Devotional 82: The Ground of Good Works: Done from Faith and by the Spirit

The Confession Read

These good works, done in obedience to God's commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 16, Section 2

Introduction

A man stands at the edge of an orchard in late summer, surveying the branches heavy with fruit. No one has ever seen an apple tree strain with effort to produce its apples, as though fruit-bearing were a feat of will. The tree bears fruit because it is an apple tree; the fruit is the natural, inevitable expression of its nature. A dead tree cannot bear fruit, and a living tree cannot help but bear it, provided it is rooted in good soil and watered by the rains of heaven. The Confession, having established in its first section what a good work is — only that which God has commanded — now turns to the question of what good works do in the life of the believer, and the answer it gives is as organic as an orchard in autumn. Good works are not the root of the Christian's standing before God; they are the fruit of it. They are not the cause of his acceptance; they are the evidence that he has been accepted. They do not purchase what God freely gives; they display, with visible and tangible glory, that the gift has already been received. This second section of Chapter 16 is one of the most pastorally rich passages in the entire Confession. Where Section 1 drew a sharp line, excluding from the category of good works everything that lacks Scriptural warrant, Section 2 opens the door to a positive vision of the Christian life in all its coherence and beauty. The Divines list seven distinct purposes that good works serve in the economy of grace: they are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith; they manifest thankfulness; they strengthen assurance; they edify the brethren; they adorn the profession of the gospel; they stop the mouths of the adversaries; and they glorify God. Seven purposes, each flowing naturally from the one before it, each addressing a different dimension of the believer's existence — his relation to himself, to his God, to his fellow Christians, and to a watching world. What emerges is not a legalistic checklist but a portrait of wholeness: the man or woman whose faith is not a private sentiment but a public, fruitful, God-glorifying reality that touches every sphere of life. The question this section answers is not speculative but deeply practical. Once a sinner has been justified by faith alone, what are his good works actually for? Are they, as the antinomians maintained, strictly optional — harmless ornaments that may be worn or discarded at pleasure? Are they, as Rome insisted, contributions to the merit by which eternal life is obtained? The Confession rejects both answers with a single sentence that charts a middle way between the precipice of legalism and the swamp of license. Good works are necessary — not as the ground of justification, but as its fruit and evidence. They are commanded — not as a ladder by which we climb to God, but as the path on which we walk with Him, already accepted in the Beloved.

Scripture Foundation

The epistle of James provides the Confession with its controlling metaphor: good works are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith. The passage is so familiar that it is easy to miss the precision of James's argument. "What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?" (James 2:14). The key word is "say." James is not contrasting faith with works but a professed faith with a living faith, and the difference between them is that a living faith produces works while a dead profession produces nothing but words. His illustration drives the point home with almost brutal clarity: "If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?" (James 2:15-16). The words are pious, even biblical in their phrasing — "Depart in peace" is language drawn from the liturgy of Israel. But words without deeds are a mockery of the very faith they claim to express. Faith that does not clothe the naked and feed the hungry is not faith at all; it is a corpse dressed in religious language, and the stench of its decay betrays the life it pretends to possess. James sharpens the point with the example of Abraham: "Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?" (James 2:21-22). The Greek construction is carefully chosen: faith synērgei — worked together with — his works. The two are not competitors but partners in a single divine operation. Faith is the living root, invisible beneath the soil; works are the fruit, visible to every passerby. And James's conclusion is that "faith without works is dead" (James 2:26), a corpse no more capable of saving than a body from which the spirit has departed. The Confession picks up this language exactly, speaking of good works as the fruits and evidences of a "true and lively faith" — a faith that is alive in the heart and therefore active in the hands, not a faith that merely recites the creed and considers its duty discharged. The Apostle Paul, writing to the Ephesians, provides the theological foundation upon which James's practical reasoning rests. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). These verses are the great charter of the Reformation, the unassailable fortress of justification by faith alone. But Paul does not end there, and the next verse is the one that gives Section 2 of our Confession its deepest ground: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10). The Greek word translated "workmanship" is poiēma, from which we derive our English word "poem." The believer is God's poem, His crafted work of art, and the purpose for which he has been crafted is good works. These works do not contribute to salvation; they are the destination of salvation. God saves us not merely from sin but unto a life of holiness, and the good works that follow are not an optional addendum to the Christian life but its God-ordained shape. To be saved is to be re-created for good works, and a salvation that produces no good works has not actually occurred. The tree that bears no fruit has no root in living soil. Our Lord Himself provides the public dimension of this truth in the Sermon on the Mount: "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 5:16). The good works of the believer are not a private matter between the soul and its God. They are a public testimony, a city set on a hill that cannot be hidden. Notice the direction of our Lord's reasoning: the purpose of visible good works is not that men should glorify the one who performs them, but that they should glorify the Father. The works point away from the doer and toward the God who made the doer new. This is the precise opposite of the Pharisaic righteousness that sounds a trumpet before it, and it is also the answer to every charge that the Reformed doctrine of grace produces indifference to holiness. The grace that saves is the grace that shines, and the light that grace kindles is not meant to be hidden under a bushel but set on a lampstand for all to see. The Apostle Peter applies this same logic to the specific context of a hostile world: "Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation" (1 Peter 2:12). Here is the purpose the Confession calls "stopping the mouths of the adversaries." The early church was slandered as a sect of atheists because it refused to worship the imperial gods, accused of cannibalism because of distorted rumors about the Lord's Supper, reviled as subversive because it confessed Jesus as Lord rather than Caesar. Peter's counsel is not to answer slander with counter-slander, nor to mount a public relations campaign, but simply to live lives of such visible goodness that the slanders are exposed as lies by the sheer weight of contrary evidence. Good works are an apologetic; they argue for the truth of the gospel more persuasively than any syllogism, because they answer the question every honest skeptic is really asking: does this faith actually change the way a man lives? The Apostle John, in his account of our Lord's farewell discourse, gives us the organic image that unites all these threads: "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5). The Greek verb for "abide" is menō — to remain, to dwell, to make one's home. The branch does not produce fruit by its own effort but by remaining connected to the vine from which the life flows. Union with Christ is the sole source of spiritual vitality, and the fruit that appears on the branch is Christ's life becoming visible in the believer's conduct. Cut the branch from the vine and it withers; sever good works from union with Christ and they become dead works, morally indistinguishable from the philanthropy of an unbeliever. The Confession echoes this image when it speaks of believers being "created in Christ Jesus thereunto" — the good works are not bolted onto the Christian life from outside but grow out of it from within, as the apple grows from the apple tree by the silent, irresistible impulse of life.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines wrote this section in the shadow of a specific pastoral crisis: the antinomian charge that the doctrine of justification by faith alone rendered good works unnecessary. If salvation is entirely by grace, received through faith apart from works, what motive remains for pursuing holiness? Why not sin that grace may abound? The Apostle Paul had faced this objection in his own lifetime — "Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid" (Romans 6:1-2) — and it had resurfaced with renewed force in the seventeenth century among those who had taken the Reformation's recovery of sola fide and twisted it into a license for the flesh. The Divines' task was to demonstrate, from Scripture and from the internal logic of the gospel itself, that good works, while contributing nothing to justification, are nonetheless essential to the Christian life. Not essential as the ground of acceptance, but essential as the fruit and evidence that faith is genuine, as the expression of gratitude that grace alone can produce, and as the God-ordained path by which the justified sinner walks toward his inheritance. At the same time, the Divines were answering Rome, which had codified at the Council of Trent the teaching that the good works of the justified truly merit eternal life — and had pronounced an anathema upon anyone who denied it. The Confession's answer is not to deny that good works have a relationship to eternal life. The final clause of the section speaks of believers "having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life." But the relationship is redefined entirely. Good works are not the meritorious cause of eternal life; they are the pathway ordained by God, the way in which those who are already justified walk toward the inheritance that Christ has purchased and the Spirit applies. The image is not of a laborer earning wages but of a son traveling home, his obedience along the way serving not to open the door but to confirm his identity as a child of the house to which he is bound. The key word in the final clause is "end," translating the Greek telos — not the cessation but the goal, the completion, the consummation toward which the whole life of grace is directed. The seven purposes enumerated in the section are not a random collection; they form a carefully ordered sequence that moves from the internal to the external, from the personal to the public, from the human to the divine. The first purpose — fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith — is foundational, because it answers the antinomian objection at its root. If saving faith is invariably fruitful, then the absence of good works is not a mark of liberty but a sign of spiritual death. The second and third purposes — manifesting thankfulness and strengthening assurance — address the believer's own soul, teaching him how his works function in the economy of his personal walk with God, giving shape to his gratitude and substance to his confidence. The fourth and fifth — edifying the brethren and adorning the gospel — reach outward to the community of faith and to the watching world, making the believer's life a means of grace to his fellow Christians and a testimony to those who do not yet believe. The sixth — stopping the mouths of the adversaries — faces the reality of persecution and slander with the quiet confidence that a holy life is its own defense. And the seventh — glorifying God — gathers all the others into the highest end to which any human action can be directed, the purpose for which the triune God does everything He does. A particular pastoral wisdom shines through the Divines' choice of the word "fruits" rather than "proofs." A proof is a logical demonstration; once offered, it admits of no further doubt. But a fruit is organic and gradual; it appears in its own season, grows slowly, and is often hidden among leaves before it becomes visible. The believer whose assurance is weak may examine his life and see little that looks like fruit, not because there is no fruit, but because the fruit is still small and green, not yet ripened into recognizability. The confessional language, by speaking of "evidences" rather than "proofs," makes allowance for the weakness of faith and the imperfection of its fruits without denying the organic connection between them. A small apple is still an apple, and its smallness does not call the life of the tree into question. The phrase "done in obedience to God's commandments" anchors the entire section to the teaching of the previous one. The good works in view are not the spontaneously generated impulses of a religious heart but the deliberate conformity of the life to the revealed will of God. The Spirit does not bypass the Word, nor does He lead believers into works for which there is no Scriptural warrant. The inner testimony of the Spirit and the outer command of Scripture are not two sources of guidance but one, because the Spirit is the author of both, and He never contradicts Himself. The man who claims the Spirit is leading him to neglect the ordinary duties of his calling, or to pursue a course of action the Word forbids, is not hearing the Spirit; he is hearing the echo of his own desires, and those desires are not trustworthy guides.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in his commentary on the epistle of James, provides the interpretive key that unlocks the harmony between Paul and James which the Confession assumes and upon which its doctrine of good works depends. Paul, Calvin argues, is speaking of the righteousness by which a sinner is justified before God, and here works have no place: the righteousness that avails with the divine tribunal is the righteousness of Christ, received by faith alone. James is speaking of the righteousness by which a man's faith is justified before men, demonstrated to be genuine rather than counterfeit. The same faith that justifies the sinner before God is justified before the world by its works, and the two affirmations are not in tension but in perfect concert. The faith that saves is never alone, even though it alone saves. It is always accompanied by works as the heat of the sun is accompanied by light: distinct in principle, inseparable in fact. Calvin's insistence on this point was not academic pedantry but pastoral urgency. He had seen the doctrine of justification twisted into antinomian license, and he had seen it buried under the weight of human merit. The path between these errors is narrow, and the Confession's careful language — "fruits and evidences" rather than "causes and conditions" — is the path itself. Turretin, with his characteristic precision, goes further in distinguishing the relationships that good works bear to the Christian life. He identifies four: good works are the index of faith, showing it to be alive rather than dead, as the pulse indicates the presence of life in the body; they are the effect of faith, flowing from it as water from a spring; they are the end of faith, the purpose for which faith itself was given, since God saves us not merely from the penalty of sin but unto a life of holiness; and they are the pathway to eternal life, the ordained road by which the justified travel to the inheritance prepared for them before the foundation of the world. To these four he appends a crucial exclusion: good works are never the cause of justification, and to assign them that office is to overturn the gospel at its foundation. This fourfold positive and onefold negative became standard in Reformed theology and remains as useful for the ordinary Christian as for the trained theologian. When you ask yourself what your good works are doing, you may answer that they are showing your faith to be real, flowing from the union with Christ that faith has established, fulfilling the purpose for which you were created anew, and walking the road that leads home. What you may never answer is that they are making God your debtor. Watson, whose gift for bringing doctrine to the conscience is matched only by his gift for memorable imagery, observes that good works strengthen assurance in the same way that smoke rising from a chimney assures us that fire is burning within. The smoke is not the fire, and no one would mistake the one for the other; but the presence of smoke is a reliable indicator that flame is burning unseen. So the good works of the believer are not the ground of his assurance — that ground is the promise of God sealed by the Spirit — but they are the evidence that confirms the Spirit's witness, the visible smoke rising from the invisible flame of faith. When a man doubts his salvation, Watson counsels him not to stare into the darkness of his own heart, a pursuit that leads only to deeper darkness, but to examine his life for the fruits of the Spirit in their concrete, observable forms. Has he begun to love what God loves and hate what God hates? Is there in him, however imperfectly, a hunger for righteousness and a grief over sin that were not there before? Does he find himself returning to God in repentance when he falls, rather than wallowing in guilt or hardening himself against it? These are the fruits of a living faith, and their presence, even in weakness, is ground for genuine comfort. The man who finds in himself no love for holiness and no grief over sin should fear; the man who finds both, however feebly, may take heart. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, draws attention to the Trinitarian structure that runs implicitly through this section and becomes explicit in the sections that follow. The good works are done "in obedience to God's commandments" — the authority of the Father who commands, whose law reflects His own holy character and binds the conscience of every rational creature. They are the fruits of a true and lively faith — the instrument by which the soul is united to Christ the Son, whose righteousness is imputed and whose life is imparted to all who are in Him. And the entire life of good works is sustained by the Spirit, whose work in the believer is the subject of Section 3, but whose presence is already assumed here, since apart from the Spirit there is neither faith nor fruit. The Christian life is lived within the embrace of the triune God, and every good work is an act of communion, simultaneously, with the Father who commands it, the Son who enables it, and the Spirit who empowers it. To sever good works from this Trinitarian context is to turn them into a form of religious self-improvement — morally impressive, perhaps, but spiritually dead. Shaw, always the most relentlessly practical of the commentators on the Confession, identifies a specific pastoral danger that attends the doctrine of good works as evidences: the temptation to rest assurance upon the quantity of one's works rather than their quality, and to sink into despair when the quantity seems insufficient. A man may perform many outwardly commendable actions and yet find no peace, because he is measuring his works by the scale of his own expectations rather than the standard of Scripture, or because he is looking to his works for a kind of security they were never designed to provide. Shaw's remedy is to return to the organic image at the heart of the section: a fruit is not measured by its size but by its kind. A small apple is still an apple, and its smallness does not indicate that the tree is dead. The question is not whether your works are numerous or spectacular but whether they are genuine — done from faith, according to God's commands, for God's glory. And even the feeblest genuine fruit is evidence of a living root. The woman whose only visible good work is patience with a difficult child, the laborer whose only visible good work is honesty in a workplace where dishonesty is the norm, the shut-in whose only visible good work is prayer — these are not second-class Christians whose small fruits call their faith into question. They are branches in the vine, bearing what the vine produces through them, and the fruit they bear, however modest in the eyes of men, is precious in the sight of God.

Puritan Application

First, examine your faith by its fruits, not your fruits by your faith. The order matters more than most Christians realize. Too many keep their eyes fixed anxiously on the quality of their works, measuring and remeasuring, and sink into despair because the works are always defective, always mingled with mixed motives, always falling short of the perfection they desire. But the Confession teaches us to reverse the direction: look at your works as evidence of what has already happened in your soul. Has God given you a new heart? Do you trust in Christ alone for your acceptance with Him? Then the works that follow, imperfect though they be, are fruits of that union with Christ — not the root of it. A farmer does not judge the health of his tree by the perfection of every apple; he judges it by whether the tree is bearing at all, and by whether the fruit, however blemished, is recognizably fruit and not something else. So the Christian, examining his life, should ask not, "Are my works perfect?" but, "Is there in me a new direction, a love for what God loves, a grief over my sin, a desire to obey that was not there before I knew Christ?" These are the fruits of a true and lively faith, and their presence, however mingled with remaining corruption, is evidence that the root is alive — evidence to be received with gratitude, not dismissed with unbelief. Second, let your thankfulness be as visible as your requests. The Confession teaches that by good works believers "manifest their thankfulness," and there is a searching precision in that word "manifest." Thankfulness that remains invisible is indistinguishable from ingratitude. The Christian who has received mercy beyond measure, whose sins are pardoned and whose soul is adopted and whose future is secured by the blood of Christ, must not keep his gratitude locked in the privacy of his heart. It must take visible, tangible form: in the obedience of the hands, in the generosity of the purse, in the patience of the tongue, in the forgiveness of injuries, in the cheerful performance of duties that no one else sees or applauds. The Heidelberg Catechism, that sister confession of the Reformed churches, captures this rhythm by structuring the entire Christian life under the heading of gratitude — not as a third thing after guilt and grace, but as the shape that grace takes once it has taken hold of a man, the only response that makes sense in the light of what has been received. To the objection that this makes good works a kind of repayment, the answer is that gratitude can never repay; it can only acknowledge. The child who brings his father a clumsily drawn picture is not repaying the father's love; he is responding to it in the only language available to him at his stage of development. So the Christian's works of obedience are the love-gifts of a grateful child to the Father who has already given him everything — and who delights in the gift for the heart it reveals, not the perfection it achieves. Third, strengthen your assurance by the steady, ordinary works of obedience, not by extraordinary experiences. The Confession lists the strengthening of assurance among the purposes of good works, but it does not specify that only spectacular works serve this end. The temptation, common to every generation of believers, is to look for assurance in the heights of religious experience — the dramatic conversion narrative, the season of unusual consolation, the answered prayer that felt like a miracle. But experiences are intermittent and their memory fades; what felt certain in the prayer meeting on Tuesday evening may feel distant and unconvincing by Thursday morning. The daily works of obedience are constant and their testimony accumulates over time. The husband who holds his tongue when provoked, the wife who serves her family without complaint, the worker who refuses the dishonest shortcut, the tongue that declines the juicy piece of gossip — these are the works that strengthen assurance, not because they are meritorious, but because they are the steady, reliable pulse of a heart that has been made alive. A man may doubt whether a single ecstatic experience was genuinely from God. He cannot easily doubt whether, over years of ordinary life, he has been enabled to obey in ways that were impossible for him before he knew Christ. The cumulative weight of ordinary obedience is, in the long run, a more reliable ground of assurance than the memory of any single spiritual high. Fourth, edify your brethren not only by your words but by your works. The Confession says that good works "edify the brethren," and the word "edify" means to build up, to construct, to strengthen — the same Greek root from which we derive "edifice," a building. We are accustomed to thinking of edification as something that happens primarily through teaching, preaching, and spiritual conversation, and indeed these are the ordinary means by which the household of faith is built up. But the Confession teaches that a holy life is itself a means of edification, a sermon preached without words to those who are watching. When a fellow Christian sees you bear a trial with patience, he is strengthened to bear his own. When he sees you forgive a wrong, he is encouraged to forgive the wrong that rankles in his own heart. When he observes your quiet consistency over decades of ordinary life, his faith in the power of the gospel is confirmed in ways that no sermon, however eloquent, could accomplish. Paul instructed the elder women to be "teachers of good things" (Titus 2:3), and the primary curriculum he had in mind was their own conduct. A godly life is a public good, a treasure laid up not for oneself alone but for the whole household of faith, and every believer who perseveres in quiet obedience is, whether he knows it or not, a pillar in the temple of God. Fifth, remember that your good works have an audience beyond the Church, and that audience is watching for reasons to disbelieve. Four of the seven purposes in this section have an outward dimension: adorning the gospel, stopping the mouths of adversaries, glorifying God before men, and walking the path toward eternal life in full view of a world that considers such a path foolishness. The Christian life is lived on a stage, watched by neighbors and colleagues and family members who are looking for evidence that the gospel does not actually change anyone, that Christians are hypocrites like everyone else, that the whole thing is a pretense. Peter's logic in his first epistle runs: the Gentiles speak against you as evildoers; let your good works be so visible and so consistent that their slanders are exposed as empty, and let the day come when even your accusers are forced to glorify God. This is a far higher calling than simply avoiding scandal. It is a calling to live in such a way that the gospel is made attractive, that the mouth of the scoffer is stopped not by clever argument but by irrefutable goodness, that the credibility of the Christian faith is advanced by the visible holiness of Christian people. When a neighbor watches you respond to provocation with patience, or observes your honesty in a transaction where no one would have caught the dishonesty, or hears you speak well of someone who has wronged you, the gospel gains credibility in his eyes that no apologetic tract could confer. The early church conquered the Roman Empire not by political maneuvering or military force but by the quiet, relentless, visible holiness of ordinary believers whose lives made the gospel beautiful — and a beautiful gospel is hard to dismiss. Sixth, pursue good works as a means of glorifying God, and let that be reward enough. The final purpose in the Confession's list is the highest, because it is the purpose for which God does everything He does: His own glory. The good works of the believer are designed to make God look great, to put His character on display, to show the world what the grace of God can do with the raw material of fallen humanity. A life of visible holiness is a monument to the power of the gospel, and every monument points away from itself toward the one it commemorates. There is a kind of good work that draws attention to the one who performs it, and that work, however outwardly impressive, is rotten at the core, because its ultimate end is the glory of the creature rather than the Creator. There is another kind of good work that makes observers forget the one who performed it and remember only the God who enabled it, and that is the work the Confession has in view. The Christian whose good works are noticed should feel what the moon feels when it reflects the sun: no temptation to pride, because the light is not its own; only the sober joy of having fulfilled its purpose by making something else look bright. The greatest good works in the history of the Church — the heroism of the martyrs, the charity of the saints, the patience of the afflicted — have this in common: they cause those who witness them to say, not "What a remarkable Christian," but "What a great God, who can make such a life possible." And that is the highest praise any human work can receive.

Prayer

O Lord our God, whose workmanship we are, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which Thou hast before ordained that we should walk in them, we come before Thee humbled and grateful. We confess that our faith has too often been barren, a profession of the lips without the fruit of the hands, and we have brought dishonor upon Thy name by the poverty of our obedience. Forgive us, we pray Thee, for every good work left undone, for every opportunity to glorify Thee that we have let slip through negligence or through fear of what it might cost us. We thank Thee that our acceptance with Thee does not rest upon the perfection of our works but upon the perfect work of Christ, whose obedience is counted as ours and whose blood cleanses us from all sin. Yet we bless Thee also that Thou hast not left us without evidence of Thy work within us, and that the good works Thou dost produce in our lives, weak and imperfect as they are, serve to assure our hearts before Thee, to manifest our thankfulness, and to adorn the gospel we profess. Grant us, O Lord, a true and lively faith — the kind of faith that works by love, that purifies the heart, that overcomes the world, that bears fruit in its season and whose leaf does not wither. Let our good works be done in obedience to Thy commandments, springing from faith, aimed at Thy glory, accomplished in the strength that Thou dost supply. Use them, we beseech Thee, to build up our brethren, to stop the mouths of those who speak against Thy truth, and to make the way of salvation attractive to those who do not yet believe. But above all, let our lives be to the praise of Thy glorious grace, that men may see our good works and glorify Thee, our Father in heaven. Keep us from the subtle pride that turns good works into a ground of boasting, and from the subtle despair that looks at imperfect works and concludes that we have no part in Thee. Teach us to walk the narrow path between self-righteousness and unbelief, resting wholly upon Christ for our justification, yet pressing forward in the pursuit of holiness as those who have been created anew for this very purpose — not to earn what is freely given, but to become what we already are in Christ, and to adorn with our lives the doctrine that has saved our souls. We ask it all in the name of Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. To Him, with Thee, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, be all glory, dominion, and power, both now and forever. Amen.