Works vs. Faith!

Most religions in the world like to complicate things. We like to make it difficult, just so that we can let people look at us and say how good we are. Look at what I accomplished. The simple gospel is too simple for most people. We want to throw works into the system, because it sometimes makes us feel better about ourselves. We don’t really enjoy charity or rather we don’t enjoy really needing charity.


But the truth is we cannot save ourselves. We are completely powerless to save ourselves. No amount of good we could do would ever make up for the bad we have done. The only thing we are worthy of is death. The wages of sin is death; death is what we have earned. Thank God for the gift of eternal life. I could not survive if it were not for that gift. Pride stands in the way of the gospel.

Pride in thinking that we can do it all on our own. We have pride in thinking that we don’t ever need any help from anyone or anything. The simple truth is that Jesus paid the price for us. We have to simply accept His payment on our behalf. Pride would keep us from doing that. Pride would hold us back from His abundance.

Many of you reading this might have gotten past that particular pride, already accepted the gift that can only be accepted never earned. We are sometimes more like the Galatians, in Galatians 3:3 he asks the simple question are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect in the flesh?

In this passage he was talking about the people picking back up circumcision which represented the Old Testament law. They had freely accepted the gift of salvation but then they started teaching that to maintain your salvation you had to perform. In other words Jesus your sacrifice was good enough to start me off, thank you for that, now it is time for me to take back over. We also might demonstrate this by doing things to please God or get Him to do something good for us based on our good works. Instead of acting from a position, that I am already accepted by God, any good that I do is because of God and His goodness to me.

A few years ago (close to 10 years ago) I was talking with someone at the hotel in a hot tub. As strange a place as it may seem to have this kind of conversation, I’ve actually had several conversations like it, in hot tubs. I actually joked one time that we should start a hot tub ministry. We were actually talking about, the whole, “all roads lead to heaven” teaching. I was sharing how Christianity, at its core, is different than all the other religions out there. As a Christian we do good works not as a way of earning our way into heaven, but because of what God has done for us, it creates in us a desire to do well. He is a Good God who wants what is best for us and it is because of that we do what is right. We only love Him because He first loved us.

This other person felt that since we all ended up at the same place of doing good that it really didn’t matter how we got there. After all, either way we end up doing what is right anyway, right? One of the problems, not the only one, is that it puts a burden on us that we cannot bear. We find ourselves exhausted from always trying to do our best, and especially when things are not going well, striving even harder and still coming up short. We end up frustrated and hating ourselves, because we always keep coming up short. It is completely freeing to work from a position where I know that I am loved by a merciful God, who will not just strike me down the very first time I make a mistake. We operate from a position of love not out of, “I have to or else.”

Which position are you working from?