Being a Doer of the Word

Discerning between faith and vanity

“If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” (John 13:17)

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The English Puritan John Bunyan, in his famous and beloved work The Pilgrim’s Progress, makes a helpful distinction between two kinds of knowledge. The first is knowledge that is content to rest in “bare speculation” of spiritual matters, and the second is knowledge that is accompanied with “the grace of faith and love, which puts a man upon doing even the will of God from the heart.”¹

To put it another way, Bunyan is warning here about a kind of knowledge that appears sound, but in reality possesses all the spiritual liveliness of a pile of dry kindling. There is content and form without light and heat. In order for knowledge to be true knowledge, he says, and of the kind that is pleasing to God, dry theological propositions must be set ablaze. They must be animated by a vibrant and burning devotion, the kind that is only demonstrated through concrete, real life obedience — by doing the will of God from the heart. 

Without this, Bunyan goes on, there really is no reason to be confident concerning one’s profession of faith. Faith without works is dead, after all. Thus Bunyan insists that in order for one’s confession of faith to be credible it must be accompanied by a “life answerable to that confession.” Which is to say, it must be accompanied by a life of holiness: “heart-holiness, family-holiness, and conversation-holiness…by a practical subjection in faith and love to the power of the Word.”²

That statement is poignant and represents the fork in the road where Christians and hypocrites part ways. True believers, Bunyan says, are not content to merely talk of holiness. They’re not content to simply admire expositional preaching or listen to the right podcasts or read the most respected books. These things will serve the talker, but not the Christian. Due to the Spirit’s powerful agency within them, Christians cannot rest until every crevice of their private and public life has been yielded to Christ in humble faith, until even the bells of the horses are inscribed, “Holy to the Lord” (Zech. 14:20). 

Nor can a Christian have peace where sin remains unchecked. As long as they are in the flesh, the Spirit of Christ within them will be at war with remaining corruption, and thus they will be marked, however imperfectly, by a Godward orientation of heart and life that seeks to not simply know the truth but to obey the truth. As Jesus said to His disciples: “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (Jn. 13:17). 

This kind of life is, of course, a process, and one that is dependent at every point upon the grace of God and the redeeming work of the Lord Jesus Christ for its existence and power, but it remains both true and biblical that faith must be attested by works. It must be demonstrated by a practical subjection to the power of the Word. For, as Bunyan put it, “He doth not lay the blessing in the knowing of them, but in the doing of them.”³

May God make us not simply hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word.

1. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 130.

2. Ibid., 131.

3. Ibid., 130.