If our Lord said that "The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?" Jeremiah 17:9 then how can we expect to know whether or not we are doing a deed that pleases the Lord? We can't even know our own hearts. We lie to God in our prayers when we say we love Him and then proceed to disobey what He told us to do in His Word. We don't even seek His Word for direction from Him.
Our Lord also said, Isaiah 64:6-7: But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind." Mankind can not clean itself up to satisfy the Holiness of God. He is the only Holy One who can remove filth or despirate wickedness.
No where in Scripture do we have a description of the size of the works that count for salvation. Nor does He tell us in His Word how many of the right kinds of works would need to be done to gain heaven.
What a cruel god so many people have, that thier god would expect us to earn our way to heaven, but not explain how many of those works will be enough to balance the scales in our behalf. The Muslims believe that their good works are placed on a scale, if the scale tips just enough in the direction of the good works, then they are able to gain heaven. 51% good works and 49% bad works is enough to save them. What kind of a god would allow 49% evil in his presence. Our God can not tollerate any evil at all in His presence, He is perfectly Holy. We must be perfect to come into His presence. But according to Scripture we can not be perfect. We are despirately wicked as Jeremiah 17 says.
What is the answer? Simply that we have no good works in us at all. That is the reason Jesus Christ had to come and shed His precious blood for us. He was the perfect sacraficial lamb of God that could satisfy the Father's demand for perfect holiness. It is Christ's sacrafice that counts on our behalf. He sits at the right hand of the Father today and pleads on our behalf. The work is begun by Christ and it was finished by Christ. He said while He was on the cross before He died, "It is finished." John 19:30
It is blasphemous to think that we can add to anything that our Lord did when He declared that it was finished. All the work was done by Him then and all the work of righteousness in us is also done by Him now. The day we realize this, is the day we truely begin to trust Him for each day, each work and our future with Him.
I can not imagine that Christ would go through all that suffering and humilations, the perfect God, and it not be enough, ludicrous. Our pride wants us to think that we can do something, anything to earn it. It is our pride that will not humble ourselves and trust what God did. We like to be in control, to say that we are nothing and have nothing to offer, leaves us humble, we don't like that.
What happends after we realize these truths? 2 Corinthians 5:17-18 says "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their traspasses to them, and has comitted to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him."
When we are made a new creation, He changes us and we no longer desire the things we used to do that grieved Him. We begin to love His ways and His Word. He begins to work obedience in our hearts. Then He gives us works to do. There are many good works out there but we must seek Him for the ones He wants us to do. Any works we do in the flesh just to feel good about ourselves will not count, only those that the Lord told us to do, that we did in obedience to Him.
Our hearts like to think that we are special, that we are capable of great things, that we are good, oh so good. We have been raised on self esteem, that we should love our selves and be sure we count for something. This is the reason we have such a hard time accepting that we are nothing and that God is everything. We don't like to beleive that we were helpless and someone else had to save us, so we attempt to add our own works to that of Christ's, this is blaspehmey.
Once we are saved the Lord gives us these instructions from James 2:14-26. Because we have faith and have been saved we will have good works. In verse 22 we are told: "Do you see that faith was working together with his (Abraham's) works, and by works faith was made perfect? The works prove that we had faith.
Galatians 2:16 says, "knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.
Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by fiath in the Son of God, who love me and gave Himself for me.
Galatians 5:25 says: If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
When we realize that God is the One that does all the work in us after we are saved, we then have no reason to boast about our good deed, He gets all the glory.
It takes faith to believe that God can do all His good works in us. His good works His way. What a weight is lift from us when we trust Him and then obey.
Blessings to you!!!!
Gwendolyn
