A Faith Worth Receiving by Jimmy Stephens:

I don’t have a perfect certainty on this issue. I have long wondered if faith has two elements, a passive and an active one, where the passive is the inward persuasion of the heart that God saves us, and the active part is the necessary choice that follows to entrust our lives to that salvation. But that’s speculation – I don’t know.

Regardless, what convinces me faith is not work is its genesis. “Works” in Paul always seem to be the merit of the worker (at least in part) because they demonstrate the state of the heart: love for God. Faith does not come out of love for God. It is brought by God into hatred at Him and changes our mind.

The genesis of faith is, at most, instrumentally the heart. The heart is passive. It is stunned by grace the way Paul is stunned by Christ’s revelation to him on the road.

I feel like the bigger underlying issue is really how to nicely differentiate regeneration and faith, which is easy for some categories. The category of “works” is hard to work out, at least for me.

Thinking about it more…

I think of regeneration as transforming the heart, in particular the emotions and dispositions and renewing the faculties for the Gospel, and all of that is consented but involuntary. It wasn’t chosen; it wasn’t intentional or deliberated; it’s just contently received.

I think of faith as transforming the intellect, the will – things that belong to the heart but which require truth, propositional content, verbal communication. It’s like regeneration has changed the body and then faith comes and changes how the mind thinks to use it. Again, it’s not chosen. But it is consensual. The person desires it willingly as he receives it, but cannot beforehand by power or desire intend it.

A diseased body is useless to an otherwise willing mind. Imagine, as the dirty dualist that you are, having some kind of perfect mind all the while suffering from a sponged brain. That would be akin to faith without regeneration.

And regeneration without faith would be like a healed retard. He just doesn’t have any of the plan-making-content and personal knowledge required to entrust his healed body to God.

The Spirit has to ready the mind that receives faith, and then faith has to be provided for that mind to cleave itself to the Truth. The genesis of both is from God.

It is beyond the will, but in agreement with it. It’s not the will helped along to take it. Nor is it the will subdued or undermined to impose it. It’s the will being surprised by something completely beyond it that persuades it upon arrival.

That’s why it’s a gift. None of it comes from us. But neither is any part of it against human will. Election, regeneration, atonement, faith – these things make a person more consistently themselves. They save them from the cracked mirror sin makes of us ourselves. (edited)

A persons true self and their true freedom can only be found by the unchosable slavery to Christ.

I always think of Ephesians 2:8. Faith includes the will, but the will is instrumental in the chain, not the genesis of faith. The act in which we entrust ourselves to God is the “middle part” of the whole God grants. That whole being the mind persuaded to cleave to Christ’s saving mission.

It’s also weird if you stop to think how permanent God has made faith. I sin so much, so badly that sometimes I wonder if God just hates me and is sending me to hell. But I’m still alive and trusting Him because that initial persuasion that changed my mind stays anything that can press against it.

Part of what makes faith not a work is that you always have some degree, as a sinner, to renounce your merits. False converts end up falling away because it was their faith, not God’s gift of faith. Only the persuasion of the Spirit Himself could make a mind so convicted that it literally cannot give up that trust in the cross.

I look at my life and wonder what the hell is wrong with me. Sometimes I get so down that I think of just giving up on the podcast thing and just about everything else. How could a sinner offer anything useful?
And everytime my sin cuts away everything, all that’s left is the alien faith I could never have put in myself. Only God’s hand could provide such solidity that survives such a weak believer.

Herman Bavinck is just as insightful: “He indeed grants us the capacity to believe and the power of faith but also the will to believe and faith itself, not mechanically or magically, but inwardly, spiritually, organically, in connection with the word that he brings to people in various ways.”

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/you-asked-why-is-faith-not-a-work/