Faith, hope, and love are gifts of God that we do.
Paul calls faith a gift of God in Ephesians 2:8: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Yet we also must believe or have faith. So faith is both a gift and something we do. Paul elsewhere says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).
Hope likewise is a gift because in the New Testament hope centres on Christ and his resurrection. Hence, Paul can call it a gift of grace: “God our Father … loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace” (2 Thess. 2:16).
Finally, God pours out love into our hearts by the Spirit according to Romans 5:5: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” So love here is obviously given by God, and may simply be the form of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in us, namely, as the Love of God. But even so, we must also love. Love is the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22) and the mark of a Christian: “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
In a word, God grants us faith, hope, and love, and then we believe, hope, and love. Augustine famously explained this dynamic in his Confessions by saying: “Give what you command, and command what you will” (Confessions 10.29.40). Or in Paul’s wording, “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7).
Realizing this basic pattern in Scripture helps us to maintain a balance between relying on God’s grace and being accountable for our actions. By doing so, we navigate past the Charybdis of fatalism and the Scylla of Pelagianism. We can both say everything we do is a gift of God, yet we still are the ones acting.
Paul seems to have held this duality together when he wrote, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12–13). Or as he says in Colossians 1:29, “I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”
So may we all say with the father who came to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
