How Pietism Ruins Good Works | Theocast

Hi, this is John. Today on Theocast, Justin and I are going to have a conversation about good works as it relates to the confessions and Reformed theology, but specifically how pietism ruins good works and the purposes of good works.

And sometimes what we think is a good work is not actually a biblical good work from God. We're going to talk about what they're for, how they are designed to glorify

God and advance his kingdom, and how we use our union in Christ, that is what we've received in Christ, as our motivation for our good works.

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To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. Today, your hosts are

Justin Purdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I am John Moffitt, the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Justin, it is good to be with you, my friend. Both of us had a snowed -in weekend where neither of us could have church, so we might be a little fired up today.

We might have a little extra sermon juice just because we didn't get the opportunity to preach, so beware.

Justin, today's a fun subject, one that you and I love to bring freedom and clarity for the sake of the glory of Christ.

So, my friend, tell us, what are we talking about today? Justin Purdy Yeah, John, good to be around the mic with you, man.

I'm missing the regular gathering for sure. Just a number of different things providentially in our world here in Asheville, and I'm feeling that.

So, just mindful of the ordinary means of grace and how much we need the assembly and how it really is a lifeline for us.

So, I look forward, God willing, to gathering with the people of Covenant Baptist Church on Sunday. I know you feel the same.

John Moffitt Amen, brother. Justin Purdy Yeah, man, we're talking today about something that we talk in various ways about it, inevitably, in a number of different episodes because it's at the heart of one of the objections that is often raised to the gospel.

So, we're going to talk about good works today, and the title of this episode is How Pietism Ruins Good Works.

And by that, we don't mean that someone who is in a pietistic theological framework cannot do good works, like their good works are ruined.

That's not what we mean. What we mean, though, is that pietism inevitably turns good works into something that seems hard and terrible and scary, and it becomes hyper -introspective.

The saints are robbed of assurance. We end up doing good works for the wrong reasons. There's all kinds of things that occur with pietism and good works.

The way I want to start us off, John, if it's okay, is by just clearly articulating the good news in a way that is frightening to some people, and that I think will launch us into the conversation that we want to have about good works.

So, the good news at the heart of the gospel is this reality, that Jesus Christ has fulfilled everything that is required for redemption, period.

Full stop. And what that means is that we no longer need to do anything, we no longer need to work anything, we no longer need to render anything unto

God that would result in His favor being shown to us or would result in our salvation.

We simply receive passively, to put it as saints before have put it, the treasure that is

Jesus Christ and His righteousness for us. That's the gospel. Now, when you say it that way, and when you preach it that way, people lose their minds.

They sometimes just get indignant and kind of kick and scream in the floor, and all that.

Sometimes people just genuinely are concerned, and there's always the, yeah, but.

Like, that's great. What you just said is great about Jesus, and we all love Him and we're grateful for Him, but what about, and then more often than not,

John, what are the words that follow? What about our obedience, or what about our holiness, or what about our good works, right?

That's what people say. And for us today, we're like, hey, glad you asked. Glad you said that.

What about our good works? Because we want to have a conversation about those good works in Christ Jesus for the saints, and because we are a confessional reform podcast, what better way to do this than to use the

Confession of Faith that our churches subscribe to, the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Chapter 16 of that confession has seven wonderful paragraphs on good works, and so we're going to use that confession as the template, the outline for our conversation today.

Obviously, this may be obvious, I guess, to some listeners. It might not be to others, and that's okay. The language of the 1689 on good works is going to be almost identical to the language in the

Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, etc. So, there's a lot of overlap in the confessional

Baptist and Presbyterian world here. So, John, without further ado, man, let's get right to the matter.

Jon Moffitt Yeah. Well, as the title of the podcast says, how pietism ruins good works. So, what we're going to do is walk through the logic behind why the 1689 brought over, and what

I would even say the Westminster Confession, and I would say all Reformed confessions hold to this perspective of good works, which is encouraging, and it should be strengthening to our faith because it helps clarify that what we are believing is not new.

It's not new to history. It's not new to the faith of Christianity, and pietism, we have three resources for you.

If you're new to the word, we have a primer that's free. You can go to our website and get that, and there's a chapter on pietism in there by Justin.

I did a 20 -minute video over it on what is pietism, and then we have a whole episode on it. All those resources are available below, but in general, pietism is the overemphasis on the progress of the internal of the

Christian life where you're always focusing on the either gaining, sustaining, or maintaining your faith by your works, and so the emphasis is on your works, not the work of Christ.

So, pietism is always emphasizing, have I done enough to either gain my salvation, maintain my salvation, or gain the merit and favor of God.

It can be in the different varying degrees, but it's always emphasizing the individual's work above the work of Christ, and what we're here to say is that Scripture and the

Confessions do the exact opposite. What I want to be clear here is we're not saying it's an either -or situation.

It's an emphasis issue. Pietism emphasizes the work of the Christian. The Bible, and the

Confessions helps clarify this, helps point it out with a big magnifying glass, emphasizes the work of Christ, and this is very important.

It's not just a matter of emphasis. It's a matter of where one truly finds rest and hope.

For instance, pietism tends to think that the law can sanctify someone.

If you obey the law, it has a sanctifying nature to it, whereas Scripture, according to Paul, says,

He who began a good work, and you will complete it. Did you begin, Galatians 3, by works of the Spirit, and now you're going to be perfected by the flesh?

We are not perfected by the law. We obey the law as we are being perfected, but the law cannot sanctify you.

That's part of the confusion of pietism, and I would also say you cannot use the law to earn

God's favor, blessing, or merit unless you perfectly obey the law.

This is James 2. If you fail in one area of the law, you are guilty above all. So if you're going to try and use the law to either sanctify yourself or gain merit and favor in the eyes of God, according to Scripture, you are going to fail hugely.

So the question then becomes, what is the purpose of the work of Christ? Christ did good works.

What were His purposes, and what are the purposes of the believer's good works? Because obviously we are to do them because Paul says in Ephesians that they were predestined that we would do them before the world began, that we would do these good works.

The question is, why are we doing them and in what way are we doing them? We're going to use the confession to help us clarify that.

Justin Perdue I want to make a couple of interjections before we get to the confession itself and we're not trying to delay this thing. Three things.

One, pietism, when it comes to our legitimacy, points us in on ourselves, whereas biblically, confessionally, we need to be pointed outward to Christ always.

Two, we are perfected, like you said, not by the law and the law's powers doesn't have any.

We are perfected by the Spirit via union with Christ. Three, are we to do good works?

That question that people ask. Well, aren't we supposed to be doing good works, guys? The answer to that is absolutely yes, like you said.

The question is, why do we do them and how? That's some of the stuff that we have to clarify today. Let's look to the confession,

John. What do you think? Before we do, I want to go back and emphasize two things.

One, power and union. The law has no power. Man, that is so scary to think about,

Justin. When you tell somebody the law has no power. Think about it. The law is a set of guidelines or I would say a set of rules, which means there's no phrase inside of the

Bible where it says the law has the power to do this, but the Bible says the gospel has the power to transform your life, right?

Totally. The gospel is the power of God. The law is the rule of God to show you, you need the gospel.

This is why law and gospel distinction is so important. It matters a ton. Right, and going back to your phrase for those who might be new to Reformed theology or even just new to theology in general, when you say union in Christ, what that means is this.

When you by faith are brought to life, you have new birth, the Spirit comes and lives within you, and you are now putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, all of the benefits that belong to Jesus now belong to you because the two of you are now one.

You're in union together. The way I love this is that the good news of the gospel is that God grabs you as a sinner, grants you forgiveness in Christ, and then seats you at the same table of Jesus and says, all of his inheritance that he's about to receive is your inheritance too.

You're sitting at the same table of Jesus, and you're going to receive all the same benefits, and here's why. He never points to your good works.

He never points to your merits. He says, I'm giving you all of this because Jesus did it on your behalf.

So we're going to use the confession because that's the perspective the confession is coming from. It's gathering all of this data from Scripture.

It's putting it into what I would call a systematic format for us so that we can see what does all of Scripture have to say about good works, boiled down to a very basic concentrated form so that we can look at it and go, oh, okay, this is how we should understand good works.

This is how we should view it. As Justin said, we have seven points here. We're probably going to read every single word, but we are definitely going to get through the summary of it just so you understand from beginning to end what the purposes of good works are.

They do speak a lot about what good works are not for, and I think that's helpful as well. JP, do you want to get us started?

Justin Perdue Yeah, man. I have other things that I would love to say based on what you said. Justin Perdue Then say it. We've got time.

Justin Perdue Super quick, man. The law cannot save, it can only condemn. The law cannot transform, it can only guide.

It's critical that we would keep those things plain. Then when you start talking immediately about the blessings that we receive in Jesus, how everything that's

His is ours, immediately I think of Ephesians 1, 3 and following, that we've been blessed in Christ.

In the Beloved, we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. I think that our doctrine of union with Christ is anemic in the contemporary church, and it is to the detriment of the saints that that is true.

We've tried to do this three times. We're really going to the confession now. We'll begin with paragraph one. This is 16 .1

from the 1689 LPC. I'm going to read this whole paragraph because good works are only those works that God has commanded in His holy word.

Works that do not have this warrant are invented by people out of blind zeal or on a pretense of good intentions and are not truly good.

There's a lot we could say here. Justin Perdue A key passage here is Hebrews 13, 21.

They talk about where the acceptability of our works comes from, which is not the merit of us.

I also think relevant passages are Mark 7 and a similar passage in the

Synoptics where Jesus says to his audience that you are teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.

That's this, because only the things that are described in God's holy word as good works are, in fact, good works in the eyes of the

Lord. There are all kinds of things that people will prescribe with the best of intentions.

I think the confession acknowledges that straight away. People mean well. I think the

Pharisees meant well in the way that they had codified a righteous life. The same could be said of people these days.

We do this as human beings. We want to codify things. It's just safer. It's easier. Tell me what I need to do.

Just outline it. 1 through 19 and I'm good. People mean well when they do this,

John, but what they end up doing is creating good works under that label that are, in fact, not prescribed in the

Scriptures. People end up spending all kinds of effort and energy trying to conform themselves to a code that is not biblical.

It's well -intentioned, but it's not biblical. We mentioned this last week. It might have been in SR. I can't remember.

It may have been in the regular episode. Either way, it still stands. We're going to say it again. I think that if you were to ask people in the modern contemporary evangelical church, pick your label, what are the good works that I need to most be concerned with doing,

I think the lists that people give would be a dead giveaway that 16 .1

is important and necessary. You and I agree on this. What's the number one good work that we should be concerned with according to the

New Testament? It's love your brothers and sisters. Love your neighbor, period. I don't know that love others, love the brethren, would be the number one item listed for many people in terms of what do

I need to be doing as a Christian. That's a sadness. There are many other things in the New Testament that are explicitly prescribed that aren't on the lips of people often when they go to describe good works that are important.

There are a number of things that people will say straight away about usually their personal devotional life, their quiet times, etc.,

that are actually not prescribed anywhere in the Scriptures. I'm going to flip this over to you, man, because I know you could riff on this for a minute.

I think I've said what I need to. I hope this is plain to the listener. We need to be going to the New Testament and looking at the things that just show up over and over and over again.

Love, considering others, speak in a way that builds up, don't speak in a way that tears down, restore people, etc.

Sexual conduct amongst the saints, things like this. They are there over and over and over again, but we often don't think enough about loving others.

In particular, we don't think enough about how we talk. Jon Moffitt So what's nice about the confession here is it's going to build us a really great kind of a pyramid and foundation where it leads us to the pinnacle of what our good works are for.

It's important that they first start off saying, okay, there's a lot of things that are deemed as good works.

It's a powerful statement. It's bold. He says, people out of blind zeal or on a pretense of good intentions are not truly good.

They're not good. The reason is that they aren't commissioned by the Father to be that which He wants us to be doing or wants us to be focusing on.

When it comes to what a

Christian is required to do, like this is what's required of you, those good works, for instance,

James and 1 John and Jesus all say, if you say you love

God and you love me and you don't love your brother or you refuse to your brother, then you're a liar because the good work that's required of you, this is what it means to be the follower of Christ.

I've heard people say, if you don't have a desire to read your Bible every day or to have quiet time every day to journal, you should really question your salvation.

They turn something that in modern day can be healthy and encouraging and edifying, but they turn it into a work that is not designed by God to be a work.

I know people are going to flip out when I say this, but if you are being sanctified by the work of the

Spirit and God uses the ordinary means of grace, that is, the preached word, the gathered saints of fellowship, the sacrament of prayer, if that's what

He uses to sanctify primarily His congregation, then we should be very careful to be adding spiritual disciplines that are isolation disciplines, meaning that these are the things

I do alone. Hear me out here. If you think performing spiritual disciplines as a good work equals sanctification, you are highly confused.

That's exactly what these confessions are getting at, is that that's a problem. That is not good.

Even though they're under good pretense and zeal, they're not truly good. In the

New Testament, we are explicitly commanded to not neglect assembling together, Hebrews 10. Many saints don't have that on their lips either when they're talking about good works we're commanded to do.

I need to regularly assemble with the saints. Many Christians sadly think that their personal devotional time is far more important than anything that could ever happen in a gathering of the church, and with all due respect, the

New Testament says the opposite. When we are exhorted to prayer in the New Testament, those exhortations are corporate in nature.

Of course we pray individually, but we pray together when we gather, and we could go on and on about this.

The ordinary means of grace in the context of the assembly are absolutely commanded by God in the

New Testament as a work we need to give ourselves to. It's sad that for many of us that's not been taught to us, and we've not been conditioned to think in those ways, but yet we've been given all of these other things that are extra biblical and well -intentioned.

We then give all of our effort and energy to those, and oftentimes we're not giving the effort and energy to the things that are clearly on the pages of the

New Testament. Justin Perdue is going to get into this in a moment, but when good works are primarily given to you for the means of sanctification and justification, meaning that you are confirming it, then those types of works are very valuable to the individual because they are measurable.

You can measure how often you do these things. When good works are not designed to be sanctifying or a measurement, that's not the point of them.

As a matter of fact, the only time you see in the New Testament where there uses a measurement is when someone is blatantly disobeying and they get upset.

The writers in the Testament are saying, what is wrong? You don't understand. You can't blatantly disobey this.

There's a difference between you don't understand and you need to do this to prove yourself.

I know there's screaming at the speaker probably saying, well, Paul says examine yourself to see if you're of their faith.

We can't take that out of context because he's dealing with people who are rejecting his gospel.

He's like, look, I preach to you the same gospel, and so if you're rejecting my gospel, you need to be examining yourself to see if you're of the faith because you believe the same gospel that I preach to you.

Paul's legitimacy as an apostle is being called into question. If you're believing the gospel I preach to you, you might want to examine yourselves.

If I'm illegitimate, you might want to examine yourselves. This is where I was going to that.

The reason why the reformers have to say these things is that on the premise, we're using good works pietistically instead of using them biblically.

Let's go to this next paragraph, which I think will help clarify that. It says, these good works, this is chapter 16 .2,

these good works done in obedience to God's commandment are the fruit and evidence of a true and living faith.

Through good works, believers express their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, build up their brothers and sisters, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of opponents, and glorify

God. Believers are God's good workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, so they bear fruit leading to holiness and have the outcome of eternal life.

This is an important clarification because it is talking about what good works are for. For instance, he says it's the fruit and evidence of a true and living faith.

Justin, you may have used this illustration. I don't know. I stole it from somebody. How do we know someone's alive?

We put our hand over their face, and are they breathing? Their breath isn't the cause of their life.

It's the evidence of their life. The same thing when it comes to good works.

Good works are the evidence of it, but it's not the cause or the confirmation. It can never be this means of the ground of it.

It can't be the cause of it. Let me put it that way. To use your body illustration, how do we know a body is alive?

We see the body's breathing. Well, you can't externally cause that to be a reality. You can't then push on the chest and force air in and out of the lungs and say, well, this is a living body.

The same is true with the fruit analogy that is so common in the Scriptures. How do we know that a tree is alive?

It bears fruit, but you can't just duct tape fruit to a tree and say, well, that's a living tree.

The life in the tree is what bears the fruit, and you can't reverse engineer it. When you try to take the fruit and weave that somehow into the root of the tree, into the life of the tree itself, you kill the whole thing.

I think that's important for us to keep those things straight. This paragraph is super helpful because we're told some of the motivations for good works.

We obey and we do good works out of gratitude and thankfulness and joy. We do these things for what purpose?

Well, for the good of our brothers and sisters, for our neighbor's benefit, and for God's honor. It also commends

Christ to others when they see our good works done in faith. Notice how the purpose of our good works is not for us at all.

The purpose of our good works is for our neighbor's benefit, for the building up of the body of Christ, and then indirectly,

I would say, for the honor of God and for the commending of Christ in the gospel through the way that we then live.

We so often think about our good works as the way that we prove our own legitimacy, and we then feel better about ourselves spiritually by doing these things.

That is a small piece of this. We're told that we can bolster our assurance through our good works, and we need to hold on to that.

I can be comforted, John, and I can be encouraged. I would maybe even say more precisely,

I can be encouraged as I look at the work of God's Spirit through me. When I realize that I'm not like I used to be, when

I realize that the Lord has used me to do something that only He could do, it's like, yeah, that's really encouraging for me, but I never trust in those things.

I trust in Christ alone, and then I rejoice as I see good works occurring in my life and in the lives of others.

Then we keep good works in their proper context, and we have appropriate frameworks. We think about this, that we obey out of love and joy and gratitude for the good of our neighbor, for the honor of God, and that these things are an outflow of life already received.

They do not cause me to be alive. They do not keep me alive.

That's huge. They do not sustain my life in Christ. They do not sustain my life spiritually, but because I am alive by the grace of God and because I've been united with Christ, these things will occur.

As I've said a bunch, the best illustration in some ways that I know of, on top of the ones we've already given, is that streams only flow downhill.

You can't make them flow uphill. Good works, sanctification, only flow out of justification and eternal life received.

We can't make things alive by trying to do good works.

We can't keep anything alive by works. We are kept alive by the same power that raised us from the dead.

Jon Moffitt So what happens then when you're looking at your life and you're like, man, I'm lacking in good works?

I would say two things. First of all, make sure what you're looking for are truly good works. A lot of what

Christians are told to do as the evidence of their faith is not true. It's not truly a good work that God has given us as a means to strengthen our assurance.

I think there's a lot of people who do a lot of good works and their faith is not strengthened. It's because the work that they're doing is pietism, or I would even say monasticism.

This whole idea that you must be quiet for so much a day, you must do this, you must do journal.

The craziness of that stuff is not biblical. So then point three, it says this, talking about good works, their ability to do good works does not arise at all from themselves, but entirely from the spirit of Christ.

Justin, this goes back to your illustration of taping fruit to a tree. If someone is not producing fruit, that's a problem.

But the problem is not yell at them to produce it. This is where I get upset with pastors who are thinking, oh, well, these carnal

Christians or these lazy Christians. I'm like, hey, listen, I was logged on to a live stream of a famous college and I was looking for something and I was like, well, let me see what their chapel is like.

And the opening statement basically was, most of you here think you're Christians, but you're not. And then he presented to just basically tell them to obey more.

And I'm like, if they're not a Christian, they can't obey. That's why the confession says the ability to do good works can't come from your own strength.

It has to come from something else. Just a brief insertion for people that haven't heard us say this before. If you as a preacher legitimately think that the majority of your audience or a significant portion of your audience are unregenerate, then you ought not be telling them to obey more.

You need to be preaching the law in its first use. Show them that they cannot keep the law, that they could never do what

God requires, and then give them Jesus who has paid their penalty and who has fulfilled the law for them.

That's what a person would need who is not regenerate. A person that is not alive does not mean to be told, like you said, obey better, because it won't give life.

Well, to your point, the paragraph goes, to enable them to do good works, they need in addition to the grace they have already received and active influence of the same

Holy Spirit to work in them to will and to do his good pleasure. That's to your point.

Yet this is no reason for them to grow negligent as if they were not required to perform any duty without a special motion of the

Spirit. Instead, they should be diligent to stir up the grace of God that is in them. In all these passages from Corinthians, Thessalonians, Hebrews, and Ephesians that talk about how to build one another up into love and good works, we're to stir one another up because the flesh is weak, the

Spirit is willing. We need to be of those things, but when we do our good works, we need to always be giving praise and glory and honor to the

Father because those works are not works of the flesh. Those are works brought to us by the

Spirit. This is why it says that they should be diligent to stir up the grace of God that is in them.

I don't think I have much more than that other than I think that it's important when we are struggling to do the things that we know we need to do.

What's interesting, Justin, is he uses grace to stir them up, not fear, not pietism.

A lot of times when you see people who are struggling to obey, they're not doing the things that they should.

What does the modern day preacher do? They either withhold blessings from God or they bring condemnation on the weak and weary sinner, the disobedient sinner.

The modern preacher generally has a framework where he thinks that people are motivated by fear of punishment or by merit, and so he preaches accordingly.

Like you're saying, you withhold blessing or you threaten judgment, whatever. That's not biblical.

That's not Christianity. But rather, what we do is because we've been made alive by the

Spirit of God, because we've been united with Christ, yet at the same time, because we're sinners and struggle sometimes, oftentimes, what we need is to be stirred up in grace and love so that we might then go and pursue good works all the more.

How does that occur? I would say generally, ordinarily, that's going to occur in a corporate context.

You're going to gather with the saints. You're going to sit under the Word. You're going to come to the table. You're going to witness baptism.

You're going to sing. You're going to pray. We're going to do all of that. We together, in doing that and then in fellowshipping as the saints, will stir one another up to love and good works.

That's how this goes typically. I know this occurs for me, John. It's not that I'm never stirred up by myself.

I am. I can be, but I'm more often, most all the time, stirred up by conversations with other believers and in particular in the corporate gathering and conversations that flow out of it.

I am motivated. I trust by the Spirit working through us.

I am motivated and stirred up and spurred on to then leave the assembly and go and love my neighbor, to leave the assembly and go and flee from sin and fight against it.

That's how the Lord works, man. It's a living and active thing how He works in us by His Spirit and He uses the means that He's given us to do so.

Far from us just by ourselves mustering up good works today.

Of course, we're diligent. Of course, we seek to be intentional, but we've got to be living on something other than our own blind zeal, to use the language of the confession.

Justin Perdue So in point one, they clarify what is and what is not good works. In point two and three, they clarify the ability of where these good works come from.

Now we need to talk about the quality of these works, lest we get confused to think that God is accepting them because they're actually good.

So why don't you read for us point four and give us your thoughts. Justin Perdue I'm going to go four into five, and we'll just kind of comment as we go because these both can hang together.

So this is 16 .4. Those who attain the greatest heights of obedience possible in this life are far from being able to merit reward by going beyond duty or to do more than God requires.

Instead, they fall short of much that is their duty to do. So far from us being able to do enough that we would actually merit favor and blessing from God, we don't even do what we're supposed to do.

We fall far short of what God requires of us being made in His image. 16 .5 goes on.

We cannot, even by our best works, merit pardon of sin or eternal life from God's hand due to the huge disproportion between our works and the glory to come and the infinite distance between us and God.

By these works, we can neither benefit God nor satisfy Him for the debt of our former sins.

When we have done all we can, we have only done our duty and are unprofitable servants. Since our good works are good, they must proceed from His Spirit.

And since they are performed by us, they are defiled and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection that they cannot withstand the severity of God's punishment.

Just a few comments, John, and then you riff all you want, man. So hear these words.

Even our best works, like the best works we can possibly do, cannot merit pardon of sin or eternal life from God's hand.

We need to own that. We are not to work anything, do anything, or render unto God anything that would earn us

His favor. It can't be done. That's because of the huge disproportion between our works and the glory to come and the infinite distance between us and God.

That's great. Then, this is great. By these works, we can neither benefit God nor satisfy

Him for the debt of former sins. How good is this? We do not benefit the Lord. We do not give

Him anything that He needs in our good works. I feel like we so often use language unwittingly in the church that makes it sound like, even in our corporate worship, we're coming to offer

God something that He needs. We're coming to give Him something that's just going to bless His name.

But we do not benefit God in our good works.

He needs nothing. Is He honored in them? Yes. Does He need them? No. Does He benefit?

No. We obviously, through our good works that we do, cannot satisfy the debt of our former sins.

That's huge. Martin Luther says this. This is a paraphrase of Luther.

He says something like this. He says, I've been preaching the gospel for 20 years, and I've been reading and writing and laboring in it for the same span of time.

One would think that the old filth would have left me by now, but yet I at times find myself wanting my relationship with God to be something where I bring

Him something based upon which He would then show me favor. We all do that.

We all need to be reminded over and over and over again, like weekly at least, that our good works could not merit pardon of sin.

They cannot do anything for God that He needs and could never earn favor from Him.

We are simply passive recipients of grace and passive recipients of everything that Christ has done for us.

Then we work from that for God's honor and good of neighbor. But let's not get it twisted. This is

James 2, 13 or 12, when he says, speak and act as one who lives under the law of liberty.

We've been set free from the burden of the law. We've been liberated from it. We don't obey as one who's earning merit or earning forgiveness.

I have to go on and read this next paragraph before I make my next statement because it will help clarify. This goes back to the union in Christ that we had talked about earlier.

Nevertheless, this is 16 .6, believers are accepted through Christ and thus their good works are also accepted in Him.

This acceptance does not mean our good works are completely blameless or irreproachable in God's sight.

Instead, God views them in His Son, and so He is pleased to accept and reward that which is sincere, even though it is accompanied by many weaknesses and imperfections.

The point of it is you have been liberated to imperfectly, with many weaknesses, do good works, and God will accept them because He accepts them in Christ.

Your good works are not good enough on their own. God does not accept them based upon your own capacity.

First of all, they're brought by the Holy Spirit, but they're brought with many weaknesses because we still live in the flesh, and they're acceptable not because you did them.

They're acceptable because God accepts them in Christ. Therefore, you should never boast in your good works because you have to boast in Christ.

Why would God accept that? Because He's accepting it because of what you have received.

You are now liberated to do good works, not to look at them and ask yourself, is

God going to accept me because I did these good works? Am I sustaining my relationship with the

Father? Am I progressing in my relationship with the Father?

The answer to all of that is no, no, and no, because you cannot have more of Jesus than you have now.

You can't be more in union with Him than you are now. You can either obey out of joy and gratitude, as we're told, not trying to do it meritoriously, knowing that you are being effective for the sake of your brother.

We use this constantly, but this is 2 Peter 1. He says when you're not doing these good works, you are ineffective and unfruitful in the work that God has presented for you, which is what?

To love neighbor and advance the gospel. You're not being ineffective in maintaining or progressing your sanctification.

That's the work of God. This chapter, if you're going to get a tattoo, I don't know.

This seems to be the one to do it. Believers are accepted through Christ, full stop, period.

Praise God. That's why we do good works, and we're excited to do it as we fail. We never look to our good works.

We're always looking to Christ. This is Hebrews, when it says, laying aside the weight and the sin that easily besets us, looking unto

Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Several comments here. I'm coming to mind.

Steinbeck, I think in East of Eden, says something like, now that you don't have to be perfect, go and be good.

That's helpful. Steinbeck is a writer of fiction, a good writer in my opinion.

There's a lot of theological undertones in things he writes. Whether the guy's a believer or not,

I have no idea. He may have just grown up in the church. That's another conversation for another time. That language is really helpful.

Now that you don't have to be perfect, go and be good. Jesus was perfect for us. We are now under the law of liberty, like you said.

We're not under the condemnation of the law anymore. We're under grace. The law guides our living, and we can go and seek conformity unto it.

We can go pursue good works and righteousness because Christ has handled eternity, and he has handled judgment, and he has kept the law perfectly for us.

So we're now free unto righteousness. We're free unto love and all of these good things.

I'm thinking about it. It's like we're children. God is our Father. It's as though, the way we think a lot of times, it's as though we come to God with our imperfect things that we've done, and we say, hey, here these are, and I'm assuming that on the basis of these,

I can get in to your holy heaven. That's the wrong way to think of it.

But rather, we come to him and we say, you know, I know that because of Christ and because of Christ alone,

I am now going to be welcomed into your joy forever. Here are things because of that. Here are things that I did for the good of my brothers and sisters, and I know that they please you.

As imperfect as they are, I trust that you accept them in the Lord Jesus. Here I am. That's a much more helpful posture, and that is the posture of the

Christian. John, I'm happy. I think we've got time to finish. Do you have any other comments on 16 .6? Do we want to conclude with seven?

Sure, we can go with seven. Yeah, just for clarity. We may as well. We're one paragraph from the end. Works done by unregenerate people, that's folks who are not born again by the

Spirit of God, may in themselves be commanded by God and useful to themselves and others. Yet they do not come from a heart purified by faith and are not done in a right manner according to the word, nor with the right goal, which is the glory of God.

Therefore, they are sinful and cannot please God. They cannot qualify anyone to receive grace from God, and yet their neglect is even more sinful and displeasing to God.

So a few clarifying comments here. Works done by people who are not trusting Christ, they might be works that God has commanded, they might be useful to that individual, and they might very well be useful to other people.

Yet they do not please the Lord. Why? Because they are not done in faith. Hebrews 11 .6. Apart from faith, it's impossible to please

God. They're not done from right motivation, etc. However, even though that is all true, they can never earn merit through doing these things, it is better for even unregenerate man to do these good works than to neglect them, because in neglecting them, they just confirm their guilt all the more.

So that's a helpful, just kind of clarifying paragraph maybe to conclude. Because a lot of us, I think, look around at our neighbors who are not

Christians, and we think, well, they're doing good things, and we need to talk like that.

People do good things in this world. They're not salvific. They don't merit anything from God, but they're good in terms of being commanded by the law, and they benefit neighbor.

And then I think we need to be able to say, yeah, there are a lot of people that I look around, and I interact with non -believers in my work, or at the gym, or wherever, and they're kind of easier to get along with than a lot of people at my church are.

True. But this is one of those great things, you know, that we, the distinctions that we have to draw, and the ways that we need to speak.

God is not in the business of saving likable people, and there are going to be many folks who do good things in this life, but they're not doing anything that would merit

God's favor. And we as the saints receive everything that we need from the Lord in terms of salvation, and any good works that we do are simply done imperfectly, but really in Christ, out of love and gratitude and love of neighbor.

And so I hope that's clarifying in some way. John, any parting shots maybe before we head over to Semper Reformanda?

I think it's helpful. Sometimes we, again, we always look at good works as means of clarification or justification or confirmation.

And when we understand that God does not look at your good works as confirmation or justification, then your neighbor's good works are of no value.

Our good works are designed for two things. They are designed for the glory of God and for the advancement of the kingdom.

That means that we're to love, care, and encourage our believers in the advancement of the gospel. I mean, if works aren't done by faith, that means they're not advancing

God's glory and they're not advancing God's kingdom, and therefore they're of no value. And that's why it says this, that they're of no value, as it relates to the eternal kingdom.

Now, is there temporal value? As Justin said, obviously it's good to suppress evil. It's good to suppress evil, but by and large, your good works have no value eternally if they are not based upon these criteria.

And that's why I think it's so important to think that you aren't working. Your good works aren't eternally valuable because they're justifying you or they're confirming you.

Your works are eternally valuable because they're glorifying God and advancing His kingdom. And you need to stop worrying about this confirmation pietism, because it actually distracts you from what you should be doing.

I'll say this is my parting shot, Justin. We can talk about this in SR. Justin Perdue I do have one parting shot that came to mind. We get so focused on self -confirmation and pietism that we are ineffective in the actual work of the kingdom.

Christians are more focused on self -development than they are loving neighbor and advancement of the gospel, and that is not good.

This is a little piece of history that I feel remiss in not saying in a conversation about good works. Many will know of the

Council of Trent, which was a Roman Catholic church council in the middle of the 16th century that was held in response to the

Protestant Reformation. In Session 6, Canon 24, there is a paragraph on justification and good works.

And the Roman position is that if anyone says that good works are only evidence of justification obtained and they are not for the increase and the maintenance of justification, then let him be accursed.

And why does this matter? Because for many evangelicals, I don't think any of them would say that we are increasing our justification through our good works, but many would think and act as though we are maintaining our justification through good works.

With all due respect, that perspective is not Protestant. That perspective is Roman Catholic.

That is my parting shot. If I have upset anyone, I don't mean to. If you are interested in learning more about the

Council of Trent, Session 6, Canon 24, and all of these kinds of things, and what it means to be historically

Protestant and how we think about good works, not as maintaining our justification, then hit us up.

DM us whatever. Maybe we'll do a future episode on it. Justin Perdue Amen. Well, thank you for listening. We do a second podcast.

It's called Semper Ephraimanda, and we go a little bit deeper. We have, in some ways, a private conversation with those who want to take this to the next level.

If you want to participate with us in that podcast, we also have an app for all of our supporters.

Justin Perdue You got to have an That's right. We're Justin and I on there quite a bit, just interacting with people, answering questions, and praying together.

It's just kind of our community as we're trying to figure out how to continue the Reformation, pushing the Reformation forward, and encouraging one another.

We found this to be a simple way to do so. If you want to learn more about that, you can go to our website. Make sure you get our free e -book if you haven't done so.