the great business of being...

Belief and works are the great themes of Charles T. Brooks' sermon, "Doing and Believing" in which he finds that the spirit of the scriptures does not separate the two.  Some excerpts...

"... in the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of faith, doing is believing and believing is doing. I call this a double doctrine, for it does serve the double purpose of affording us a plain test by which to judge whether our belief is a reality, and at the same time enabling us to try whether our works are dead works, or the live works of the spirit.

Our Maker and Father continues to call his children, bidding them, I will not say to go, for we are taught that he is everywhere, but to come and work for him and with him in his vineyard. In the life and teachings and death of Jesus; in all the institutions and influences that have sprung from his words and labors; in the silent appeals of conscience through the frequent mortification of pride and selfishness, and the unsatisfactoriness of their triumph when they seem to be successful; in all the sacred voices of life and death and eternity, He, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, invites us to take his yoke upon us and enter into the service and into the joy of our Lord. And there can hardly be one of us, I conceive, upon whose heart that urgent call is not often pressing, even if there are many to whose conscious thought it seldom distinctly shapes itself...

" What services must I perform, — what are those good and perfect and acceptable works of God ?" asks the distracted spirit, perplexed, it may be, by the cry of Lo here! and lo there! and again the simplicity of Christ answers, " Call home your wandering thoughts. Really to believe in my Father and in me is what you want. Where there is a belief there is a will, and where there is a will there is a way."...

This, then, I would say: that to believe is the work of God, because it is the spirit of God working' in all our works to make them be clean and satisfying and successful, all religious works, outgoings of a devout and divine life. And it is the work of man — his one great work — because he is called upon to do it; because the distractions and delusions of the world make it a hard thing for many to take upon them even the yoke that is, in itself, light and easy; and finally, because, this work once done, all is done; that is to say, duty no longer is drudgery, toil is no longer torment, the work of life is felt to be the work of the Lord, and the work of the Lord not the affair of days and months and times merely, but the great business of man's being."

Blessings
(Painting is "Work" by Ford Maddox Brown)