Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
In seeking to truly live a good life we can only “do the right thing” because God is progressively transforming us into the image of His Son in the process of sanctification. It is in the realization and appropriation of His righteousness, now within us, that we begin to truly do the right thing for the right reason. All good works done apart from His Spirit are not really good works in the truest sense because they originate in the system of works-righteousness that is inherent in our old sin nature. What the Word of God calls “the flesh” taints such actions, no matter how admirable they may seem on the surface.
This is a very hard pill for human beings to swallow. It requires that we consciously abandon the deeply ingrained conceit that, apart from God, we have any goodness in and of ourselves. We desperately want to believe that we are innately good. The alternative is to face the darkness within us as well as the eternal ramifications of that darkness. Coming to grips with the reality of our sinful hearts is the ultimate watershed in our lives. It quite rightfully leads to despair, but it can also lead to salvation.
Yet even after salvation the temptation to work out of our old nature remains. The Pauline books of the New Testament are replete with exhortations to cease doing the right thing for the wrong reason. These epistles are addressed to believers. A primary process in the Christian life is the rooting out of wrong dependencies. One of the most intractable of these dependencies is the tendency to continue trying to do good by the power of our flesh instead of out of the newly forming character of Christ within us.
The solution to the oxymoron of “works-righteousness” is to let the Lord progressively reproduce His character within our deepest hearts. God is love and it is in the nature of love to give. Love works for the benefit of its object solely out of a pure and true desire to bless that object. Such work is absolutely sincere. There is no hidden agenda of self-centeredness present. Jesus has often been described as a “Man for others”. In this the Son of God embodies His Father’s nature. All his works are rooted and enabled by that nature and are therefore good in the ultimate sense of the word.
If we are children of God we have the character of God. The believer gains this character at the moment of salvation. In the ongoing sanctification that should occur from that point onward we practically appropriate and act in the Spirit of Christ that first changed our heart at the time of conversion. In one of the greatest paradoxes of the Christian journey we begin to turn into who we truly are. In this mystery lies the power to die to wrongly-motivated works and become able to do the good things we do solely out of the good new heart that The Father has placed in us through His Son. We work out of who we are, and are becoming, and our motivation progressively becomes sincere love for those we are working for.
The good deeds that come out of a heart of true love are not a burden but a joy. When we are doing them out of the compulsion that comes from trying to work our way into God’s good graces we find the yoke to be hard and the burden heavy. This is because we are not acting in love but in fear; the fear of not being able to earn our way to God. Such a fear is completely legitimate for God seeks those who worship Him in both spirit and truth. That means, among other things, receiving the free gift of salvation “by grace through faith”. Part of that gift is the ability to increase loving as He loves over our lifetimes. When we move in His love, put within us by the presence of Jesus Christ in our hearts, we finally work for the right reasons. In so doing we become a true blessing to both God and others, and are blessed ourselves in the process.