By Dr. Tony Evans
I was once battling a cold and couldn’t shake it. I called my doctor, told him my symptoms, and he told me I didn’t need to come in. He would call in a prescription for me. He told me what medicine he was prescribing and how he wanted me to take it.
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To benefit from this conversation, I had to believe that I was talking to the person I thought I was talking to, because I couldn’t see him. Ours was just a brief talk over the phone, so I had to listen to and trust his voice. Then I had to respond when he told me how to fix my problem. Now, I could’ve lain in bed and meditated. I could have believed him without leaving my bed, thinking about how good it was that I had a doctor who understood my problem and provided me with a solution. But all that lying around and thinking about the good words that the good doctor shared with me wouldn’t make me better. It may have given me warm fuzzies, but I’d still be sick as a dog.
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I had things to do. I had to get up, get in my car, drive to Walgreens, and say to the pharmacist, “Do you have a prescription with my name on it?” Though there was a lot of medicine in that pharmacy, I needed the one thing waiting with my name on it. I needed something personally prescribed for me. The doctor had told me it was there, and because I believed his word, I acted on it.
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Taking this illustration further, I could have just received the medicine, gazed at it, and made sure that it looked acceptable to me. But, I’d still feel miserable. The doctor’s instructions were not for me just to drive to Walgreens and get emotionally fixated on the look of the medicine. He told me to take it. By following his instructions, I allowed my faith in the doctor to match up with my works of obedience and began to feel much better.
A lot of us are spiritually sick, and every week we go to hear what the Great Physician has to say to us. But some of us just stop there and think about how good it was to hear from him. Some of us leave church feeling good about how great the prescription sounds, yet we remain sick as a spiritual dog because we don’t ingest the prescription by acting on it. Therefore, we’re not transformed.
Think about Abraham. God didn’t just tell him that he would give him a bountiful land. He gave him a prescription: “Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation” (Gen 12:1-2). In order for Abraham to experience the goodness of what God wanted to give him, he needed to put his faith into action.
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Abraham’s story serves as an example that each of us should learn from. Hebrews 11 provides a list of other biblical heroes whose journeys of faith also provide us with inspiration and instruction about how to receive the full promises of God. This “large cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1) should remind us of something vital to our Christian walk: faith works.
On the other hand, “faith without works is dead” (Jas 2:26). Faith in God can’t just be a good feeling about something you heard on Sunday morning. The Great Physician has prescribed a course of action for you, and in order for you to benefit from the medicine, you’ll have to follow his instructions.
— Read other articles in this series by Dr. Tony Evans —
Reprinted from The Tony Evans Study Bible (2019) with permission of Holman Bibles. Tony Evans—author of numerous books—has faithfully proclaimed the gospel for more than 50 years. He serves as senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and is founder of The Urban Alternative.
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