Mar 21 Are You Good Enough?

Mar 21

Good Enough?

Eph 2:9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.

Be a good little boy and you will go to heaven. Variations of that wrong advice fills books, dogmas, and the minds of those who have been defrauded. The Bible teaches no such thing as earning heaven, or being good enough, or working hard enough, or sacrificing enough. There is a wonderful paragraph in Joseph Allenes wonderful book, Alarm to the Unconverted.

     “Men may pray long, fast often, and hear gladly, and be very forward in the service of God, though costly and expensive, and yet be strangers to conversion. They must have more to plead for themselves than that they go to church, give alms, and make use of prayer, to prove themselves sound converts. There is no outward service but a hypocrite may do it, even to the giving of all his goods to feed the poor and his body to be burned. (1 Cor 13:3)”

      Yet we are bombarded with the idea that we must be good enough. We must follow the ten commandments. We must be a member of a certain church. We must be baptized, we must perform certain rituals, and on and on.  Often people latch onto a verse or a part of a verse and use a few words to build a doctrine, while ignoring the basic principle of salvation. How many main line denominations practice such ideas while claiming to be Bible believing churches. They do use the Bible as well as some “special person” who was given a message contrary to what the Bible clearly teaches. They wrote a book which is used to interpret the Bible, or in some cases to move the Bible to a lower level of authority. Other churches teach the traditions established by the church have equal weight as the Bible, and if there seems to be a contradiction between them the traditions, or other writings are taken as more authoritative than the Bible, or the Bible is explained away.

     So with all this confusion what does a man need to do to be saved? What must we do to acquire some hope of heaven? Nothing! Christ has done it all. 

     Our verse comes from Ephesians. That would be a good starting place.

Eph 2:8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:

 9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.

This verse says it is not of works.  But surely a person who has been moral their whole lives will get some benefit from that, won’t they? I mean a no good, rotten, thief and murderer should not have the same kind of salvation experience as a person who has been good all their lives, should they?  

The answer is a simple one of perspective. If we compare ourselves with some creep then we will look pretty good. But if we compare ourselves with the Holiness of God we fall so far short that there is no difference between us and the low down creep. It is as though God’s Holiness was a million miles high and we were 5 steps above the creep. When we look at the person worse than us we appear way above them. But when we look at the Holiness of God, it is so far out of our understanding there is essentially no difference between us and those who are a little worse than we are.

We like to think that God grades us on a curve, or a grading scale where C+ is a lot better than D-. But salvation is a pass-fail system. A blood bought, born again Christian passes. Anything less than that fails.

I will stop blabbering and confusing you. Let us see what the Bible says.

Isa 64:6 ¶ But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

 Ac 13:39 And by him all that believe are justified

from all things, from which ye could not be

justified by the law of Moses.

Ga 2:16 Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.

 Tit 3:5 Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;

There are far more verses that say the same thing in different words than space permits here.  Most people reading this will already be aware that you cannot gain heaven by good works.

     One final proof comes from a delightful little book God’s little Instruction Book 

“Heaven goes by grace, if it went by merit,

you would stay out and your dog would go in!”