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Introduction
Sometimes the Reformed emphasis on sin, total depravity, and our inability to do anything perfectly can leave us wondering why we should even try to please God. If every good work we do could be done better, and if we never meet God’s standard, why strive to please him? We can even begin to think of God as a distant or a grumpy father who is always looking for our failures.
Sanctification means that we are being conformed more and more to Christ. This does not mean that our works become perfect, but that we increasingly desire to know God’s will, pursue it, and live according to it. We continue to push forward because we belong to Christ. His resurrection victory is the power at work in us. The question is not whether we can perform good works perfectly, but what makes a work truly good in the sight of God. The Christian life is not about earning God’s favor, but about living out of the grace we possess in Christ.
Transformed in Christ
The Christian life involves both the dying of the old man and the bringing to life of the new. We are called to hate our sin. This is not self-loathing, where we hate ourselves. The call is that we have a godly sorrow for our sin.
A godly sorrow is to genuinely grieve our sin because it offends God. True godly sorrow is more than being afraid of getting caught or suffering the consequences of our sin. We see an example with David in Psalm 51. We traditionally see Psalm 51 as David’s confession after his grievous fall into sin. He comes before the Lord, owning that he is grieved because he has sinned against God (Psalm 51:4).
We want to avoid sin because it interrupts our peaceful fellowship with God. We should want to run from sin and remove ourselves from the places of temptation. Ephesians 2 reminds us that we were once dead in our trespasses and sins, walking according to the course of this world and the desires of the flesh (Ephesians 2:1-3). But God, in his mercy, has raised us up with Christ and seated us with Christ. As redeemed saints, our orientation and outlook are in Christ’s resurrection victory. His victory is our victory. We have overcome the ultimate consequence of sin: death. We walk in the power of Christ’s resurrection right now (Ephesians 2:4-6).
Now that we are seated in Christ, the Christian life is not simply about avoiding sin, but about finding our joy in living for the Lord. God has not redeemed us to take away our joy, but to give us true and lasting joy in him. We are called to seek his will, delight in his law, and pursue holiness in the power of Christ.
We will never fully arrive at the goal in this life. We will always struggle against sin. We need to remember that we are redeemed in Christ, and therefore we push forward in Christ. We see the joy of our conforming to our Savior.
Seeking his will
We still struggle with sin, and nothing we do in this life will meet the perfect standard of God. Yet Paul reminds us in Ephesians 2:10 that we were created in Christ Jesus for good works. These are works that God prepared beforehand for us to walk in. This means there is a real moral standard set before us in God's law, and we are called to keep it. Keeping the Lord’s law as a delight is our obligation as saints. The good works are the good works that Paul will start laying out for the church in Ephesians 4.
But this can leave us with an important question: if we know we can never perfectly meet the standard, and yet we are called to pursue it, does the Christian life simply become an obligation to work harder? Paul tells us to discern what is pleasing to the Lord (Ephesians 5:10), and certainly we are called to live holy lives doing good works.
We can become completely overwhelmed by this standard. On the one hand, we know that we will never reach perfection even as we are seated with Christ. On the other hand, we are called to live perfect lives doing the good works of God. This is not the Old Testament God, as some claim, but this is clearly God’s will for his people. So, how are we going to seek his will, joyfully conform to Christ, and want to draw near to such a holy God?
Doing Good Works
We can put ourselves into a tailspin and feel as if we are a dog chasing its tail, never making any progress in the Christian life. This is why we need to carefully define a good work. Question and Answer 91 of the catechism reminds us that a good work must proceed from true faith, be done according to God's law, and not merely according to human opinion.
Why faith? This is the faith by which we take hold of Christ for our salvation. We do not have faith in faith, but we are rooted in Christ Jesus. It is in Christ that we are empowered to do good works. By the Spirit’s power that works faith in us, we pursue Christ, and we seek to bring him glory. We trust that our perfect priest will continue to empower us and perfect our feeble works.
Why the law? We are tempted to compare ourselves to others. We can either puff ourselves up, perceiving ourselves to be holier than we really are. The other side is to fall into self-loathing by looking to people we perceive to be very holy and pious. The Lord gives us his objective standard. When we look at his objective standard, we look at the perfect works that Christ has done, and then we will see that we are called to continue to grow, to pursue our God, and we are works in progress in this age until we are glorified. We trust that Christ is our perfect priest who perfects our works. This is why it is so important that our works proceed from faith rather than ourselves.
Why not human opinion? The catechism reminds us that we should be discerning about Christian opinions or Christian cultural expectations. We can see Christ critique the Pharisees who set up a tradition that denies Moses. They use their Corban tradition, money dedicated to God, to keep back their wealth. They should be using the money to care for their aging parents. They are being greedy while using the tradition to appear pious (Mark 7:1-13).
Peter and Paul echo Israel’s tradition, but affirm its customs regarding submission to foreign authority (1 Peter 2:11-17, 1 Timothy 2:1-2). This means that as the tradition is compared to the word of God, some traditions stand, and some should fall away. We are reminded of the need to discern the Lord’s will rather than blindly following the tradition.
There are two key phrases in Ephesians 2:10. The first one is that we are God’s workmanship. This is used in Romans 1:20, recounting the Lord’s creation of this world. He is the craftsman, and this world is his craft. Paul assures us that we are being crafted to be the people he desires us to be as he starts to craft us toward our perfection, which will only be completed in our glorification.
We are also created in Christ Jesus. This assures us that God is starting to sand off the rough edges in this age. We need to see God as a skilled craftsman who knows exactly what a piece of wood or a canvas will become even when the work is still unfinished. God is continually shaping and molding his people. He is sanding off the rough edges and conforming us to Christ.
This assures us that as we are stepping out to do good works, the Lord is at work in us. No, we will never do a perfect work in this life. However, we will continue to conform to the Lord. We will continue to press forward in this world even though we will never arrive at perfection until glory.
So, as we walk by faith and seek to discern what pleases the Lord, we see that his commands are not oppressive. The Lord is the master builder. The Lord is the craftsman who is building us into the image of the new man, the man from heaven, Christ Jesus. He created us, and we know how we find our potential. We find it in living for his glory even as imperfect people in this age.
Conclusion
We need to see that our God is a loving father. We have been made alive in Christ, and the Lord has revealed his righteous standard. We should desire to conform to this standard as we walk by faith. This is the faith that is given to us by the Spirit. We are motivated to do this out of gratitude for what he has done.
We should not become discouraged because our works are never perfect. We were once content to live in rebellion against God, children of wrath and sons of disobedience, but God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ. He knows our frame; he knows we are weak. However, as he created the first creation as a marvelous craftsman, so he creates us as part of his new creation. We testify that the craftsman is bringing this creation to its glorious goal.
In many ways, what we bring before the Lord is still just mud pies, but we should desire to make better mud pies. We trust that Christ takes our imperfect works and perfects them. He takes our mud pies and turns them into glorious apple pie. So we move forward in him, knowing that truly conforming to Christ as his redeemed people is where we find our joy and purpose in this age. Our Lord was moved by his mercy. It is by his mercy that he has raised us up with Christ, empowers us to live for him, and continues to prod us to conform to his law. Let us continue to press forward in Christ because he has made us his own.
(If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend Ferguson’s book titled “Devoted to God.” I did a 10-part series summary of the book that you can find here.)
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