📢 Forum Update - Hello everyone! I've made an improvement to the forum that should make following active discussions much easier. Beginning today, forum topics will display the most recent replies first (while keeping the original topic post at the top), so you no longer have to navigate through multiple pages to find the latest conversation. This change also helps improve the browsing experience in long-running discussions with many pages of replies. If you notice anything that doesn't seem to be working correctly or have any feedback, please let me know. — Richard G. I always took this verse to mean that His grace and salvation was the gift of God when you have faith. That has just always been my interpretation on the verse. We can see in verses 5 & 6 leading up to verse 8 are speaking about the grace and salvation in Christ. Then in verse 8 it tells us that His grace is a gift and cannot be earned. The discussion, not my position, was that the gift is either (1) salvation or (2) grace, but certainly not (3) faith being referred to. These are evidently not unusual interpretation preferences, nor evidently unimportant to some believers who insist the antecedent to "...that..." in ".... through faith; and that not of yourselves ...," simply cannot be (3) faith. It has to be one of the other two. Does anyone here have a strong feeling about whether the antecedent of "that" is "faith?" You cannot know how many times I have made that bold claim in talking to people at for example the weekly assisted living center Bible studies I lead, and in other discussions with Christians for decades. It was never questioned before, so I started looking into online sources. I wonder if my Systematic Theology book disagrees with me... I may let you know. It is also truly a diamond in the rough! :yes: :good: TR Indeed a gift from God, no doubt! Where people get confused or mixed up is that faith is not a static gift, but rather grows and needs development. Faith is like a seed, once planted into the spirit it needs tending. Like any vegetable or flower of the garden. If it is not nurtured and exercised, it can wither and die! TR When we hear God’s Word, the Holy Spirit empowers it, and if we receive the truth, God’s supernatural faith enters us. We were so destitute that we couldn’t even believe the good news on our own. God had to make His kind of faith available to us so that we could believe in Him and receive His salvation. We were saved by using God’s supernatural faith to receive His grace.
