YOU’RE JUSTIFIED BY FAITH PLUS GOOD WORKS
Notes
Transcript
For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.
You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.
Now, I believe that there is no contradiction between what James says and what the apostle Paul teaches. What many people don’t realize is that what James is referring to here is justification before men.
Jesus said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16, emphasis mine). Who sees your good works? Men.
James said, “If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:15–17). Notice how the good work of giving to the needy is done before men and to men?
You see, people can’t see with their physical eyes that you have been justified by faith. They can’t see that God has made you righteous. They condemn or justify you based on what you do. You may tell your friends, “God has justified me and made me righteous through faith in Christ,” but they are not necessarily going to believe you or give weight to your words until they see your good works.
Let’s look at the two examples of good works that James gives: “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? . . . Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way?” (James 2:21, 25).
James shared Abraham’s offering of Isaac and Rahab’s assistance to the two Israelite spies as their good works. Christians like to quote these examples and say, “So where are your good works? Don’t you know that faith without works is dead?” What they don’t realize is that between the justification of these two Bible characters and their good works is a long time!
Abraham was justified by faith even before Isaac was born. In the book of Genesis, we see how God brought Abraham outside and said, “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them. So shall your descendants be.” Abraham believed the Lord and “He accounted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:5–6). That’s when Abraham was justified. Isaac wasn’t even conceived in Sarah’s womb yet. And only after Isaac was born and grew up to be a young man did Abraham perform the good work of offering him to God. It didn’t happen overnight.
What about Rahab? Scripture tells us that she went to the spies she had hidden on her roof and told them, “I know the LORD has given you this land. . . . We are all afraid of you. . . . For we have heard how the LORD made a dry path for you through the Red Sea when you left Egypt. And we know what you did to Sihon and Og, the two Amorite kings east of the Jordan River, whose people you completely destroyed. No wonder our hearts have melted in fear! . . . For the LORD your God is the supreme God of the heavens above and the earth below” (Josh. 2:9–11 NLT).
Notice how Rahab used the term “LORD” or Yahweh, and declared to the spies that He was “the supreme God of the heavens above and the earth below.” She was already a believer in Yahweh. That’s why she was willing to help the Israelites and even begged them to spare her and her extended family when the Israelites came into Jericho (see Josh. 2:11–13 NLT). She had no doubt that the same Lord Who had opened the Red Sea and defeated the two Amorite kings for them would also give them the land of Jericho. Rahab must have grown up hearing about how the Lord had dried up the Red Sea for the Israelites, and she’d believed then in the Lord, that He was surely the supreme God of heaven and earth. So if you think about it, as in the case of Abraham, there must have been a good many years between her believing God and her good work!
Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” (John 6:29)
The apostle Paul goes to great lengths to explain to us that it’s not our good works that make us right. No, it’s whether or not we have faith in the good work of Jesus that really matters. But if that’s the case, then what is the purpose of the Law and its 613 regulations? It’s not to save us. Romans makes that clear. Under the Law, no one could ever do enough to justify themselves in God’s eyes. Instead, the Law is designed to shut us up:
Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.
There Must Be More than
This! Bible teacher Charles Trumbull described his spiritual frustrations this way:
There were great fluctuations in my spiritual life, in my conscious closeness of fellowship with God. Sometimes I would be on the heights spiritually; sometimes I would be in the depths. A strong, arousing convention; a stirring, searching address from some consecrated, victorious Christian leader of men; a searching Spirit-filled book; or the obligation to do a difficult piece of Christian service myself, with the preparation in prayer that it involved, would lift me up; and I would stay up for a while and God would seem very close and my spiritual life deep. But it wouldn’t last. Sometimes by some single failure before temptation, sometimes by a gradual downhill process, my best experiences would be lost, and I would find myself back on the lower levels. And a lower level is a perilous place for a Christian to be, as the devil showed me over and over again.1
Sound familiar? It may describe the way you feel right now. I became a Christian in 1993, and Trumbull’s description of his Christian experience pretty much parallels mine for the twenty-nine years after I trusted Christ. I don’t think I’ve been alone in this. Many who have professed Christ as Savior have secretly wondered, “Is this all there is to it? Surely the Christian life is meant to be more!” They know that they are supposed to be experiencing the abundant life Jesus promised, yet they find themselves in a life of mediocrity. These Christians want a victorious Christian life, but they don’t know how to find it.
If at First You Don’t Succeed…
We live in a culture that commends effort. From childhood we have been told, “Don’t give up. Don’t be a quitter. Keep trying until you accomplish your goal.
In the natural world, trying harder is commendable and often effective. But God’s ways aren’t our ways. Sometimes they seem to be opposite from ours. In the spiritual world, trying harder is detrimental. That’s right. Trying harder will defeat you every time.
No Christian has a problem with the previous paragraph as it relates to salvation. If an unsaved person were to suggest to you that he was trying hard to become a Christian, what would you tell him? You would probably make it clear that he could not be saved by trying, but by trusting. You would tell him that there is absolutely nothing he could do to gain salvation. It has all already been done. Salvation is a gift to be received, not a reward to be earned. A person who tries even a little bit to gain salvation by works cannot become a Christian. As Paul said about salvation,
“If by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work” (Romans 11:6).
In other words, it has to be either grace or works. We are saved by grace, and trying hard has absolutely nothing to do with it.
But many Christians who understand that trying is harmful to becoming a Christian somehow think that it is essential to living in victory after salvation. The truth is that victory is not a reward but a gift. A person does not experience victory in the Christian life by trying hard to live for God. It just won’t work! I know because that’s what I did. Have you tried to live for God? Did your efforts cause you to experience real victory?
In the past, I had a mental picture of what I thought I should be. In this picture there was always a wide gap between where I ought to be and where I was. Sometimes when I was especially motivated, I would feel that the gap had narrowed a bit. When I was winning people to Christ or spending a lot of time praying and studying the Bible, I felt that I might actually one day be able to bridge the gap and be a victorious Christian.
But inevitably, my motivation level would diminish and my fury and fire would die down. That decline always led to a sense of condemnation. Even when I had done nothing wrong, I would feel guilty for not doing all the things that I believed I should be doing. The devil had a field day with me during this phase. Sometimes I would become spiritually indifferent. Other times I would wonder if I would ever be consistent in my Christian life. I would wallow in my misery until I couldn’t stand it anymore; then I would finally rededicate myself to God, confessing my spiritual slothfulness. With genuine contempt for my inconsistency, I would ask God to help me be more consistent.
I would promise to read my Bible more, pray more, win more souls, whatever I thought it took to get back on course. I resolved to try harder than ever to live for God. Yet no matter how hard I tried, I never experienced real peace about my Christian life. If I read five chapters of the Bible, I felt that I should have read ten. If I led one person to Christ, I thought it should have been two.
Many other people have acknowledged a similar experience. They live in this vicious cycle, moving from motivation to condemnation to rededication. If this describes your spiritual life, after a while this constant spinning around and around will make you sick. But I want to give you hope.
You Know the Rules!
An important cornerstone of a civilized society is law. Without laws to govern the behavior of its citizens, a nation would exist in anarchy.
We have all been taught that if we don’t obey the rules, we will be punished. Whether it is a child sneaking cookies before dinner or an adult driving 70 in a 55-kmph zone, if we get caught breaking the rules, we pay the price. Because we are taught from the cradle to the coffin that we must obey the law, it is very natural to transfer this system into the Christian life.
The law of God is good because it accomplishes an important function. But many Christians have misunderstood the purpose of the law. The law was given so that people might see their own absolute inadequacy to live in a way that glorifies God. In the Old Testament the law revealed to Israel God’s righteous standard. The story of the Hebrew people chronicles their repeated failure to live up to God’s laws. Because God is omniscient, He knew before He gave the law that they wouldn’t keep it. Through the law God revealed that righteousness cannot come from external regulations. Every person understands this at the time of salvation, but many seem to believe that the rules change after they are saved.
The purpose of the Law is to show us that we have a problem. The Law is like a mirror. It reveals the dirt on the face of humanity, but just like a mirror, it has no power to clean us.
As unbelievers , the Law made us aware of our spiritual problem and our need for Christ:
Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.
The Law diagnosed the problem (spiritual death) but did not provide the solution (spiritual life). Only Christ can offer life (John 10:10). By accepting Jesus’s sacrifice for our sins and His resurrection as the means to new life, we enjoy a rightness with God that has nothing to do with Law-keeping:
But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets,
We all have had the desire to be successful in our spiritual life. The popular belief is that success comes by commitment and hard work. That’s true in the business world. A person dedicated to accomplishing something in business has every reason to be optimistic about his chances in our free enterprise system. But it doesn’t work that way in the spiritual life.
The criteria for measuring success in the world is production. The person who produces impressive results in business is considered successful. Successful people have learned how to accomplish the desired results. But here is where we get into trouble in the Christian life.
Christianity isn’t built around performance, but is centered on the person of Jesus Christ. When we transfer a worldly approach to success to the Christian life, we will be disappointment.
God never intended for our focus to be on performing and producing. He desires that our focus be on the person of Jesus Christ!
How is the fruit produced by the the branch, by abiding in the vine.
“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
If you have prayed for God to use your life, don’t be surprised when trouble comes. Remember, the trouble is intended to strip you of self-sufficiency, a necessary step before God can use you to the fullest.
God cannot use a Christian to fullest potential until that person has come to the end of confidence in personal abilities. So He allows problems to come into our lives that are greater than our abilities can solve. Don’t miss this point, because it is fundamental. If we have sincerely prayed for God to use us, He must cause us to come to the place where we have no confidence in the flesh. Adverse circumstances may be the hand of God working to bring us to the end of self-sufficiency.
God’s purpose is not that we should rededicate our self with all its abilities, but that we should give up hope in self.
We sometimes try to live for Him when He wants to live His life through us.
It is important to see the difference here.
To ask God to help us live for Him is to request some sort of divine blessing on our effort to “do what He wants us to do.”
But that isn’t what God desires. He isn’t interested in what we can do for Him. Christ is interested in living His life through us. Is there a difference? You bet! It’s the difference between law and grace.
Law will cause a person to say, “Lord, help me to do the things You want me to do.” In other words, “Help me keep Your rules.”
1 Thessalonians 5:24 we read, “He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.” Not only does Christ call us to the Christian life, but He will also live it for us. After all, who else could live the Christ-life except Christ?
2 God wants to bring us to the understanding that we weren’t saved to do something for God. We were saved so that we might know Him in intimate daily fellowship. Do good works have a place in the Christian life? Of course! But they are an overflow of our relationship with Him, an evidence of His life being expressed through us.
“For in Him we live and move and have our being…‘ For we are also His offspring’” (Acts 17:28).
The essence of your identity rests in your spirit. Someone has said that a person is a spirit who has a soul and lives in a body.
You are a saint. In 1 Corinthians 1:2, Paul addresses the people of the church at Corinth as saints. He certainly had to be talking about an identity that began or got initiated from their spiritual birth, because their behavior surely wasn’t saintly. He calls them saints in chapter 1 and then spends the rest of his letter telling them to live like the saints they really are. Don’t be uncomfortable with being called a saint, because that’s what God calls you! That doesn’t mean you live a sinless life, but that God has set you apart and placed the nature of Christ within you.
You are God’s work of art.“We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:10). The word “workmanship” is the Greek word poema, from which we get the English word “poem.” God has made you to be a heavenly piece of poetry on this earth!
You are righteous and holy. You have received the gift of righteousness (Romans 5:17). The Lord Jesus is your righteousness. When you received Him, your spirit was filled with righteousness. What you are at the spirit level determines your real identity. When you do not behave righteously, you are being inconsistent with who you are.
You are fully accepted by God. You are accepted because you are in Christ (Ephesians 1:6). Because Christ has received you and He is fully accepted by the Father, you are fully accepted as well! You don’t need to change a thing about yourself for God to accept you. Your acceptance isn’t based on what you do, but on who you are.
You may be thinking, “But I don’t feel like a saint. I don’t think of myself as a heavenly poem. I sure don’t act very righteous and holy. I don’t feel accepted by God.” I know how you feel. But you must decide whether you are going to trust what you feel or what God has said in His word.
Let this truth wake you up! You are not just a sinner saved by grace. You are a saint who has the life of Christ at the center of your being. A sinner saved by grace spends his time on the defensive against Satan. Someone who knows he is a saint goes on the offensive.
Author Bob George shares a great illustration of this truth.
Imagine that a king decreed that a pardon would be extended to all prostitutes. Would that be good news for you if you were a prostitute?
Of course, it would. You wouldn’t have to worry any more about avoiding the law, or about having a criminal record. The pardon would definitely be good news to you. But it wouldn’t necessarily give you the motivation to change your lifestyle. But suppose that in addition to extending the pardon, the king came to you personally and asked you to become his wife. Would that give you a reason to change the way you live? Absolutely! Who wouldn’t trade the life of a prostitute for that of a queen? Gaining a new identity as the king’s wife would be your motivation to abandon prostitution. When you became a Christian, you probably understood that all your sins were forgiven. But did that forgiveness give you sufficient motivation to change your behavior?
The Bible says that we are the bride of Christ, and that relationship gives us a new identity!2 A proper understanding of our identity in Christ is sufficient motivation to have a totally different attitude toward sin..
John 15: 5 “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.
Galatians 5:22-23 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 [a]gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”
John 6:63. “It is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh profits nothing, the words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.”
Your identity is determined by your birth, not your behavior.
You behaviour is relational transformation because of you being in Him and His flowing through you.
Bible says “Christ in you the hope of glory” Col1:27, we allow Him to live his life through us, knowing who we have become soKeep your eyes on him.
Let’s look at the two examples of good works that James gives: “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? . . . Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way?” (James 2:21, 25).