John 6:29

They said to Him, "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent." So, as He spoke clearly, they show their deep-rooted assumption once more. People in every state and age and country take it for granted that fallen man can work the works of God. They ignore their own sin, His holiness and majesty. It was the way of Cain; and the professing Christian world is as infected with it as Judaism or paganism.

God asked for faith: believing in the Lord Jesus, the One He sent. He did not ask for activity in works, or for an offering brought to the altar in the Temple court. So God asked nothing beyond what a man could do. Not works, but faith, was the work of God for them.

They ask then what they might do, and our Lord tells them there is but one work of God for them. It is to "believe in Him whom He has sent." He is the true Bread. So to believe in Him is to eat that Bread which has come down from heaven.

So the principle is clear. To the man who works, God counts the reward as a debt, not as grace. But the man who does not work, and instead believes in Him who justifies the ungodly — God counts his faith as righteousness. Man may be fully and securely blessed, but it is only of grace, and so by faith, which gives the glory to God, as itself His gift. So faith is the work of God, and it shuts out man's working. It does not shut out works as the fruit of faith, for faith produces plenty of good works. It shuts out any work that comes before faith or stands level with it.

They knew neither their own helplessness nor God's grace, so they thought of God as One who makes demands of man. They had yet to learn that the grace of God does not demand works to get the blessing. It only asks that man should believe in the One Whom He has sent. Works would follow faith.

Is He the One whom God the Father, of all who ever walked this earth, counted worthy to seal? How clear, then, that to believe in Him is what God must approve. Without that faith, God can accept nothing else.

These words clearly imply that the relationship of Father existed before He, the Son, came out from Him. The same relationship, before He became man, stands revealed in the Lord's frequent saying that the Father sent Him, the Son. See John 5:30, 37 and John 6:29. The sense of these passages is plain and unmistakable, and it needs no forcing: the Lord came out from the One Who was the Father, and came into the world.

The work of God is to believe in Him whom God has sent. That belief, produced by the Holy Spirit, brings life and salvation. (There is also a belief which is purely mental!) ... The Holy Spirit is brooding over the darkness and chaos in the souls of men. He works in a moral way, awakening them to their true condition before God. The result is a new condition which answers to God.