« Do Only Christians Know Correctly about God? | Main | When Bad Things Happen, Where is God? »
October 30, 2005
What Place Do Good Deeds Have in Our Standing With God?
Psalm 62 / Job 34: 10-21
Ephesians 2: 4-10
October 30th, 2005
Job had the kind of friends that made enemies unnecessary. When he was down they piously explained to him it was because he was a sinner. They understood the great moral calculus of life. You reap what you sow. “God gave you what you deserved”—as he mourned the loss of his whole family except his wife, and all that he owned, including his health.
But Job did not deserve what he got. He was a good man. Bad things happen to good people. It troubles us that good things happen to the wicked and bad things come to the virtuous.
But there is a difference between even our idea of the kind of goodness that “deserves” a decent life and the kind of goodness that impresses God. We know it. We sense it. This informs our conscience.
Because God knows the secrets of the heart. A person may appear to fulfill the basic qualifications for a “good average life” but be doing in secret some great evil. A horrible example of this was spread before us not long ago when an apparently good church-going fellow from Wichita, Kansas, a leader in his church, a good family man, was discovered to be the BTK serial killer. Not many are secretly that evil, but there are many closets that folk hope may never be opened.
Not only that but we all know that we are not always totally honest. We speak half a truth sometimes when it’s convenient--and we know it. We know that unfair thoughts pass through our minds about others. It is this sense we have about ourselves--that we try to ignore, but cannot that is the source of conscience. We may try to ignore conscience, we will try not to be caught, but in our hearts we know what's going on. When others do what we hope we may not get caught doing, it is remarkable how great is our protest.
Who of us would say we’ve never held a grudge, or even wished for something bad to happen to someone we didn’t like? If what you and I were thinking were known, how many of us would be embarrassed. Though we look outwardly like good people. When we come to stand before the One who will judge the secrets of the heart, there will be very much we all wished He could not see.
God’s standard, after all, is perfect justice, perfect kindness, perfect love, perfect mercy, perfect morality. Only Jesus attained this. If even Mother Theresa stands beside Jesus, she comes off second best. She would admit it first. So would St. Francis, and St. Theresa of Avilla, and everyone else you think of as a “role model.” Paul called himself least of all the apostles. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Not one of us is uncontaminated by sin.
This is why Jesus was born that first Christmas because we are this way. He was born in order to bear in Himself, in His body, the consequences of our sin that naturally comes to our bodies.
In that lyrical passage in II Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul tells us that, “for our sakes God has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Thus we can stand before Him “as though we had never committed a single sin or ever been sinful.”
This is the sweet message of the Gospel.
But somewhere in the early going there were people who believed in Jesus who thought that they could satisfy God’s idea of perfect humanity on their own. Maybe they got the idea from the diligence the Pharisees exercised in trying to keep God’s law. The Pharisees thought that if they made boundaries around each of the 613 laws in the Hebrew Bible so that they didn’t even get near breaking them, they could fulfill the law of God. Jesus knew this line of thinking well. He said that if a man lusts in his heart after a woman he has committed adultery in his heart. If you hate someone it’s violating the same law that says, “Thou shalt not murder.”
Even if you or I kept everyone of the laws that said, “Do not do this or that,” a holy life is far more than not breaking any of God’s laws. Indeed, there is something repulsive to us about a person who is coldly “perfect.” A holy life is filled with love, with grace, with radiant kindness. It is not merely a life that holds to some withered sense of moral purity.
Yet there were some early Christians who thought that God would not make commands if He didn’t think we could obey them. That’s why the Apostle Paul needed to write the words we read this morning. “For by grace you are saved, through faith. It is the gift of God, not of works lest any one should boast.” John addressed this kind of person in his first epistle. “If we say we have not sinned, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
Nowadays, it doesn’t seem that a lot of people worry about sin. The word comes up at church from time to time, but I think our feeling of national and community security and our general prosperity have lulled a lot of people into a pretty sleepy attitude toward sin if not also a sleepy attitude toward God. I may have everything I need without the Good Shepherd’s help. On my own.
But in the Middle Ages a lot of people thought about sin. The Church reminded them very often of sin. Superstitions developed because of the harshness of life. When the Black Death hit Europe in the 14th century, killing one third of the population, many people saw it as an exhibit of the anger of God. The Church might not be able to avert the bubonic plague but it could help with the afterlife.
Martin Luther, whose stunning deed of October 31st, 1517 we remember today, was afflicted with such superstition. He saw a lightning bolt that struck near him as God cracking a bull whip to get his attention. On the spot he promised St. Anne, Jesus’ grandmother, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that he would become a monk—as though this was what God wanted of him.
Luther became an Augustinian friar, in a particularly strict monastery. He hoped he might please this implacable God who hounded him with the awareness of his own sin if he kept the harsh discipline of the cloister. He went beyond other monks. He slept on the cold stone floor. He lashed himself on the back until it bled. He fasted and prayed. He crawled up a staircase in Rome that was supposedly from Pilate’s judgment hall—on his knees, saying the Lord’s Prayer on each stair. But still no sense of release from his sins.
Perhaps it is fair to say that by the grace of God he was at that time assigned the task of lecturing on the Bible at the University in Wittenburg. It was when he read and pondered Paul’s letter to the Romans that his heart was awakened to the blessed truth that “the just shall live by faith.” He realized, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 2, that we are saved by grace, through faith. It is not of works.” Even though Luther would not have boasted at his works, he realized that not only could he not do enough to merit God’s favor, he did not need to. All he had to do was to accept God’s favor with a trusting heart.
When he realized this the whole edifice of the Medieval Church collapsed in his mind. It so happened that about this time Pope Leo X was marketing Indulgences throughout Europe in order to raise funds to build St. Peter’s basilica in Rome.
Indulgences were like checks written on the church’s supposed “Treasury of Merit.” The church taught that since you and I average blokes can’t keep from sinning, we can draw on the excess merits of Jesus, the blessed Virgin Mother, and all the saints who had more goodness than they needed to get into heaven to cancel some of the time in Purgatory that we deserve. Purgatory was the place in the afterlife where we endure what we deserve for sinning in this life. Dante tells us that everyone in Purgatory eventually gets out and goes to heaven. But Purgatory certainly was no fun. So if people could afford to buy enough indulgences they would have to endure less time in Purgatory than otherwise.
Luther did not yet believe that Indulgences were improper. When he posted his Ninety-five These to the Castle Church door in Wittenburg, his complaint had more to do with the pope’s mean spiritedness in not freely granting to all the release from Purgatory made possible by the treasury of merit.
The answer to the problem of sin and guilt, Luther came to see was spelled out clearly in the Bible. We are saved by grace. We are, in fact, justified by God’s grace. This means that because of Christ’s redeeming love God sees us as though we have never sinned or ever been sinful! No purgatory to pay for our own sins. No indulgences.
Justification by grace received only by a trusting heart brought great relief to a burdened conscience like Luther’s. And he had lots of company in 16th century Germany where superstitions abounded and the Church took full advantage of this.
But what if consciences go limp? What if few even think of the holiness of God and almost nobody worries about sin?
In the first half of the twentieth century Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw how the Reformed and Lutheran churches in Germany, having lost sight of the holiness of God, bowed before Hitler who had brought prosperity to the land after suffering that followed World War I. They heard about free Grace so often that it became a commonplace, just one of those things said in church. It was just part of the heritage from Luther.
It was this setting that spawned the Holocaust. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his book, The Cost of Discipleship. He reminded his fellow German Christians that when Jesus bids us to follow Him He calls us to come and die. Paul who taught us of grace that is free to us said: “I am crucified with Christ.” Free grace does not mean cheap grace. Free grace to us meant paying everything most precious for God. Grace was costly to God. Free to us. Accepting the grace of God means accepting the cross. Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price for his devotion, for accepting his cross and carrying it.
In an earlier generation a lot of American Christians were fascinated with Bonhoeffer’s stirring book. They recognized a tendency that grew in our land, that the great evangelical doctrine of justification by grace through faith has lulled us too into a very cheap idea of what it means to follow Jesus. Today being a “good Christian” seems to require little more than being a good citizen in a prosperous and powerful America and identifying with one of the “in” churches.
Nowadays the churches in our land are promoting a message of prosperity. I don’t know what to think about much public worship today. Something is not right. God is still a holy God who has called us to be a holy people. The very idea of the holiness of God has been replaced with the idea of a loving God whose greatest delight is to affirm us and make us happy.
In fact, the great evangelical doctrine of justification by grace through faith sounds a bit out of date because people wonder why they need to be justified if God affirms me just the way I am. If God’s desire is to affirm us just as we are, sin is an old-fashioned word. If we have no real sense of our own sin, what need to we have of grace?
I am very sad to see that in the sector of the Church that has been most vocal in claiming to believe the Bible moral living has been severely compromised. Many evangelical pastors have fallen. Many families are broken. Strife riddles our churches. Lulled by thinking we believe correctly, we have been stupefied to how sinful our nature is.
And so I have wondered what is the place of good deeds in our standing with God? Clearly we cannot earn God’s favor because no one can be perfectly good. But this does not mean that good deeds play no part in our salvation. As we are told in the epistle of James, “Faith without works is dead.” If you say you believe in Jesus but are comfortable harboring sin in your heart, you have good reason to ask yourself whether you have saving faith. Maybe you have the kind of belief in God that the devils have that makes them tremble. Your faith has not made you want to follow Jesus.
I get the feeling that God wants us both to trust that Jesus’ death on the cross fully paid for our sins, and to remember that Jesus invited us “come follow me.” So that this is the life of faith, industriously to try to follow Jesus. With this in mind—the completeness of our forgiveness and the complete truth of Jesus’ words, “You are my friends if you do what I command you,” we are to “work out our salvation in fear and trembling. My sector of Christianity likes to harmonize conflicting ideas in the Bible. But I think God would have us let the tensions alone.
Just because we are saved by grace through faith it does not mean that God spreads before us easy street, a life of indifference. It matters that we try. I have not been so convinced of the grace of God that I forget what Jesus taught me that “not all who say to me Lord, Lord, shall enter the Kingdom of heaven.” Only those who do the will of God. I do not view the grace of God as canceling out Jesus’ somber teaching that when we clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick and imprisoned we care for Him, and when we do not do these things, we are neglecting to care for Him. Jesus said the consequences of this neglect are severe. “Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
God has left us with a purposeful tension: it is all of grace, but come, follow Jesus. When either side of God’s word to us is neglected, it is wise that we acknowledge it and mend our ways. This morning I say to you on the authority of God’s word, in Christ you and I are forgiven of our sin; we are justified before God, if we have received His free grace with a trusting heart. This morning I say to you on the authority of God’s word that Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” “Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord” shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
Let us pray: O Lord, we are glad to know you love us and have poured out on us your grace lavishly. Help us to receive your grace with a trusting heart and then to pour out our gratitude from day to day in obedience to your Son, Jesus whom we love because He first loved us. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at October 30, 2005 09:30 AM