From Faith to Faith
From Faith to Faith
This lesson looks at the expression "from faith to faith" in the personal view. We are thinking about how the baby faith of a person first obeying the gospel, develops into a mature and full grown faith by which that person lives completely.
Paul said to the Christians in Rome, "I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed, from faith to faith, as it is written, 'The righteous shall live by faith'" (Rom 1:15-17)
Paul shows us in the above text that we cannot develop our own individual faith without the gospel. Some think that "the gospel" serves only to help a person become saved, and once saved you need to leave the gospel and move on to something else in order to advance. Paul, however, says that the gospel is for those he called "saints" (Rom 1:7-8) and he wanted to preach it to them so that, by the gospel, they could advance "from faith to faith".
This message of the gospel is the source of our faith and the power by which faith grows and matures in each of us personally. One of the terms for the gospel is "the word of faith" (Rom 10:8). No other message in the world has that power to produce and develop saving faith, because only in the gospel is revealed the righteousness or justification of God.
Only the gospel can produce the faith by which the righteous or the just shall live (Rom 1:17), which, ultimately, means to "have eternal life" (Rom 6:23).
We find in Paul's statement (Rom 1:15-17) a system of connected things, a chain if you like: One cannot live forever unless one is justified (made right). One cannot be justified unless one has faith or belief in Christ. One cannot have that faith unless one hears the gospel through the scriptures. And of course, as we will touch on later, one would not have this gospel unless Jesus had died and rose again.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul uses at least seven interchangeable terms to describe the message he was preaching. Note that one of them is"the word of faith" —or "the faith" for short.
Lesson continued