Good works

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Booker T. Washington in his book, Up from Slavery describes what it was like for black slaves at the end of the Civil War.

Finally the war closed, and the day of freedom came. It was a momentous and eventful day to all upon our plantation. We had been expecting it. Freedom was in the air, and had been for months. . . . As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. . . .

The night before the eventful day, word was sent to the slave quarters to the effect that something unusual was going to take place at the “big house” the next morning. There was little, if any, sleep that night. All was excitement and expectancy. . . . The most distinct thing that I now recall in connection with the scene was that some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.

What an amazing scene! The glory of freedom! There is an amazing joy in the releasing of the captives and the slaves to glorious freedom.

And it is just that sort of freedom that the good news about Jesus Christ proclaims to us. We are free. Paul says, “For freedom you have been set free!” “You are called to freedom!” The Apostle Paul says in Gal. 5:13. If you have put your trust in Christ as Savior, then you have been freed! You are free! You should rejoice like the slaves rejoiced to be set free after the Civil War!

The Meaning of Our Freedom
What does it mean that we have freedom? From what does Christ set us free? Consider these seven ways that Christ has freed us.

1. Christ has freed us from guilt. Our sin has incurred guilt before God and feelings of guilt within ourselves. We are rightfully under the curse of the law because of our sin. The glorious news is that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us . . .” (Gal. 3:13). We stand justified and accepted before God’s throne. We no longer need to feel the crushing weight of guilt because of our sin. We are free.

2. Christ has freed us from old habits. The old habits of sin no longer have dominion over us. We may experience the presence of sin, but we don’t have to live under its power. “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24).

3. Christ has freed us from anxiety. We may feel anxiety, but we don’t need to let it dominate our lives. Why? Because Christ has given Himself for us, we do not need to be anxious about the future! We can trust that the Christ who gave Himself for us will subdue all things for our good.

4. Christ has freed us from bondage to old wounds. We all have those things that have hurt us, but we don’t have to live in bondage to them. Christ’s assurance of blessing tells us that these wounds do not describe our destiny. In addition, Christ’s power within us frees us to forgive and so release ourselves from the bondage of those who have hurt us.

5. Christ has freed us from the power of bad relationships. Why do we remain held in the bondage of bad relationships? Christ frees us to find what we need in Him. When we do that, we don’t have to bargain our well-being away in bad relationships while eating the scraps of acceptance that people are willing to throw to us. We are freed to love and serve those around us while also maintaining legitimate boundaries.

6. Christ has freed us from idols or wrong centers. When an idol takes over our life, we look for life from it. This causes us to sacrifice everything for the sake of it. For example, work becomes an idol for us, and we sacrifice our family, health, and children to it. Christ frees us from this because He delivers to us the status and security we were looking for in our work and that our work promised but could not deliver.

7. Christ has freed us from the fear of death. Death has lost its sting. It will not win in the end. We know that when we die we will be with Jesus. When He comes again, we will rise to new life. We know that He will take care of those we love. We do not need to cower before death the way our society does. Christ has freed us!

There is literally nothing more important that you can do this year than to take these facts in deeply and learn to rejoice in your freedom. A greater sight of these things will change everything for you.

As I enter into my 7th year here, there are really two things that I want you to see through my ministry here. The first is to have a greater vision to see how great Christ is and how utterly sufficient all that He has is for you. This is the first thing, not what we do but what Christ has done, is doing, and will do for us and in us.

Get that in view! Meditate daily on it. Listen for it in the sermon. Experience it in the sacraments. Pray that the Holy Spirit will enable you to see it. Remind each other of it. Pray for each other that we will be able to see like never before how totally sufficient Christ is for everything we need. Pray that we will see how secure we are, how accepted we are, how empowered we are, how valued we are, how free we are! I can’t say it enough or too often. We have everything we need secure for us in Christ. You are free! You are called to be free, to experience this freedom.

What We Should Do with Our Freedom
The second thing is that when you are filled with joy because by faith you see the wonders of what Christ has for you, use that glorious freedom to work as hard as you can to serve others, do good, and glorify God. The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “What is the chief end of a human being?” It answers, “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Those are the two key things I want to teach. I want you to find your joy and fulfillment in God. Being filled, I want you then to do all that you can to glorify God to the highest degree you possibly can.

Enjoying God and glorifying God are interrelated. Sometimes we need to press forward when we do not feel like it. However, many times what we need to do when we don’t feel like serving is to go back to the root of faith. Ask yourself: Am I experiencing the freedom that I have in Christ through faith? Am I, through fellowship with Him, being empowered to live a new life and enlightened to see the greatness of His power and love for me? It is faith working through love. In order to work through love we need to grow in our faith. When we grow in our faith, we can and will work through love.

If you feel like you have nothing left to give right now, then give attention to yourself. Get the help you need. Tend to your wounds. Get healthy. Get your spirit right. Take a rest. Take a break. Let your heart heal. God does not need our service or His own gifts (which is really what we are giving back to Him). The kingdom will make it on OK without you, and you will come back much better equipped to serve. Make no resolution to do anything except take in God’s goodness until you feel empowered to move forward.

If you feel like you have nothing left to give, then give attention to what you are doing. Do you really need to do all the things that you are doing? Are there things that you are holding onto that you don’t need to? Are there areas you are spending money where you could stop? Are there relationships that have moved on, but you keep holding on to them? And do you need to think so much about all the things that society tells you that you need to think about? I mean, whether you love him or hate him, does Donald Trump really deserve as much of our emotions and head space as we have given him (and no, he’s not going away)? You need to spend lavishly, but you need to spend lavishly on those things most worthy of expenditure!

If you feel like you have nothing to give, work on increasing your faith, but also work on increasing your love: “through love serve one another.” Yes, you can do this. Learn to see the world and people as God sees them. When it comes to believers, we have all trust in Christ and resolved to live for Him. What an amazing thing we have in common! But what about outside the church? The Apostle Paul says, do good until all, especially those of the household of faith. Every person you meet is a human created in the image of God and made for society! The world is full of friends, in spite of its sinfulness. We are made for community! But what if they do us wrong? Then, they harm themselves. If someone is unjust, they are acting contrary to their nature. It’s as if they were breaking their own bones. This deserves our pity as much as our condemnation! We can learn to love because God will teach us how to love, even our enemies, even in our darkest days.

So, you may not feel that you have much to give. Then, give attention to what is going on in your heart and life. Find ways to reconnect with the freedom in the Gospel. However, if you feel the freedom and joy that God gives through the Gospel, then push forward to serve others. Push forward, and push forward hard. Give it all you’ve got. Do all that you can. What should you do with your freedom? “Do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh, but through love serve one another.”

At Thanksgiving, we learned that we should see the blessings that God has given us innumerable ways without ignoring the bad. At Christmas, we learned that there is a joy that transcends all our circumstances. At New Year’s, we hear the good news of a fresh start. A whole year is before us! What are you going to do with it? How are you going to serve this year? Make your resolutions as big as you can and as attainable as you can. Resolve to do something that will equip you to serve better. Resolve to do something that will bless those around you. Resolve that in some significant way or many, you will serve others in love.

When you do, expect opposition. Expect resistance. Benjamin Franklin said: “Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged: but they have capacities, if they would employ them” (cited in Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1081). The Apostle said concerning the Christian life, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9). What is true of the good of the Christian life is true of all good things in this life. There will be opposition to doing them, inside us and outside us. We have to accept that in order to accomplish anything good. Your family or church or class will not applaud your efforts to change things. Practicing an instrument or reading a difficult book will always be hard. Engaging in society involves the clash of political opposition. We’ve got to accept this reality and still move forward. Through love, serve one another, and don’t give up!

Conclusion
So, what are you going to do with a year? Maybe you need to take the whole year off from serving and just get mentally and physically healthy. That’s fine. Your standing with God is not based on how much you serve this year. You are justified in Christ, on the basis of His perfect service, not yours.

But if you’re in good shape or even decent shape, if you feel that you can serve, then whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. Use the joy of the freedom of your spirit to serve one another in love! Push forward. Push hard. Don’t take the path of least resistance. Whatever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord. Keep breathing in deep the freedom you have in Christ, and aim for something greater this year out of a great sense of love for Christ and the power of Christ.

Whatever this year brings, let’s aim at something. Let’s try to do something significant. Let’s have no wasted years. Let’s do things that will bring us satisfaction. Let’s do things that will glorify our God and Savior. Let’s do things that will impact our communities. Let’s do things that will bless our church and the broader church. Let’s do it for the love of others and the love of our great Savior who loved us and gave himself for us that He might free us to be a people for Himself, zealous for good works. Amen.

[Listen to an audio version here]

I began 2020 on a sabbatical in Myrtle Beach. Looking back, I’m extremely thankful that I did so because this year has been a doozy! We’ve all dealt with so many things and had to adapt in so many ways. We’ve had to try and get a handle on what’s going on. We’ve missed parties, milestones, and vacations. We’ve had financial setbacks. We’ve have had funerals that we could not attend. I talked to someone recently who finally made the difficult decision to put their Mother in assisted living . . . in February! They just saw her in person for the first time since March! Besides all this, we have the concerns over COVID itself. People I know have lost parents and important people in their lives to COVID. The struggle is real.

As I talk to people in a variety of churches, ministry workers had to figure out how to make church and ministry work without buildings or in-person meetings. One church hasn’t met because the place where they met does not allow large gatherings. Going back to in-person meetings has helped, but it required a lot of adjustments. And . . . not everyone liked the adjustments. Some thought they were too strict. Others thought they weren’t strict enough. Has anyone noticed that COVID has been controversial? It’s a good thing that we’ll have a vaccine soon, and the controversy will be over.

In the midst of all this, people have got to find a way to function. I want to suggest to you today that this passage and many like it gives us a firm foundation in the midst of a mass of confusion. It provides the stability that can enable us to function well in any difficulty.

What we need in the midst of all this anxiety is to go back to the basics. And when I say basics, I mean basics, like you can see color, you can feel, you can touch. You can understand what you see and praise your Creator. You are accepted. You are loved. You are forgiven. And, you are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. That’s what our passage teaches us today.

The Context
Ephesians is such a beautiful letter that it would do us good not to write or speak about it all. Instead, we could simply read it and then offer our praise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. That is the purpose of the letter: praise to our gracious Father.

The letter discloses the Father’s glorious and wise purpose to us. It is to bring all things in heaven and earth together under one head, Jesus Christ. This is God’s plan, and He will bring it about according to His great wisdom and power, just as He works out all things according to His great purpose and power. He then calls those who have submitted to Jesus Christ to do everything in their power to conform themselves and others to the reign and grace of Jesus Christ.

This, of course, does not mean that it is simply our effort. This is a book about grace, God’s gift. God’s gift has given Christ for us, and the Holy Spirit works God’s gifts and grace within us. In the verses prior to Eph. 2:10, we read as powerful an expression of this as you will find in the Scriptures, “For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one can boast.”

But—though we are not saved by works; we are most certainly saved unto good works. That’s what our passage says. We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works. It’s not by works but unto good works; not because we were holy but because He chose us in Him to be holy. Good works don’t precede being justified, but they certainly follow in the one who has been justified.

This was God’s purpose for us—to make a people zealous for good works. He prepared them in advance for us to do them. This means that we were destined to be God’s workers. As Paul says in Eph. 1:4, we were chosen to be holy not because we were holy. We are created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.

The Encouragement
A few years ago, I started using a Scriptural phrase that to encourage my children with God’s promises to them. It was taken from Song of Solomon. It was, “You are the beloved’s, and His desire is for you.” Whenever I could, I began to share this with them. I still say it to this day. This phrase would help them and encourage them. I remember one time when one of my daughters was upset, my wife said, “You are the beloved’s, and His desire is for you.” Her frustration began to dissipate immediately, and a smile came to her face.

I also have a son, and I quickly realized that telling him, “You are the beloved’s, and His desire is for you” would not affect him in quite the same way. He would acknowledge its truth and accept it, but it would not touch his heart in the same way that it did my girls. I’ll be honest here. The same was true for me. That’s when I realized I needed to use this passage, “You are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works.” God wants to do something significant through you. That doesn’t change, no matter what.

The message of God’s love is indeed a powerful one, but the Gospel is broader than that. God not only offers us love; He offers us friendship. He not only loves us; He also likes us. God not only accept us; He wants to use us. We are His workmanship.

If we begin our explanation of the Gospel with the doctrine creation, then we will see that God created us to do good works, significant things that bless ourselves and others and glorify God. Understanding that God created us for good works, we can understand that God restores us to good works in salvation, which is precisely what our text says.

Once we get this, a whole host of the benefits of the Gospel and its promises are opened to us. God is our friend who makes known to us what He is doing. He is our companion who wants to work alongside us in His mission to the world. We are co-workers with God. God makes us holy, meaning, we are set aside for His service. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works.

The Confirmation
Now, how do we know that God wants to use us? God has given us all ample opportunity to see how He values us and wants to use us. He has already used us in a variety of ways. He has used us to serve and work in the world. He has used us to build families. He has used us to build community. He has used us to make our homes beautiful in ways that bless the community. He has used us in all sorts of small ways to contribute to the well-being of the world.

He has also used you in innumerable ways in the work of redemption. You have supported the work of the church with your money and time. You have taught your children the things of God. You have loved your neighbors. You have built friendships that encourage people. You have taught Sunday School classes and contributed to small groups. You have cooperated in the work of missions, as our men’s group did when they went to the MNA Warehouse.

All these things are evidence of God’s good work in us and that He values us and wants to use us. We should not downplay these good works. We sometimes are guilty of false humility. Humility, says theologian Josef Piper, is an estimation of ourselves according to truth, and that is almost all there is to it. We should acknowledge our sins and failings, but we should not be afraid to acknowledge that we have done good things as well, giving ultimate credit to the grace of God.

Few people have praised the value of good works more than Martin Luther. Listen very carefully to these words:

We teach that to reconcile God, to make righteous, to blot out sin, is so high and great and glorious a work that alone Christ, the Son of God could do it and that this is indeed such a pure, special, peculiar work of the one true God and His grace that our works are nothing and can do nothing. But that good works should be nothing or be worth only a penny, who ever heard of such a thing, or who could teach such a thing except the lying mouth of the devil? I would not give up one of my sermons, not one of my lectures, not one of my treatises, not one of my Lord’s Prayers, nay, whatever small work I have ever done or am doing, for all the riches of the world (Cited in Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 3:59–60.

Luther saw that the Christian was really God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works.

The second way that we know that God wants to use us is the Gospel promises, like the one we are considering today. We have to admit that we can make the mistake of confusing our good works as evidence of God’s value of us with seeing good works as the basis of God’s value of us. If we do that, then they will fall apart. We always have to go back to God’s free acceptance of us in Jesus Christ as the our most ultimate foundation.

We can easily wrongly estimate our value when we’ve failed or sinned. It’s at such times that we tend to think we are worthless or that God doesn’t want to use us. But that’s not true. However much we’ve failed or sinned, we are still God’s workmanship. He still wants to use us today to do significant things that bless ourselves and others and glorify God. That doesn’t change based on how well or poorly we do. God’s value of us remains the same.

At these and many other times, we need to go back again and again to this basic foundation: You are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God has prepared in advance for us to do.

Dear friends, that’s a Gospel foundation that will get you through the tough times. That’s a Gospel foundation that will get you through failure. That’s a Gospel foundation that will get you through COVID. That’s a Gospel foundation that will get you through this election. That’s a Gospel foundation that is a resource for a lifetime of ministry wherever the Lord may lead you. Amen.

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