Which comes first, faith or obedience? What if we lived as though we believed? Would genuine faith follow?

This is the chicken-and-the-egg dilemma of Christianity. “Which comes first?” is a valid question, yet sometimes we ask it because we are searching for an excuse for inactivity.

Certainly faith often prompts us to obey, but we can’t insist that faith always precedes obedience. How would we explain Jesus’ expectation of immediate, unquestioning obedience to His call? When He rallied His disciples, He left no time for them to summon faith in Him, though they’d met Him just moments earlier!

Let’s be compelled to obey because we desire God and because we know the God-life necessitates obedience even when we are quaking on the inside. To wait for the faith to obey, even when God asks us to do something that frightens us, is to put the cart before the horse.

When faith is in short supply, we must obey as those who believe — that is, in spite of doubt. Then we’ll discover that the faith is suddenly there. A. W. Tozer, who believed that faith and obedience were two sides of the same coin, said that “truth … demands obedience before it will unveil its riches to the seeking soul.”

Today, if your faith is feeble, do an experiment in response to the following command: “Don’t be afraid” (Luke 12:7). Live this day as though you had great faith. Live as though you were completely confident that there’s nothing to fear and that God is in control, and see what happens.

“Thank God! Once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey” (Rom. 6:17, NLT).