Justification by Works

The search for self-esteem through religion and moral virtue presents a greater problem. No matter how good we have been and what we have done for God and others, there is always somebody whose relative goodness makes us feel less than.

Consider the example of John and Libby Moritz who lost all three of their children in a car crash. In response to their grief, they founded a nonprofit for vulnerable children. They sponsored orphanages in Mexico and Grenada, provided scholarships in Kenya and India, alleviated hunger in the Philippines, and provided shoes in Guatemala. They bought a large farm and turned it into a foster home. In virtually everything, they became other-centered. They used their own money to fund the work. In the summers, John tended to his swimming pool business. During off months, they visited the orphanages and programs they sponsored.

Unsurprisingly, the article about the Moritz’s began, “Prepare to feel a little guilty. It’s not that John and Libby Moritz would want anybody to feel guilty. It’s just that if you want to compare good deeds checks list with them, yours will probably come up short.”

A high-level NFL star (it’s Tom Brady if you want to use his name) recently expressed the essence of works-righteousness that lurks in all our hearts apart from Christ. After what he called an “amicable divorce,” he said, “All you can do is the best you can do, and that's what I'll just continue to do as long as I'm working, as long as I'm being a dad."

Then he defined what it means to be a “professional” athlete:

So I think the interesting thing for, you know, a football player, an athlete in general is, you're out there--I always say we're not actors, even though we're on TV--that is our real self out there and we're trying to do our best … We all have our unique challenges in life and we're all humans and we do the best we can do.

He concluded:

I want to … always try to do things the right way as well. And to deal with things that are in your life, that have challenges--you want to deal with them in the best possible way. So, I want to always be able to hold my head high on and off the field, and I'm going to try to continue to do that for as long as I'm here.

Possible Preaching Angles:

This illustration is not meant to criticize this athlete. It shows our need for a Savior because no matter how much we try to do our best it will never give the new life Jesus promises. This athlete shows the futility of works righteousness for all of us.

Beatrice Fediuk decided to write a resumé for heaven as her obituary. When she finally passed at age 94, the Winnipeg Free Press printed the resumé in its entirety. It starts: "Dear Lord, please accept my application for Eternal Life. My resumé is as follows." She divided her obituary into sections—like a real resumé—objectives, references, training, experience, volunteer work, and hobbies.

Beatrice gave a summary of her life history, saying she was born on October 22, 1927, to “loving parents Eugenie and Alfred. ... I have left my daughter Michelle, her husband Perry, my granddaughter Kali, and many nieces and nephews on earth, as there are no openings for them in Heaven just yet."

She shared her memories, saying: "Lord, you know that (as a teacher) I never had any 'teacher's pets.’ Rather, I put my heart into teaching those with learning challenges, or difficult family situations. It was here that I feel I did my best work. … I also continued volunteer work, knitting scarves for underprivileged children.”

Summing up her CV, she added: "Lord, I hope that you will find that I have met my Objectives and deserve a place in Your heavenly home. You know where to find me to further discuss my qualifications."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sadly, this is how many good people plan to arrive in heaven—on the basis of good works and good intentions. But as Scripture clearly says, “He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy (Titus 3:5).

In a survey, two in three Americans told LifeWay Research, “Yes, I am a sinner.” But on what to do about it, self-confessed sinners were split.

All Americans:

34% I work on being less of a sinner

28% I depend on Jesus Christ to overcome sin

5% I am fine with being a sinner

Men:

38% I work on being less of a sinner

22% I depend on Jesus Christ to overcome sin

6% I am fine with being a sinner

Women:

33% I depend on Jesus Christ to overcome sin

30% I work on being less of a sinner

4% I am fine with being a sinner

Protestants:

49% I depend on Jesus Christ to overcome sin

31% I work on being less of a sinner

3% I am fine with being a sinner

Catholics

48% I work on being less of a sinner

19% I depend on Jesus Christ to overcome sin

4% I am fine with being a sinner

In CT magazine, writer Dikkon Eberhart shares his personal testimony of progression from theological drifter to Orthodox Jew to a born-again experience with Jesus Christ:

I grew up in the Episcopal Church. But in my high teens and young twenties I drifted. At seminary in Berkeley, California, during the 1970s—I created my own religion. I called it Godianity. Certainly, I believed in the existence of God, hence the name of my religion. But I didn’t know much about that Son of God fellow, and the little I did know seemed impossibly weird.

Then something happened. I married a Jew who was an atheist. Then my wife became pregnant and nine months later, our first daughter squirmed in her mother’s arms. Here’s the sudden realization of an atheist: Such a perfect and beautiful creature must be the gift of God, not the product of some random swirl of atoms. My wife’s atheism bit the dust. Her new God belief was Jewish. My Godianity should have taken notice. “Listen up!” it ought to have heard. “You’re in trouble, too.”

That trouble came five years later. Our daughter and I were swinging in a hammock under a tree on a windy day. Normally an eager chatterer, our daughter fell silent and then said, “Daddy, I know there’s a God.” I was enchanted. “How, sweetie?” She pointed at the tree and its leaves. “You can’t see God. He’s like the wind. You can’t see the wind, but the wind makes the leaves move. You can’t see God, but you know he’s there, because he makes the people move, like the leaves.”

My heart swelled with love for this perceptive child, but then she crushed me. She continued, “Daddy, what do we believe?” Really, what she was asking was, “Mommy’s kind of Jewish. You’re kind of Christian. So what am I?” And despite my three advanced religious degrees and seminary employment, I couldn’t answer.

In that instant, I shucked my Godianity. Right away, my wife and I retreated into an urgent executive session. She was a Jew who was no longer an atheist. We resolved, we shall raise our children as Jews. And we did—as Reform Jews. Yet I still teetered on uneven ground, conscious of being an outsider. Then something else happened. During services on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, God spoke to me: “If you should desire to come to me, my door is open to you.” Right away, I knew I needed to become a Jew myself, and three years later my conversion was complete.

For some time, my wife and I had noticed something: While Reform Judaism respects Torah, many Reform Jews themselves were selective in their adherence to its strictures. But we objected. We wanted a faith that wasn’t in the habit of accommodating itself to the surrounding culture.

Across our rural road, there happened to be a small Baptist church. Some of our neighbors had invited us to visit, in case we Jews should ever want to know more about Christ. We realized that—oddly—these neighbors seemed concerned for our souls.

More than a year later, desperate for direction, I crossed the road to the church one Sunday morning. That day, the pastor was preaching from 1 Timothy. I was astonished to hear a Baptist preacher using Old Testament references within his message—and with accurate Hebrew nuance. The pastor and I began meeting each week and my wife frequented the women’s Bible study. She and I began devouring book after book, faster and faster, thrilled by each new discovery of seemingly impossible truths that were actually true.

Even as a Jew, I knew the Passion story. But it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, that story might be real—and if it were, then everything would need to change. Our Torah-based lives would be as dead and ineffectual as Godianity. Instead, we would give our souls to the personal love of the Incarnation, the God-man who dwelt among us. We realized that the Old Testament begged for the climax of the New Testament.

It took nine months, an appropriate duration for re-birth, before I committed myself to Jesus. My wife did the same three months later. Our younger two children followed soon thereafter. When God spoke to me in the synagogue all those years ago, inviting me through his open doorway, I had assumed he was summoning me into Judaism. Little did I know he was actually calling me to Christ.

In a skills article for Preaching Today, David Prince writes:

I know a family who adopted an older child from an unspeakably horrific orphanage in another country. When they brought her home one of the things they told her was that she was expected to clean her room every day. When she heard about that responsibility, she fixated on it and saw it as a way she would earn her family’s love. In other words, she isolated the responsibility and applied it to her existing frame of thinking that was shaped by life in the orphanage. Thus, every morning when her parents came in her room, it was immaculate and she would sit on the bed and would say, “My room is clean. Can I stay? Do you still love me?” Her words broke her new parents’ hearts.

Eventually, the girl learned to hear her parents’ words as their unconditionally beloved child who would never be forsaken, not as a visitor trying to earn her place in the family. After she knew that she was an inseparable part of the family story, even correction and discipline did not cause her to question her family’s love for her; she understood correction and discipline to be part of what it meant to be in the family.

A 67-year-old woman scheduled for routine cataract surgery thought it was just dry eye and old age causing her discomfort. But the real cause of her discomfort was much more concerning: 27 contact lenses, stuck in the woman's right eye in a "blue mass."

Rupal Morjaria, a specialist trainee in ophthalmology, said the woman hadn't complained about any visual trouble before the operation. But when the anesthetist at the hospital started to numb her eye for surgery, he found the first cluster of contacts. Morjaria said, "He put a speculum into the eye to hold the eye open as he put the anesthetic in, and he noticed a blue mass under the top eyelid."

Eventually they found a mass of 27 lenses. "We were all shocked," Morjaria said. "We've never come across this." A representative from the American Academy of Ophthalmology said he's seen patients have one lens stuck, but never 27. "This is one for the record books, as far as I could tell," he said.

The woman had been wearing monthly disposable contact lenses for 35 years, but it's unclear how long they had been gathering in her eye. Sometimes when she would try to remove a contact from that eye, she couldn't find it. The patient had just figured she'd dropped it somewhere, Morjaria explained, but it was actually getting stuck in her eye with the others.

Possible Preaching Angles: Miracles; Jesus; God, power of; Gospel—Instead of going to the doctor and seeing the person that could fix her blurred vision, she just tried harder. She kept adding something else, thinking that it must be the problem. What this woman didn't need was something else added to her life- She needed it removed.

Comedian Jay Leno once conducted a "man-on-the-street" interview by asking random people to name one of the Ten Commandments. The most common response was something that wasn't even on God's original list—"God helps those who help themselves." That phrase, which is often used to emphasize a get-your-act-together approach to salvation, is often attributed to the Bible.

But the phrase is more closely tied to non-biblical sources. In a first century A.D. Greek fable, a wagon falls into a ravine, but when its driver appeals to Hercules for help, he is told to get to work himself. One of Aesop's fables has a similar theme. When a man calls on the goddess Athena for help during a shipwreck, she tells him to try swimming first. Both of these stories were probably created to illustrate an already existing proverb about helping yourself first.

A French author from the 1600s once said "Help yourself and Heaven will help you too." But it was the 17th century English thinker Algernon Sidney who has been credited with the now familiar wording, "God helps those who help themselves." Benjamin Franklin later used it in his Poor Richard's Almanack (1736) and it has been widely quoted ever since. A passage with similar sentiments can be found in the Quran, Chapter 13:11: "Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."

But that phrase never appears in the Bible, and the way it's often used (as a self-help approach to salvation) is the exact opposite of the Bible's message of salvation by God's grace.

Editor's Note: This illustration could easily be adapted based on details from your own life.

Tim Keller writes in, “The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness”:

When I was at school, my mother kept saying things like, "You know, honey, you ought to join the chess club." I would say, "Mom, I hate chess." "Yes, I know," she would say, "but it will look so good on your college application." She would try again. "Don't they feed the homeless and hungry downtown, every Saturday morning? Why don't you volunteer for that?" "Mom," I'd say, "I hate that kind of thing." I would get the same response, "I know, honey, but it will look so good on your college application." So, at school, I did all kinds of things that I had absolutely no interest in doing for themselves. I was simply putting together a résumé.

That is what our egos are doing all the time. Doing jobs we have no pleasure in, doing diets we take no pleasure in. Doing all kinds of things, not for the pleasure of doing them, but because we are trying to put together an impressive curriculum vitae. By comparing ourselves to other people and trying to make ourselves look better than others, we are …. trying to create a self-esteem résumé because we are desperate to fill our sense of inadequacy and emptiness. The ego is busy. So busy all the time.

The authors of the book Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) argue that our tendency to justify our actions is more powerful and deceptive than an explicit lie. They write:

[Self-justification] allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done. In fact, come to think of it, it was the right thing. "There was nothing else I could have done." "Actually, it was a brilliant solution to the problem." "I was doing the best for the nation." "Those [jerks] deserved what they got." "I'm entitled."

[For example], when researchers ask husbands and wives what percentage of the housework they do, the wives say, "Are you kidding? I do almost everything, at least 90 percent." And the husbands say, "I do a lot, about 40 percent." Although the specific numbers differ from couple to couple, the total always exceeds 100 percent by a significant margin. It's tempting to conclude that one spouse is lying, but it is more likely that each is remembering in a way that enhances his or her contribution.

Over time, as the self-serving distortions of memory kick in … we come to believe our own lies, little by little. We know we did something wrong, but we gradually begin to think that it wasn't our fault, and after all, the situation was complex. We start underestimating our own responsibility, whittling away at it until it is a mere shadow of its former hulking self.

A Reader's Digest article told of a 67-year-old man named Bill who had donated over 100 pints of blood over the years. No doubt many people owe their lives to this man's kindness. How do you think this man's good deeds go over in heaven?

Here's what Bill thinks: "When that final whistle blows, and St. Peter asks, 'What did you do?' I'll just say, 'Well, I gave 100 pints of blood,'" [Bill] says with a laugh. "That ought to get me in."

Bill was probably joking. But if he was serious, if he truly believes that his good deeds will give him a ticket to heaven, then he has perfectly articulated the gospel of works. If Bill is counting on the giving of 100 pints of blood to get him to heaven—he is trusting in the wrong blood.