Faith involves more than believing that Jesus died on the cross for our sins.  It is a simple word that requires many other words to flesh it out.  If that were not the case, why would the New Testament use so many different words for the appropriate response to the gospel?

Saving faith includes:

Believe, Trust, Accept, Receive, Ask, Choose, Decide, Repent, Follow, Obey the Gospel, Humble Yourself, Come, Turn to God from…, Confess, Call upon the name of the Lord, Hunger and thirst for righteousness, Seek and knock, Draw near to God, Surrender

Confused?  Which of these clarifying words for faith are essential?  Which can be ignored?

The fact is all of them are important.  God intends that we get our mental arms around the whole list in order to understand “simple” faith.  This is the same kind of exercise we did with the subject of sin in chapter nine.

It should be no surprise that the diagnostic list of words defining our sin problem and the prognostic list of words describing how to access the cure, match.  The sum total of meaning involved in the word sin is fully answered in the sum total of the salvation response words.  Sin is an authority rejection problem.  Salvation is an authority embracing solution.

This takes us to the Roman centurion and the kind of faith Jesus praised.  Faith starts with who Jesus is – the Leader above all leaders.  Then it moves to trusting what Jesus has done to rescue us.  The submission part is essential to the receiving part of faith.  Willingness to follow is necessary to effectual believing.