Word of Salvation – Vol. 46 No. 48 – December 2001
Christians And Their Good Works
Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 24 (Q&A 62-64 Heid Cat)
Scripture Reading: James 2:14-26
Suggested Hymns: BoW 407; 136:1-4; 9:1,2,3,4; 241
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
The Scriptural teaching of God never holding against the believer any of his sins, nor his sinful nature, give us much comfort. It is a great relief to know that everything that was wrong in our life has been put on Christ. God punished His own Son for all our sins and therefore Christ was made to suffer and die in our place. Having all guilt removed, the sinner who has come to Christ is now free from God’s judgment, for it has fallen on Christ. And Christ’s righteousness and holiness has come on the Christian with the result that it is as if the believer had never sinned nor been a sinner, as if the believer had been as perfectly obedient as Christ was obedient for him. This is the wonderful gospel of God’s grace that we may preach and believe.
But frequently this wonderful gospel has its shine and beauty dulled by teaching that man must also do something. It is believed that the good a person does will help make that person right with God. So let us now hear about…
CHRISTIANS AND THEIR GOOD WORKS.
1. We are saved by grace and not by works
There are people who believe in God but they do not warm to the Gospel of God’s free grace to sinners. They believe that good works play a major part in making people right with God. And so, when they see a Christian do a lot of good, showing love and kindness to others, a willingness to help and assist, then they are convinced that such acts of goodness will enable that Christian to easily make it to heaven.
The Christian who knows better will try to correct that view by saying that he does not deserve heaven because he, too, is a sinful being and that it is only by the grace of God in Christ that God loves him. But it seems as if they don’t know what the Christian is saying. They will again say that God must be very pleased with such a nice and wonderful person. They resolve that they must try a bit harder if they are to be as good and maybe God will then also approve of them a bit more. This belief that God saves you on account of good works is even found among those who attend a church where the Gospel of God’s free grace is preached. Their belief that they are right with God has in their case not so much to do with being good and kind to others but with having some kind of faith, going to church, reading the Bible, and pray. It may even be that these very same people don’t bother much any more with being kind and compassionate to others. They know that they can’t earn their salvation but confessing the right doctrine and belonging to a church is deemed to be sufficient. In their case the doing of good works has all but disappeared.
So good works have become an item differently thought about. Some think it is their ticket to heaven and so they try hard at being a good person. Others know that trying to be a good person is not going to make you right with God and so they don’t bother much with good works. To be right with God for them means having the right doctrine and being a good church member. And so we have the strange situation that there are some people who don’t go to church but are wonderful people to have around for they are willing to help you anytime. And there are other people who do go to church but seldom lift a finger to anyone in need.
We should not always use Roman Catholics as an example of salvation by works for we often do them an injustice. The Roman Catholic Church does not teach that doing good works can save a person. What it has always said is that God does His gracious work in Christ and in addition to that we must do our share. Their idea of salvation is Christ plus good works. It’s a form of cooperation between God and man.
But that way of looking at salvation is also the way a number of protestant Christian groups and churches see it. There is a feeling that in addition to what Christ has done God expects you to do a few things as well. Sometimes this is expressed in the form of – well, God loves you and Christ has died for you, He can’t do any more. It is now up to you to accept it. Accepting Christ, then, becomes a good work. Without it you are not yet a Christian.
But this is really no different to the more familiar forms of believing in Christ plus having to keep the Sabbath on Saturday, or having to speak in tongues, or having to give ten percent to the church. Unless you do these extra things you cannot yet be right with God. It is a salvation by faith plus works system. There is no longer the free grace of God to the sinner who cries out, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!
But it gets a bit confusing sometimes. Don’t we also say that you’ve got to get up and follow Christ? We also have a commitment procedure which we call doing your public profession of faith. In fact, does not the Lord Jesus say – come to me and eat, come and drink; if you love me you will obey my commandments; ask and it shall be given; seek and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. These are all things that we have to do.
Is, therefore, the Catechism’s understanding of the Bible right when it so strongly emphasises that we are right with God only by true faith in Christ? Isn’t that going too far? Hasn’t it all become a bit too easy? Just believe, that’s all you have to do. With that anybody can be a Christian.
But no, it’s not going too far. The Gospel of being right with God only by true faith in Christ is in one sense amazingly simple. You the sinner only have to believe it. Mind you, this Gospel must emphasise that sin is such a crime against God that He literally had to punish Christ, His own Son, with death in order to save you from His judgment. How can you not remember the cross of Christ, of how He suffered terribly and died horribly as God’s anger on sin, due to you, was on Him, when you ask God believingly to deal with you in His mercy? For God to save you by His grace certainly didn’t come cheap.
You can also see in another way that salvation is by faith in Christ only and not also by faith in whatever you can do. It’s when you realise that even the best of your good works is not yet perfect. What could we possibly put before God and say – Lord, look at this, see what I have done! Put it in your book and add it to the other good things I have done. Maybe the total of my good works will be more than the total of my sins.
We know better than that. Salvation is not by a credit and debit system. Just remember that God is absolutely holy and that all our good works would have to be perfect if He were to accept us on that basis. The reason we need salvation is because none of our good works are perfect. If we could only obey God’s commandments perfectly, then there would have been no need for a Saviour.
It is difficult for us to see that even the best of our good works are still imperfect in the eyes of God. Because among people we are used to praise and rewards being given for those who have done good things. We tend to think that if people reward you for your good works, then God would do that even more so for He knows better than people how hard we’ve tried. But God of course knows also the sinful things in us that people don’t see.
Think of Jesus’ parable of the rich your ruler (Lk.18:18ff). “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asked. Jesus answered, “…by keeping the commandments” and He named a few. He said he had kept them all since he was a boy. The young man was a good fellow. Jesus could have challenged him on how well he had understood the commandments. But the Lord did not do that. He knew the young man was rich and loved his wealth. So He told him to give everything to the poor and then follow Jesus. It was then that the young man saw that in the eyes of God his life was not so good.
Haven’t we all been guilty of trying to gain other people’s approval or admiration when we were busy trying to be good for God? We seek to serve the Lord in the various biblical ways that this can be done, but mixed up in our devotion to God there can so easily be elements of pride, self-righteousness, and a looking down on others who do not do as much as we. The Lord regards good works as simply doing our duty. It’s part of loving God and your neighbour.
In our first point, then, we reminded ourselves that we are saved by grace and not by works.
2. We are not saved apart from works
This is not a contradiction of our first point – saved by grace and not by works. We can put it this way – we are not saved by our good works and we are not saved without them. The apostle James explains, “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such a faith save him? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (Jam.2:14-17).
The Lord teaches here that faith without deeds is no faith. We are made right with God through faith in Christ, but only if that faith transforms our lives. Earlier we spoke about some people for whom confessing the right doctrine and belonging to the right church is all important, so much so that it has become the sum total of their faith and belonging to God. The doing of good works has all but disappeared. The words of James are applicable when he said, “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
In other words, if your belief in Christ is only an acknowledgment with your mind, then you are nothing more than an armchair Christian. Christians who know that they would be cut off from God if it wasn’t for His pardoning grace don’t just sit around. They get up and begin loving God and loving neighbour. Not to earn their salvation with that, for they are already saved, but to live out their faith.
Now God rewards such believers for the good they do. Not with salvation for Christ already gave them that. The rewards consist of blessings in this life and the next. What are these blessings? Can we see them? And if we know what they are, do we then long for them and do we want them? Think of Moses. For many years he lived in a palace in Egypt. As the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter he had a life of luxury. But no one in the palace believed in God and many of the pleasures that were available to him were sinful. So he gave it all away. The blessing of belonging to and serving God was a bigger attraction for him than the treasures of Egypt. So he left his Egyptian comfort and chose to be mistreated along with the people of God. He knew he would deeply offend Pharaoh but he did not even fear that “because he was looking ahead to his reward” (Heb.11:26). What he saw ahead of him was not just being with the Israelites, for often that was a trial to him, but by faith He saw God who is invisible. By faith he saw Christ who was to come, and by faith he must also have seen something of the treasurers of heaven. Yes, Moses looked forward to ‘his reward.’
Earlier we mentioned the rich young ruler who walked away from Jesus and His blessings because he was unable to part with his earthly treasures. Peter watched all this with interest and then said to Jesus, “We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?” (Mt.19:27). Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of man sits on His glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life” (vs 29). Jesus promises a reward.
Elsewhere the Lord says that if we are faithful with a few things then we will be put in charge of many things (Mt.25:12ff). If we are good stewards with our money and serve the Lord with it, then we will reap results in the hereafter (Lk.16:9). “Behold I am coming soon,” said Christ, “and I will give to everyone according to what He has done” (Rev.22:12).
What is the nature of these rewards for the good we do as Christians? They have often been called, and the Catechism does it too, ‘gifts of grace’. To understand what ‘gifts of grace’ are, let’s look at Jesus’ parable that He told after telling the disciples about God rewarding those who have left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields in order to serve God.
The parable is about a landowner who early in the morning went to the market place to hire some men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day, which was the normal rate of pay for a day’s work, and sent them into his vineyard. Later on he returned to the market place and saw more men looking for work. He hired them also and told them that he would pay them whatever was right. Three more times that day he went back to the market place and each time hired more workers.
The last lot of men had only an hour left in the day to work. When it was evening he told his foreman to gather all the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first. Those who worked for one hour were paid one denarius, as did all the other workers. When those who had been hired first at the rate of one denarius for the day, saw that a denarius was paid to those who had worked only an hour, they expected to receive more. When they also just received the normal day’s pay, they grumbled against the landowner (Mt.20:1ff).
The landowner was not stingy, because the all-day workers received the normal wage. He was generous because he also gave a day’s wage to those who did not work the whole day. The last lot only worked an hour and also got a day’s wage. The landowner was extremely generous with them.
With this parable Jesus is teaching us that the length of our earthly labour for God may not correspond to one’s heavenly reward. Some of us have been Christians for most of our lives, others less than that, still others only for a very short time of their earthly life. But whatever the length of time we are Christians, the Lord calls us to do good works. And the rewards are the same. The Lord is perfectly free to richly bless the short-term Christian as much as He does the long-term Christian. There is no need to feel jealous of the good gifts God has given to another. We can stop all those feelings of envy when we remember our absolute dependence on God’s grace for all the good we receive from His hand.
The blessing of forgiveness, the blessing of being made right with God through Christ, the blessing of having the Spirit of God guiding and leading us, the blessing of having Christian parents, the blessing of having children who follow the Lord, the blessings of work, health strength, food and a home, and finally, the blessing of always being with God – when you believe what God does in Christ, then you have experienced at least some of these blessings. When we follow the Lord, walk in His ways obediently, and do the good works we are called to do, then these blessings are the rewards. All believers have received eternal life but not all believers receive the same blessings in this life. But we can’t complain or be jealous because whatever blessings we have been given, they are all gifts of God’s grace.
So far, then, we have seen that we are saved by grace and not by our good works but those who are aware of what their salvation means will seek to do good works. As James said, “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
3. Those who do not work have not believed
The Bible teaches that if you’re a Christian, then you will show it by your life. Remember Jesus’ teaching about the vine and the branches? The sap from the vine flows to the branches and thus there is fruit. If there is no fruit the branches are useless and they are cut off and burnt. So Christ is in you, and He is, if you are saved, then your life will bear fruit for God in one way or another. It is impossible to be a Christian and not do good works.
Now that being so, why then do churches still have members who are spiritually lazy, indifferent and worldly? Maybe you know of such members in the church. Maybe you fit that description. It’s the person who might say – I believe all the right doctrines but I am not all fired up about it. I have nothing against what the Bible teaches and what this church teaches, but I am not passionate about it. Could that be you? And because there is no fire in your belly for what God has done for sinners in Christ, it’s hard for you to get going and do good works. There is no drive, no motivation to do the things of God in His church and kingdom.
Why is that? No doubt there are many reasons for a lack of doing good and being indifferent and worldly instead. But one possible reason, and maybe it’s the major reason, could be that you are not a Christian. And if you are in a covenant relationship with God, and received baptism as the sign of God’s promise of salvation and the Holy Spirit to you, then maybe you have not yet responded in faith and obedience.
It is doubtful that the early Christian church had members who were not Christian believers. In those years being a member of the church did not leave you the option of being indifferent. Christians were persecuted and if you joined the Christian church because Christ had saved you, and you started doing good, you became in that society a marked person. It’s probably similar with Christian churches under persecution elsewhere in the world today. No one wants to be a member of Christ’s church unless they are also prepared to leave houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for Jesus’ sake.
History shows that the faith of church members has been the strongest when they see their need to be close to God. In Old Testament times Israel was nearest to God when their enemies made life difficult for them. That’s not to say that we should wish for persecution and oppression. Peace in the land and peace in our lives is a great blessing. Freedom of religion allows Christians to do many good works in society.
But the church should not insist that in addition to faith in Christ the members must also meet other requirements in order to receive salvation and remain members of the church. That is the way of the sects and cults. The church must simply go on teaching the wonderful doctrine of God’s free grace in Christ – salvation through Christ alone, by faith alone, by grace alone and by God’s Word alone.
There is no more wonderful truth than to hear from God that He has forgiven us our sins and transferred our guilt on Christ His Son; that because of Christ being our Saviour, we are declared right with God; and that God has given us the holiness of Christ and that we are now before God as if we have never sinned, as if we have never been a sinner, and as if we have been as obedient to God as Christ was obedient for us.
But we must pray that we teach and preach this precious truth in such a way that sinners are made to see the wonderful love of God, the costly sacrifice of Christ, His Son, and the incredible promise that God will forever care for us; and that the church makes it very plain that without forgiveness, sinners are utterly lost, and that they remain without hope in the world until they surrender all to Christ.
When sinners are genuinely saved, when regeneration and conversion are real, and when faith is not merely historical but living, then good works will follow. For it is impossible that those who belong to the Lord Jesus will not also follow Him and produce the good fruits of gratitude.
Amen.