Salvation by Works

Is there really an afterlife? While most people think humans will never be able to prove what happens after death, half of adults still believe their spirit lives on—somewhere.

The new survey of over 1,000 people in the United Kingdom, finds 50% of respondents believe in an afterlife. Of this group, 60% believe everyone experiences the same thing when they die—regardless of their individual beliefs. However, two in three believe scientists will never be able to tell us what really happens when someone passes.

Regardless of whether people think they’re going to heaven (55%) or worry their life choices could end up sending them to hell (58%), the poll finds 68% of all respondents have no fear of what comes next. Overall, one in four think people go to heaven or hell, 16% believe they’ll exist in a “spiritual realm,” and 16% believe in reincarnation.

No matter what happens after death, respondents are confident it’ll actually be an improvement over their current life. The poll finds adults think heaven provides people with a chance to recapture the things they’ve lost throughout their life.

The vast majority (86%) think the afterlife involves a sense of peace and 66% describe it as a place of happiness. Three in five adults believe there will be no more suffering when they die.

However, respondents think there are a few conditions people need to follow in order to reach this peaceful realm. Over four in five people (84%) say you have to live a good life and be a generally good person to reach heaven. One in three claim you have to place your faith in a higher power to reach the afterlife and one in five say it requires you to confess all your sins.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This survey was taken in mid-life when old age and illness are seen as far away. When one gets closer to the end, it is likely many of them will change their opinion, or fall deeper into denial with the help of Satan who wants to soothe them with lies.

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).

A survey by Pew Research Center shows that American Protestants believe that:

46% Faith in God alone is needed to get into heaven

52% Both good deeds and faith in God are needed to get into heaven

46% The Bible provides all the religious guidance that Christians need

52% In addition to the Bible, Christians need guidance from church teachings and traditions

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.

Throughout history, human beings have always attempted to regulate behavior in order for people in a society to live peacefully and productively. Religious and secular values, societal laws, education, and politics have all been used to motivate people to adopt the better sides of our nature. The great atheist nation China has begun to implement a bold new plan to foster a more moral and industrious society.

The government has begun evaluating and ranking every citizen based on their behavior. As of 2020 all citizens have a new identity number and a social-credit record. Because of widespread concerns by Chinese citizens of the prevalence of corruption, scams, and scandals, the Communist Party has developed a system that would “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

Good behavior is rewarded while bad is punished. “Rewards for high social credit—in other words, being deemed trustworthy—may include perks like free access to gym facilities, public transportation discounts, and shorter wait times in hospitals. Punishments for low social credit could include restrictions on renting an apartment, buying a home, or enrolling a child in one’s preferred school.”

Psychologists warn of the downsides: “People whose futures are tied to the score may make cold calculations about friends’ likely numbers in an effort to make sure no one becomes a drag on their or their family’s prospects. And they may decide against friending some individuals—or whole groups of people altogether.”

The brilliant American writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th, 2008. He was only 46-years-old. For many months prior to his death, Wallace had been in a deep depression. About ten years after Wallace’s death, Dr. David Kessler M.D. wrote an article in Psychology Today reflecting on what may have caused Wallace’s tragic end:

Wallace’s 2008 suicide at the age of 46 devastated the literary community. He was, at that time, acclaimed as the boldest, most innovative writer of his generation ... Despite Wallace’s frustration with his inability to complete the book [The Pale King], in some ways his life had never been better. He had married four years earlier and was comfortably settled in California, with a teaching job he loved. Why then did he take his own life?

Wallace’s life offers an example of what can happen when … striving perfectionism, which evolves into relentless self-criticism and becomes coupled with an uncanny ability to analyze the flaws in one’s own analysis … Wallace was caught up by this very loop, which resulted in a despair that ultimately he could not conceive of ever escaping. Yet, swimming upstream through his own torrent of disapproval, Wallace always hoped for more: more achievement, more recognition, more love.

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.

As a young Christian, pastor and author Tim Keller said, "I found the Old Testament to be a confusing and off-putting part of the Bible." But while he was at a study center someone asked the great Bible scholar Alex Motyer a question about the seeming disjointedness between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Keller writes:

I will always remember his answer … [Dr. Motyer] insisted that we were all one people of God. Then he asked us to imagine how the Israelites under Moses would have given their "testimony" to someone who asked for it. They would have said something like this:

We were in a foreign land, in bondage, under the sentence of death. But our mediator—the one who stands between us and God—came to us with the promise of deliverance. We trusted in the promises of God, took shelter under the blood of the lamb, and he led us out. Now we are on the way to the Promised Land. We are not there yet, of course, but we have the law to guide us, and through blood sacrifice we also have his presence in our midst. So he will stay with us until we get to our true country, our everlasting home.
Then Dr. Motyer concluded: "Now think about it. A Christian today could say the same thing, almost word for word."

My young self was thunderstruck. I had held the vague, unexamined impression that in the Old Testament people were saved through obeying a host of detailed laws but that today we were freely forgiven and accepted by faith. This little thought experiment showed me, in a stroke, not only that the Israelites had been saved by grace and that God's salvation had been by costly atonement and grace all along, but also that the pursuit of holiness, pilgrimage, obedience, and deep community should characterize Christians as well.

In his film, A Hologram for the King, Tom Hanks plays a middle-aged American businessman who is sent to Saudi Arabia, where the king is planning to build a new city in the middle of the desert. Hanks' character, Adam Clay, must persuade the Saudis to let the company he works for provide IT technology and support for this new city.

In an interview after the film debuted, Hanks told Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air," that he felt particularly connected with his character's sense of self-doubt and dislocation. Hanks said, "No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, 'How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?'

Despite having won two Academy Awards and appearing in more than 70 films and TV shows, Hanks says he still finds himself doubting his own abilities. "It's a high-wire act that we all walk," he told Terry Gross,

There are days when I know that 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon I am going to have to deliver some degree of emotional goods, and if I can't do it, that means I'm going to have to fake it. If I fake it, that means they might catch me at faking it, and if they catch me at faking it, well, then it's just doomsday.

In an interview in The New York Times, award-winning actor Ben Affleck reflected on the pressure to hide our broken areas. When he watches other movies that strain to make their heroes entirely likable and valiant, Mr. Affleck said: "I find that boring. Instead, I think it's interesting how we manage the best version of ourselves, despite our flaws and our weaknesses and our tendencies to do the wrong thing."

The article noted, "[Affleck] has also realized that for all of his Hollywood success, some part of him will always feel like a relentless striver who must prove, through his work, that he has a right to be there." Affleck put it this way:

That [relentless striving] never goes away. All these habits that we develop, that help us at some point, they have flip sides. In this case, it's hard to turn that feeling off … The urge of making it good and trying to make sure that it works, that you've done the most interesting version that you can—it's like a neurosis that drives me to work every day.

In his film (2016), A Hologram for the King, Tom Hanks plays a middle-aged American businessman who is sent to Saudi Arabia for a special project. The film addresses an important issue we all face: no matter what we've done or how much we've accomplished, there still comes a point when we ask "How did I get here?"

Hanks said that he felt particularly connected with his character's sense of self-doubt and dislocation. "No matter what we've done," Hanks said, "there comes a point where you think, 'How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?'" Despite having won two Academy Awards and appearing in more than 70 films and TV shows, Hanks says he still finds himself doubting his own abilities. Hanks put it this way:

It's a high-wire act that we all walk. There are days when I know that three o'clock tomorrow afternoon I am going to have to deliver some degree of emotional goods, and if I can't do it, that means I'm going to have to fake it. If I fake it, that means they might catch me at faking it, and if they catch me at faking it, well, then it's just doomsday.

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course this applies to everyone regarding issues of success and identity, but it could also apply to fathers on Father's Day—men who are struggling to not "fake it" through life and fathering.

Imagine you are twelve years old again, and you love baseball. All your heroes are baseball players, all your extracurricular time is spent either with a ball glove in hand or watching a game on television, and, regardless of the season, it's been that way as long as you can remember. It's not that you're particularly good or particularly bad at baseball, you just love the game—the smack of the bat after a line drive, the smell of the grass, the feel of sliding headlong into second base. You've never had to defend it or describe it that way, but that's what you feel. And you can imagine one day having a jersey with your name on the back.

Things have begun to feel a little different this season, though, because twelve-year-olds have to try out for JV teams at the end of the year, and you get the feeling that not everyone makes the cut. You suddenly find yourself comparing your fielding skills with the other infielders and with players from other teams, and you start to count the number of times you miss balls that are hit to you. You keep track of how many strikeouts you get in each game.

Your coach has a way of calling you out, too. In one particularly bad stretch of the season, your coach calls across the field after you make yet another missed fielding play, "That's four times this game! Keep your head down!" You don't keep your head down, though, and after the fifth ground ball makes its way between your legs, your coach demotes you to the outfield. You replay his voice in your head. At your next at-bat, you strike out quickly, and you wonder if baseball is your sport after all.

Possible Preaching Angles: The authors note: "The Law is shorthand here for an accusing standard of performance. As we have noted, whenever the Law is coming, condemnation follows close behind. Whenever an expectation stands before us—from our coach, from ourselves, from God himself—we are either condemned by our failure before it, or made to be condemners in our fulfillment of it. The Law is the unfeeling voice of The Coach—it tolerates no excuses, it accepts no shortcuts. The Law is good, in that it proffers good fundamentals ('Keep your head down when fielding a groundball,' 'You shouldn't smoke,' 'Spend only the money you have,' etc.), but the failure which pursues it always creates a reaction. When we are criticized, we must defend."

Mark Twain held a wide range of views on Christianity and the Bible at different times in his life. His theological beliefs changed many times as he dealt with the tragic deaths of family and friends, as well as considerations of his own mortality. His misconceptions of sin and guilt may have contributed to his rejection of the gospel. In his book, Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece, Butler University's Andrew Levy wrote about Twain's faith:

He spent his Sundays in a church where the preachers were very clear about hell and the odds of a wayward child going there. He wept to his mother that he had "ceased to be a Christian," but his "trained Presbyterian conscience," as he later called it, swallowed guilt like air. There was no death in his family or among his friends he did not blame himself for: "I took all the tragedies to myself, and tallied them off in turn as they happened, saying to myself in each case, with a sigh, 'Another one gone—and on my account.'" Later there would be no economic or social injustice in which he regarded his hands as clean.

John Zahl writes in "A Gift (Certificate) That Never Expires”:

A few years ago, a friend and the owner of a local high-end department store gave me a very generous gift certificate. When I went to use the gift certificate he met me at the store, and walked with me as I selected a sports coat, a dress shirt, and a pair of shoes. I made sure to look at each of the price tags (on the sly) so I could overshoot the gift certificate enough and put some cash back into the store's register, thereby showing my gratitude for his generosity.

When I got to the register, I put my wallet on the counter and got out my credit card, but he placed the gift certificate in front of me and said, "Well, it looks like you've only spent a little more than half of your credit with us." I was shocked. In that moment I realized he had only been charging me half of the ticket price, which meant that I was still in his debt.

In a few weeks I returned to the store with my wife determined to show my appreciation by overspending the gift card. So this time we approached the counter as a unified front, and with a huge armload of clothing and accessories. I handed our friend the gift certificate, and got my wallet out. He took the gift certificate in hand and started entering the purchases into the register.

Finally, when the bags were full, he turned to us and said, "You're not going to believe this, but I've rung everything up, and the total comes to exactly zero." We started protesting: "That can't be right. The total should be well above what was left of our store credit."

Then he said, "I don't think you understand how this gift certificate works. No matter what you throw at it, the total will always read zero." We finally understood his arrangement. In our attempts to buy our way out of the debt, we had completely missed the value of the gift, which this generous man took such pleasure in bestowing upon us.

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.

The comedian Cathy Ladman expresses a view that's becoming more and more common: "All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt with different holidays."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Justification by faith—Cathy Ladman is on to something with this quote—many religions do seem to spread a message of guilt, not grace. (2) Christ, uniqueness of—Cathy Ladman may have a point, but it highlights the uniqueness of Christ who came to offer forgiveness from our guilt.