Good works are good

The Fourth Discourseman

Why should we do good works? There’s a way of telling the gospel that makes this a normative question, perhaps even a virtuous question. The logic goes like this. I am a sinner, and the consequence of my sin is God’s righteous judgment. But God has, graciously, provided a way to deal with the consequences of my sin by sending Jesus to die in my place. He pays the price that I should have to pay for my rejection of God, winning for me pardon for my sins. I need only receive this as a gift, given freely, and grasped by faith alone.

If this sounds rather antinomian to you – like the gospel is an excuse for lawlessness and vice – then perhaps that’s because you’ve misunderstood the lavishness of God’s grace. A couple of years back a friend of mine tweeted: ‘If you’re not asking “Shall we go on sinning in order that grace may abound?” then you haven’t understood grace.’

Some are a bit less strident than that, and recognise the danger of an antinomian telling of the gospel. So books on holiness are produced to help us get straight on the matter. Kevin DeYoung’s The Hole in Our Holiness (which I heartily recommend) contains a three-page list of scriptural reasons for the pursuit of a holy life; pastors will also often recommend J.C. Ryle’s classic Holiness (again a recommendation I can echo; the Banner of Truth printing is the best). I once went on a church getaway in which we had a seminar on the question of holiness. That too began with this same question – why should we be holy?

As laudable as such efforts are, I want to suggest that they nonetheless fail to get at the proper place of holiness in the Christian life. The problem with needing books and seminars telling us that holiness is *actually* a part of the Christian life is that it seems to presuppose that it is not already central in our understanding of what being a Christian is. And that, I think, flows from a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel.

The account of the gospel I sketched above might seem ‘sound’, as us hot-Prots like to say. But it has a gaping hole in it; in a sense, it is only half the gospel. For the grace of God to us in Christ saves us not merely from the consequences of sin – future wrath – but from sin itself. Christians are not only those who fear hell, who are wary of where our sins may one day lead; they are those convicted of the wrongness of sin and the beauty and wonder of righteousness and the ways of God. It is indeed a profound grace that, as the angel announced to Joseph, Christ saves his people from their sins (Matt. 1:21).

Asking why we shouldn’t just go on sinning in light of our salvation by faith alone is not a good question to ask. Those who opposed the apostle Paul ‘slanderously’ charged him with teaching this antinomian ‘gospel’ (Rom. 3:8). They had failed to acknowledge that Paul taught the kindness of God that leads to repentance (Rom. 2:4), that the apostle’s mission was to bring about the obedience of faith (Rom. 1:5, 16:26). Ultimately, behind this question is a spiritual issue, a heart problem. Failure to see the wonder that God’s grace extends to our sin itself, that he offers us freedom from its slavery, and the power to follow after Christ, is failure to see that God’s ways are good, that he knows the path that is best for us and longs to help us walk in it. It reveals that we still cherish our sin, still believe it to be good, and merely want to be free from what might follow after it.

But perhaps there’s a simpler answer to this than all that. Why should we do good works? The clue is in the name. God knew what he was doing when he commanded us to walk in them: good works are good.