What Are Good Works?

Every evangelical is familiar with the pillar verses of grace found in Ephesians 2:8-9. They are majestic and worthy of praise for the truth they teach: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (ESV). This is beautiful and incredibly freeing. But, of course, the apostle didn’t stop writing there. He continues: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (2:10, ESV).

Though we are not saved by good works, the command to do good works nonetheless is as consistent of a message as the entire Bible provides. I have been studying the great pastoral epistle Paul wrote to his good friend and mentee, Titus, and this phrase (“good works”) pops up everywhere. Here is an exhaustive list for a very short book:

“They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work” (1:16).

“Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works...” (2:7).

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (2:11-14).

“Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy to all people” (3:1-2).

“This saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works” (3:8).

“And let our people learn to devote themselves to good works, so as to help cases of urgent need, and not be unfruitful” (3:14).

Paul takes care to distinguish the work done by God through the Holy Spirit that saves us from works-righteousness in this letter, but the call to live a life of good works is inescapable. Which naturally begs the question, what exactly are good works?

Sometimes I feel that we have a tendency to define good works too narrowly. What qualify are the overtly “spiritual” acts: sharing the gospel with an unbeliever, inviting someone to church, going to a Bible study, etc. But the way that I understand the Biblical imperative to be devoted to good works is that good works are anything we do that show us to be followers of God in a fallen world. And really, this leaves the door wide open.

Paul tells the Ephesians that God has prepared works for us already; our only job is to walk into these good works. Put more bluntly, as believers in Christ, saved by grace through faith, we can’t help but walk into this new batch of good works for which God has saved us. The glorious truth of our redemption is not only that our sins have been forgiven, but that we have been commissioned and freed to live an entirely new life, one that gives God glory instead of seeking our own temporary gain. This is an incredibly positive thing. We are emptied so that we may be filled again.

This is why Paul tells his friend Titus that Christ has redeemed us and purified us for the purpose of good works. It is Titus’s job as the pastor of this bunch to remind them of what God has already done for them through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and that this type of transformation will bear fruit in the form of works that glorify God and help those around us. When we limit “good works” to only the explicitly spiritual works—evangelism, helping the poor, going to church—we limit our ability to perform good works. To meet the other requirements of life, we just don’t have time to do a ton of evangelism (especially effective evangelism) and go to a dozen church meetings every week. But if good works is broad enough to include everything we do in this life that we do differently because we have been saved by the grace of a great God and Savior than we can serve God with our whole hearts and without guilt in the everyday mundaneness of this life, knowing that we are giving him honor and glory.

This, as the writers of the Westminster Confession knew, is our chief end.

Owen Hugh Coffman

I am writing now from the living room of my house, absolutely distracted by the beautiful child laying on the floor wrapped in the blanket his great-grandmother made for him. I am a father now, weird as that is to write out. Last Friday morning, July 15^th, we welcomed our first son, Owen Hugh Coffman, into the world at 9:08 a.m. He weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces and was 21.25 inches long. He just might be the most precious thing in the entire world.

I am not really sure what to write. The reality of being a dad, of the fact that this kid will live with Clara and me for the next 18 years (at least), sometimes loving us, sometimes despising us simply has not set in yet. I don’t know that it ever will, explicitly. Eventually it will just be the way it is. This is how marriage worked. It felt weird until it didn’t. Nothing happened. Life just kept rumbling on. As it will surely happen in this case.

These are days to be treasured, though. Held close. I am jealous over my time with my son which has absolutely destroyed my productivity. There is a stack now of half-read books about John Milton and the relationship between Christianity and culture that seemed so important a week ago but have not been touched since Owen’s birth. They will seem important again. I am already feeling the pull back to the other things of this world that occupy my time. But what a gift to have nothing better to do now than stare at this beautiful and precious child.

I have an incredible wife. Sorry, I couldn’t think of a great transition into this paragraph. She woke me up at 4 a.m. Friday. We had gone to bed at one and she hadn’t slept a wink. She let me sleep for a little bit, though, and woke me up to tell me it was time. We threw everything into the car and I drove like hell to Topeka. I topped out at 95 mph but backed off a bit when a coyote crossed the road just in front of me. I figured the last thing we needed would be a deer splattered across the windshield.

We got settled in to the birthing center by five and Owen came out at nine. I cannot even begin to describe the toughness I saw from my wife. This was an all-natural birth—no medication, no doctors—just a midwife and a husband’s hand to squeeze. But she gritted it out. What’s more, she remained sweet and good-natured. The night before my calf cramped at an ultimate Frisbee game due to dehydration and I loosed a string of profanity under my breath that would make an inmate blush, and here was my wife giving birth and remaining nice and even. I feel like I have learned more about her in the past few days than I have in previous entire years of our marriage. I have fallen in love with her all over again. She is simply out of my comprehension. Sometimes I wonder if my one great virtue in this life is that I have married well.

I imagine she would not say this, but for me it went fast. All of a sudden instead of enduring contractions, the midwife was telling her to push. I asked her if she was serious, if our son was really coming. You see, part of me was beginning to believe that it might never happen. That the pregnancy was some sort of elaborate ruse and Clara had really just been eating a lot of chocolate or something. Or that our son was going to age for years in his mother’s womb. After months of anticipation and questions, imagining holding him and kissing his face and sleeping with him on my chest, I couldn’t really imagine actually doing these things. They had been abstractions before.

I lay beside her as she pushed. She squeezed my hand to the point that I am still grateful feeling returned. I watched the whole thing. It was unreal. Beautiful. The most amazing thing I have ever seen. And, frankly, it scared the hell out of me.

I am not sure entirely what I was expecting him to look like, but whatever mental picture I had, I was picturing something slightly other than human. I guess I expected him to come out coated with a bunch of gunk and be indiscernible. Imagine my surprise when I saw a head of blond hair and then a face and then the midwives helping his torso and then legs come through and then they put him up next to Clara’s chest and she welcomed him into the world. He started to cry and so did I so he wouldn’t be lonely. Clara held him close and said his name over and over again. I held her close and put my hands on him. And we were a family. We drove to Topeka as two and came home as three.

Letters to Owen

I wrote this letter by hand to my son the other day and left it on the table for his mother to read to him out loud when she got home from work (he is, alas, still in the womb). Today is our due date. Pray for us.

Dear Owen ____ Coffman,

                Listen here, little man, I don’t intend to make cutting deals a central part of my parenting strategy with you. Most of the time I will tell you what to do and expect you to do it fairly well in accordance with my prescriptions. Moreover, I imagine that I am already offering you the best deal that you will ever receive apart from grace when I promise to provide at least 18 years of three meals per day (that’s close to 20,000 free meals), 18 years of free clothing and free vacations and even free life advice. This last offer will last forever. But I feel compelled to sweeten the deal. You see, your mother is in a hellatious work situation right now and your father is something of a deadbeat this summer. I could say that I am pursuing the scholarly life (there is a sizeable stack of books beside me right now with highly intellectual subject matter), but that is only partially accurate. In any event, your arrival will hasten your mother’s retreat from this awful job, plus, we are rather excited to meet you simply for the sake of meeting you, so how about this: if you come sometime on your due date or before, I will take you on the trip of your choice when you graduate high school (within reason: for example, I don’t know what space travel will look like by that point, and within the family budget: your father will probably never be a wealthy man). So there it is. In ink. I love you and can’t wait to meet you. Now that you are fully incentivized, get out here.

Your father,

Toby Alan

DON’T READ THIS PART OUT LOUD!!!

P.S. Mom, I will probably make him this deal in any event. But that’s just between us.

The Fear of the Lord, Part Three

In this series on the fear of the Lord, I began by giving a working/fluid definition of how the fear of the Lord looks for a Christ follower. In the second post, I looked at a brief passage in Luke 12 where Jesus zeroes in on the functionality of the fear of the Lord in the life of a believer—it frees us from the fear of anything else. In this post, I will look at a secondary function of the fear of the Lord and how, building off of our freedom from fear of the world, we are now able to act boldly and somewhat foolishly as we live our lives seeking to give God glory.

Once again, I am drawing from the words of Jesus in Luke’s gospel as the basis for my hermeneutic of fear. These are the words of Jesus after the famous passage about not being anxious about our lives and considering the lilies of the field as an example, which though neither toiling nor spinning are clothed in more grandeur than the finest ensemble in which man has ever arranged his body. After giving these poignant examples, Jesus seeks to encourage his followers with these words:

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Luke 12:32-34

Because fearing God frees us from the fears of this world, and the fears of this world are not only the more pernicious fears of persecution or martyrdom but the more pressing and mundane concerns over worldly riches and possessions, we are free to live completely counterculturally from the world. We do not have to fear the consequences of making a decision based on serving the kingdom for our God will meet all of our needs. And he is a rich God.

I do not take this to mean that all Christians as our entry fee into the club need to get rid of everything we possess and live off the largess of the government or wealthy and more prudent relatives. Some of the Thessalonian Christians made this mistake and Paul had to correct them a couple of times. It is good to work hard and save some money and manage well what the Lord gives us. But we are also free. The freest of all people. And we exercise that freedom by standing confidently in reverent fear of our God who is love and also a consuming fire. And that God, when he walked around this planet as a man, told us that if we seek first the kingdom of God everything else that we need will be given to us as well. Amen.

The Fear of the Lord, Part Two

In the last post I started talking about the fear of the Lord and how that functions in the life of a follower of Christ. I gave a basic definition of what it is to fear God and in this post I will examine a short passage from Luke’s gospel where Jesus himself addresses the concept of fearing the Lord. As always, any time we can get theology from Jesus, we ought to take advantage of this.

I will begin in the first verse where the word fear shows up directly:

I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not even one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.  Luke 12:4-7

We see the apparent contradiction even within this passage: Let me tell you who to fear, but don’t be afraid. Jesus has just told his disciples what I find to be one of the most frightening promises in Scripture—that everything we do in this life will one day come to light, so that what was whispered in private will be shouted from a housetop. In light of this haunting truth, we must fear the consequences of those seemingly private actions, thoughts, and words. The person or entity that we should fear is God himself. We need not waste time fearing only him who has the power to kill us physically, because there is judgment to come that is greater than whatever we experience in our temporal existence on this fallen earth. And we should fear the God who is able to throw us into hell and has warned us of the final spiritual realities of this existence. Indeed.

Yet then it seems as if Jesus’ tone changes. He goes from talking about God throwing us into hell for our sins both private and public to a discussion of insignificant aviary life. These tiny creatures that we view so inconsequentially are known by God and, presumably, beloved by Him. How much more, then, are we known and loved by God? God not only knows us and loves us, he knows the very number of the hairs on our heads. I am at that stage in life where I will notice myself losing hair from time to time. My pillow acts as a collection agency for hairs God has decided He doesn’t want to keep track of anymore. So if God, who loves sparrows, appears to love us infinitely more and places this immense value on us (not because we are good, but because He is good) then how can we be afraid?

Jesus didn’t forget what he was talking about a second before that. He wasn’t hedging by adding in the bit about the sparrows and the hairs on our heads. He didn’t mention hell and then feel mean so he brought up this bit about not really needing to be afraid. He meant both: fear God because he is great; fear God because of the enormity of his power; fear him for his dominion over both heaven and hell. But if you are his child, beloved by him, you are also freed from fear.

Most particularly, we are freed from fear of anything in this world. We need not fear men who can only kill our bodies, because there is One who has greater power than even that. This is one of the most persistent messages in Scripture concerning fear. The prophet Isaiah refers to fear of the Lord as freeing the Israelites from the fear of the surrounding nations multiple times. And this might be the greatest freedom afforded us by a healthy fear of the Lord—a freedom to be free from worry and fear that this world presses upon us. We have Someone greater to fear and he loved us enough to go the cross for us. How amazing is that?

Next time, fear and action.