Gospel-centered Obedience: Introduction

It seems as if the perennial battle in the mind of New Testament readers and teachers is the relationship between faith and works. People align themselves with Paul or James or Jesus (depending on how they understand Jesus), and the whole thing tends to get quite messy at times. In my personal quest to understand these two aspects to Christian belief, I came up with a chart (dum, dum, dum - *ominous music) that has been helpful... to me. Obviously, if God wanted us to reduce spiritual, yay, even mystical, truth to mere charts, He could have inspired the biblical writers to draw a few stick figures and graphs. The illustration below is not an attempt to oversimplify deep passages that are more interested in forming us into the image Christ than being formed into theological systems; but hopefully it will be helpful to you as you think about and live out faith in Christ.