The Hope of the Believer … No. 14

ARE YOU TIRED OF TRYING TO GO TO HEAVEN?

An entrance will be supplied to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. —2 Pet. 1:11

Are you among those who are “trying hard to go to heaven”? I was in that company for a large part of my life, but I grew weary of the struggle and sought something better. I don’t believe we go to heaven by trying harder and harder, day after day, year after year. If it is a matter of how hard I try, how hard does that have to be? What grade do I have to make?

I was recently reminded of this problem when I sat with a dozen or so in a Bible study at a Church of Christ. When the teacher was a bit flustered over a problem that came up, he said to the others, “I am trying as hard to go to heaven as you are.” I found myself feeling sorry for him —and for us all. I eased up to him afterward and quietly suggested to him that none of us is likely to make it to heaven if it depends on how hard we try. He seemed puzzled. I reminded him of the promises of abundant grace, abundant mercy, and an abundant entrance into heaven. And sometimes, as in 1 Tim. 1:11, we are even promised “an exceedingly abundant grace.” We are saved by grace, not by trying, I assured him.

He then revealed what I think is a problem for many of us: “But we have to try, we have to make an effort.” Yes, of course, I assured him, but it isn’t by trying that we are saved. We try, or make an effort, or do good works because we are saved, not to be saved. “By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,” I pointed out, quoting Eph. 2:8.

He readily granted that we are saved by God’s grace, but “We have to do our part,” he insisted. God’s part plus our part equals salvation is the way the math goes. It is a hard way to live and an impossible way to be saved.

This notion that we take up where God’s grace leaves off has been our undoing. This is why we have no real assurance of being saved or of going to heaven. We do not question God’s part. It is our part that keeps us in doubt, so we keep trying harder and harder. When I asked the dear brother if he thought he worked at it hard enough to go to heaven, he said, “I hope so!” I told him that was an awful way to have to live and that our Lord has delivered us from such uncertainty with such promises as, “Come unto me, all of you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

There was the lowly publican, I recalled for him, who humbly prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” He didn’t say anything to God about how hard he had been trying, or how good he was, or how he deserved it because of his works. It was the self-righteous Pharisee that prayed that way.

Moreover, Jesus said of the publican, “This man went down to his house justified rather than the other” (Lk. 18:14). What justified or saved him? Not his works. Not his goodness. Nor how hard he tried. It was by God’s mercy, which he received freely as a gift when he asked for it.

It is the same with us. We cannot lay enough gold and silver at God’s throne to buy it. We can never be good enough to deserve it. We cannot work enough to earn it. We cannot try hard enough to attain it. We cannot muster enough power to wrest it from him. It is ours only as a free gift. Paul said it beautifully in Tit. 3:5, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit.”

That passage says it all. It might be clear enough to us that we are not saved by our own selfish works, but here we are to see that we are not even saved by righteous works —not ours at least. God has done the “work” through Jesus Christ on our behalf. It is by God’s mercy that we are saved, and this happened because “the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared” (verse 4).

God has done it all for us. Even baptism, which almost certainly is what “the washing of generation” refers to, is God’s work. In baptism he is doing something with us and for us. We are “washed” by the regenerating power of God’s love, which is typified in baptism. We are “renewed” by the power of the Holy Spirit. In all this we are not acting but are being acted upon. We accept his free gift of salvation by yielding to his will in allowing baptism to happen to us. And, according to Philip. 2:12, even the yielding is God’s work in us: “It is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”

When we really believe that our salvation is God’s work in us, and not our own, only then will we have assurance of salvation and heaven. This is what gives us joy. We are for the most part a joyless people because we have no assurance that we are saved. We hope we are and we try hard, but we cannot be sure. There is no “exceeding joy” in religion like that.

But we have to be faithful, we are told, and this puts us back on the treadmill of “trying hard” to be saved. Yes, of course, we must be faithful, but this can’t mean being right about everything by dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. We are faithful, not by rule keeping or by our good works, but by trusting in him who is “able to keep you from falling, and to present you blameless before His glorious presence with exceeding joy” (Jude 24). I could fall, yes, but that will not happen because I trust him who is able to keep it from happening. I am not able, but God is able, and he will keep me. That is why I have joy. I trust in the Lord to keep me and not myself.

A large part of the problem is that we have made the New Testament into a code of case law, and our preachers are the lawyers. They tell us that if we are “faithful members of the church,” which means to attend the services regularly, perform “the five acts of worship,” place ourselves under the authority of the elders, and do other such “church” things, then we might make it to heaven, maybe. That is what “faithful” is made to mean. All this is the Sunday morning rip-off. No wonder we are a people scared to live and afraid to die!

We have been sold a bill of goods and the price is more than we can pay, and that is that we are “under New Testament law” like Israel was under the law of Moses. We have had laid on us the notion that God nailed one law to the Cross and turned around and gave us another one through Christ. But we cannot be saved through a law of Christ anymore than a law of Moses. Has not the apostle Paul made it dear that “If righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain” (Gal. 2:20). Christ saved us by dying for us, not by giving us a better or a higher law. That is what grace means, and that is why Paul says in the same passage, “I do not set aside the grace of God.”

But that is exactly what we do when try to be saved by any law or by good works or by doing “our part” —we make void the grace of God. If we could but believe the great message of Rom. 3:24: “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Or Philip. 3:9: “and be found in Christ, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.”

This is why Paul could joyously say, “I know and I am fully persuaded” (2 Tim. 1:12), and why John could assure his readers with “We know that we abide in him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit” (1 In. 4:13). This is our hope and our joy.

When we are justified by grace through faith we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph. 2:10). When we do such works - gladly and not simply out of duty - it is evidence of what God has done for us and is doing through us, for faith without works is dead being alone. We are “justified by works” (Jas. 2:24) in that our works show that we are indeed saved by his free grace. This is our confidence. —the Editor