Devotional 84: The Necessity of Good Works: Not for Justification, but Necessary

The Confession Read

They who in their obedience attain to the greatest height which is possible in this life, are so far from being able to supererogate and to do more than God requires, as that they fall short of much which in duty they are bound to do.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 16, Section 4

Introduction

If you were to ask the most godly man you know to name his greatest sin, he would not have to search his memory. He would already know the answer, because he has been confessing it every morning for as long as he can remember, and the sorrow of it has grown sharper, not duller, with each passing year. If you were to ask that same man to estimate the quality of his obedience on a scale of one to ten, he would pause for a long time — not because he is calculating, but because he is embarrassed to give the number he actually believes, a number far lower than you would guess from the outside, a number that would probably alarm you if you knew how seriously he meant it. The holiest saints are not the ones who think they are holy. They are the ones who have seen enough of God's holiness to know that everything they offer Him is riddled with imperfection, that their best prayers are wandering and distracted, that their most costly acts of love are alloyed with self-interest, that their most disciplined seasons of obedience are shot through with sins they barely recognize because they have lived with them so long. The doctrine of this short, sharp section of the Confession is the doctrine that every advanced saint has learned in the laboratory of his own soul: the greatest heights of obedience attainable in this life are, in truth, far lower than we imagine, and the distance between what we achieve and what we owe is not a gap we are gradually closing but an abyss we are only beginning to measure. The Confession has walked us through three carefully ordered truths about good works: what they are, what they do, and where the ability to perform them comes from. Now the Divines turn to a question that cuts against every instinct of the natural heart: how good are our good works, actually? If they proceed from the Spirit, are they not excellent? The answer is bracing. Our best works are so far from exceeding what God requires that they do not even reach what God requires. Not the beginner's works — those we expect to be clumsy. The works of the Christian who has attained "the greatest height which is possible in this life." Even these fall short. Even these are defective. Even the Apostle Paul, after decades of apostolic labour, cried out that he had not yet attained and pressed on as though he had everything still to gain. If Paul fell short, what ground have we for imagining that we exceed the mark?

Scripture Foundation

The book of Job contains one of the most searching confessions ever uttered by a righteous man. Job was one of whom God Himself testified, "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?" Yet when Job stood before the Almighty, every claim upon his own righteousness dissolved like morning mist. "I know it is so of a truth: but how should man be just with God? If he will contend with him, he cannot answer him one of a thousand" (Job 9:2-3). This is not Bildad or Zophar speaking — this is Job himself, the most righteous man on earth in his generation, confessing that his best obedience could not survive the scrutiny of the Judge with whom we have to do. Job does not say that some sinners cannot answer God. He says that he, the man whom God called perfect, cannot answer God. If the holiest man of his age trembled at the prospect of divine examination, what ground have we for confidence in our own works? The Confession draws this truth into the sharpest possible focus by denying that any Christian can perform works of supererogation — works beyond what God requires, works that surpass the demands of the law and create a surplus of merit. The language of "supererogation" comes from the Latin supererogare, to pay out over and above, and the Divines chose it deliberately because it was the technical term the medieval church had used to describe the works of the saints whose excess righteousness was stored in the treasury of merit and dispensed through indulgences. The Confession's answer is not merely that most Christians cannot supererogate but that no Christian can — not even those who have climbed to the summit of sanctification attainable in this present life. The climb is real; the summit is genuine; but the summit itself falls short of the law's demand, and the climber who has reached it is still a debtor to grace at every step. Our Lord Himself provides the decisive word on the matter. In Luke's Gospel, He tells His disciples a parable that dismantles the entire concept of supererogation with a single, unforgettable image: "But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down to meat? And will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink? Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I trow not. So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do" (Luke 17:7-10). The parable is uncomfortable because it is so unsparing. The servant who has plowed all day does not receive congratulations; he receives new orders. And the conclusion Jesus draws is that when you have done everything God commands — and none of us has done everything God commands — you have only done your duty. You have not earned a surplus. You have not placed God in your debt. The Greek word translated "unprofitable" is achreios, meaning useless, good for nothing. Our Lord is not teaching His disciples to wallow in self-loathing; He is teaching them the truth that makes grace necessary and boasting impossible. A servant's obedience, however complete, does not obligate the master. How much less does our partial, sin-mingled obedience obligate God? The sharpest existential proof of this doctrine is not found in a parable but in the inward experience of every believer. "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would" (Galatians 5:17). The verse assumes that the believer genuinely desires to do good — the will has been renewed, the Spirit has planted holy longings that were not there before regeneration. And yet it concedes that even the regenerate believer cannot fully perform what he desires. The residual corruption that remains in every Christian until glory opposes the Spirit continually. The result is that the believer's obedience is always partial, always mixed, always falling short of what he would do if the flesh were fully mortified and the Spirit held unopposed sway. Paul's own testimony in Romans 7 confirms the point. "For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Romans 7:18-19). The regenerate will desires holiness; the unregenerate flesh resists it; and the resulting obedience, though genuine, is never pure. Every prayer is prayed with a divided attention. Every act of charity is performed with some admixture of self-regard. The Christian who knows himself best is the Christian who knows this best, and the knowledge drives him not to despair but to the cross, where alone imperfect obedience can be accepted for the sake of Another. The prophet Isaiah captures the same truth in an image so vivid that it has haunted the conscience of the church for two and a half millennia: "But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags" (Isaiah 64:6). The Hebrew is stronger than most English translations convey. The word translated "filthy rags" is beged iddim, literally a garment stained with menstrual discharge — the most vivid image of ceremonial uncleanness available to the Hebrew mind. Isaiah is not saying that our sins are like filthy rags; that would be unsurprising. He is saying that our righteousnesses — our best deeds, our most virtuous acts, the works of which we are most proud — are like a polluted garment. The point is not that the prophet's audience were gross sinners who needed to clean up their act. The point is that even their religious devotion, their temple worship, their fasting, their prayers, were so corrupted by sin that they could not stand before a holy God. If the best works of Old Testament saints were filthy rags, what are ours?

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Assembly directed this section against a specific error with a specific history, and to understand the Confession's language we must understand what they were opposing. The medieval church had developed, over centuries, a doctrine of supererogation that rested on a distinction between precepts and counsels. Precepts were the commandments of God binding upon all Christians: the Ten Commandments, the commandments of Christ, the requirements of the moral law. Counsels were the higher, voluntary standards recommended to those who sought a more excellent way: poverty, chastity, and obedience — the three vows of the monastic life. The ordinary Christian fulfilled the precepts and, it was hoped, attained salvation. The exceptional Christian — the monk, the nun, the saint — went beyond the precepts, embraced the counsels, and accumulated a surplus of merit beyond what was strictly required. That surplus, the church taught, was deposited in the thesaurus meritorum, the treasury of merit, from which the pope could draw to grant indulgences, applying the excess righteousness of the saints to the account of sinners whose own works were insufficient. The Reformers recognized this system as an assault upon the sufficiency of Christ. If Christ's righteousness is sufficient — and it is — then no saint's surplus is needed. If the law demands perfect obedience — and it does — then no fallen human being can exceed its demands. If the best works of the best saints are imperfect — and they are — then they cannot accumulate a surplus of anything except reasons for humility. The Council of Trent responded by anathematizing anyone who denied these doctrines. The Divines answered with a single, densely packed sentence that struck at the root of the whole superstructure. The first clause of the section establishes the subject under consideration with deliberate precision: "They who in their obedience attain to the greatest height which is possible in this life." The Divines are not talking about the ordinary Christian who struggles with besetting sin and whose obedience is obviously partial and inconsistent. They are granting, for the sake of argument, the very best-case scenario that the Roman doctrine imagines — the Christian who has climbed as high as grace and effort can take a fallen human being on this side of glory. They are considering the Apostle John leaning on Jesus' breast at the Last Supper, the Apostle Paul pressing toward the mark after decades of apostolic labour, the martyrs who went to the stake singing psalms, the saints whose lives seem to us almost translucent with holiness. If anyone could supererogate, these could. And the Divines' verdict is unequivocal: even these are "so far from being able to supererogate and to do more than God requires" that the very idea is a category error. The law of God demands perfect, perpetual, and personal obedience. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength — every faculty, every moment, without interruption, without diminution, without the faintest shadow of a competing affection. Love your neighbour as yourself — with the same instinctive, unwavering, comprehensive devotion with which you naturally pursue your own welfare. No fallen human being has ever done this for five consecutive minutes, let alone for a lifetime. How then could any fallen human being do more than this? The second clause completes the demolition: "as that they fall short of much which in duty they are bound to do." The verb "fall short" translates the Greek hysterountai, used in Romans 3:23 — "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." The image is of an arrow that fails to reach its target, an athlete who fails to finish the race, a debtor who cannot pay what he owes. The saint who has climbed to the greatest height of obedience possible in this life has not exceeded the target; he has missed it, and the distance between his arrow and the mark is measured not in inches but in light-years. The Divines are not saying that the advanced Christian's obedience is worthless — Section 6 will go on to affirm that God accepts sincere though imperfect obedience for Christ's sake — but they are saying that it contributes nothing to a treasury of surplus merit, because there is no surplus. There is only deficit. And the deficit is not small. The word "supererogate" was the technical term of the controversy, and the Divines' use of it was an act of theological precision. By using the Latinate term, they placed their confession in direct opposition to Rome, signaling that this was no matter of indifference. If men can supererogate, then men can contribute to their own salvation; if men can contribute to their own salvation, then grace is no longer grace; if grace is no longer grace, the gospel has not been recovered but lost. The Divines were not given to hyperbole, but they were given to clarity, and the clarity of this section is the clarity of men who believed they were defending the heart of the Christian faith.

Theological Depth

Calvin addresses this doctrine in his Institutes with the controlled vehemence of a man who has seen the treasury of merit used to exploit the fears of the dying and the ignorance of the simple. The very phrase "works of supererogation," he argues, is a contradiction in terms. A work is either commanded by God or it is not. If it is commanded, it is a duty, not a supererogation — the servant who does what he is commanded has done nothing beyond his obligation. If it is not commanded, it is not a good work at all, as Section 1 has already established, but a work devised by men, the product of blind zeal or good intention, and God has not asked for it. There is no third category, no middle ground between duty and disobedience, no register of super-duty works that go above and beyond the law's requirements. The law of God is perfect, and perfection admits of no excess. To claim to have done more than perfect love requires is to claim to have loved God with more than all one's heart — a claim that, the moment it is examined, reveals its own absurdity. Calvin's conclusion is as devastating as it is simple: the doctrine of supererogation is not merely a mistake about the degree of human ability; it is a mistake about the nature of God's law, which demands everything and leaves no remainder of unclaimed devotion that a saint might offer as surplus. Turretin develops the argument with his characteristic precision by asking what kind of works could possibly exceed the law's demands. The law requires us to love God with all our heart. Can any creature love God with more than all his heart? The question answers itself. The law requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves. Can any creature love his neighbour more than he loves himself? The law requires us to glorify God in everything we do. Can any creature glorify God more than by doing everything — eating, drinking, working, resting — to His glory? The demands of the law are not a ceiling but an infinite horizon. They recede as we approach them, always ahead of us, always beyond us, always exposing fresh territory of obedience we have not yet occupied. The saint who has made the most progress in holiness has not exhausted the law's demands; he has merely seen more of what the law requires and has therefore become more aware of how much he still falls short. This is why the holiest Christians are always the humblest. The beginner in the faith thinks he is doing fairly well, because he has not yet understood what God requires. The advanced saint knows he is doing very poorly, because he has begun to understand what God requires, and the gap between his obedience and the law's perfection has grown larger in his perception, not smaller, with every step of progress. Hodge brings the discussion to its practical conclusion by enumerating what the doctrine of imperfection does not mean and what it does. It does not mean that the Christian's good works are worthless. They are the fruit of the Spirit, the evidence of faith, the adornment of the gospel — all the purposes unfolded in Section 2 remain true. It does not mean that the Christian should cease striving for holiness, since he can never attain perfection in this life. The command to be holy as God is holy remains in force, and the Spirit who enables obedience enables real, genuine, observable progress — incomplete but real, imperfect but growing. What the doctrine does mean is that no Christian can ever stand before God on the ground of his own works, and that the man who has made the greatest progress in sanctification is no less dependent on Christ's righteousness for his acceptance with God than the man who was converted five minutes ago. The ground of justification does not shift from Christ's righteousness to the believer's righteousness as the believer matures. The most mature saint in the church goes to heaven on the same basis as the thief on the cross: the righteousness of Another, received by faith alone. To imagine otherwise is not advanced spirituality; it is a return to the very legalism from which the gospel sets us free. Watson, with his gift for bringing doctrine into the conscience, presses the question every Christian ought to ask: if my best works are imperfect, what does that say about me? It says that pride is the most irrational of all sins. The man who is proud of his good works is like a beggar who is proud of the pennies he has collected, forgetting that he owes his landlord a sum he could not repay in ten thousand lifetimes. It says that gratitude, not self-congratulation, is the only proper response to any measure of obedience. The works we perform are enabled by the Spirit, accepted through Christ, and rewarded by grace — at every point the initiative is God's, and at every point the glory returns to Him. It says that the doctrine of imperfection, far from being a counsel of despair, is a necessary preparation for comfort, because the man who thinks his works are good enough for God will never seek a righteousness better than his own. Only the man who has seen the pollution in his best deeds will flee to Christ for a righteousness that is truly pure. And it says, finally, that the Christian life is a life of looking forward, not backward — straining toward what is ahead, pressing toward the mark, because the mark has not yet been reached and will not be reached until faith gives way to sight and the imperfect gives way to the perfect. Shaw adds a historical observation that explains why the Divines gave this doctrine such prominence. The doctrine of supererogation was the engine that drove the entire system of indulgences, and indulgences were the engine that drove the Reformation. When Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door at Wittenberg, the first thesis read: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent,' he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance." Not a season of initial turning followed by a plateau of achieved holiness, but a continual turning from sin that is never fully left behind. The treasury of merit assumed that some Christians had finished repenting and had moved on to surplus. The Reformation was built on the conviction that no Christian finishes repenting, because no Christian's best works are pure. This section is the theological foundation of that conviction.

Puritan Application

First, learn to measure your holiness not by how far you have come but by how far you have yet to go. The natural tendency of the human heart, and of the religious heart especially, is to look backward and take comfort in the distance traveled. "I used to lose my temper daily; now I lose it weekly. I used to neglect prayer entirely; now I pray, though imperfectly. I used to harbour resentment indefinitely; now I forgive, though slowly." All of this is genuine progress, and it would be ingratitude to deny it. But the Confession's doctrine teaches us to turn around and look forward, and what we see when we look forward is not a finish line drawing near but a horizon that has receded further than we ever imagined. The mature Christian is not the one who thinks he has come a long way; he is the one who has seen enough of God's holiness to know that he has barely begun. The Apostle Paul, near the end of his life, called himself the chief of sinners — not out of morbid exaggeration but out of a genuine, Spirit-wrought conviction that the closer he drew to the light, the more clearly he saw the stains on his own garments. Cultivate that holy dissatisfaction. Let every real advance in sanctification produce, not self-congratulation, but a deeper hunger for the holiness you have not yet attained and a more honest grief over the sin you have not yet shed. Second, abandon every residual hope that your good works will contribute one particle to your standing before God. This is the hardest application of this doctrine, and the one most Christians resist longest, because the desire to contribute something — anything — to our own acceptance is woven into the fabric of fallen human nature. We want to pay our own way. We want to stand before God and point to something we have done. We want the verdict to be, "Well done, good and faithful servant," and we want to feel, deep down, that we earned it. But the Confession teaches that even our best works fall short of what duty requires, and the logic is inescapable: if we cannot even reach the minimum, we cannot possibly exceed it, and if we cannot exceed it, we cannot accumulate merit, and if we cannot accumulate merit, we must be saved by grace alone from first to last or not saved at all. The mature Christian has made peace with this. He no longer tries to smuggle his works into the ground of his justification. He rests entirely on the righteousness of Christ, and he has discovered that this resting, far from making him indifferent to holiness, is the only soil in which genuine holiness can grow, because a man who is trying to earn God's favour is always, at some level, performing for an audience, and a man who knows he already has God's favour in Christ is free to obey out of gratitude and love. Stop trying to contribute to what Christ has finished. Your contribution is not needed, and your efforts to supply it are an insult to the sufficiency of His work. Third, let the imperfection of your works drive you to Christ not once, at conversion, but daily, hourly, as the only refuge for a soul whose best deeds are polluted. Many Christians understand that they came to Christ initially as sinners, bearing nothing but sin and receiving everything from grace. But somewhere along the way, they begin to think of themselves as partners in the enterprise of their sanctification, contributing their improved obedience to the joint account, feeling that God is now pleased with them on the basis of what they have become. The doctrine of this section forbids that shift. You never outgrow your need for Christ's righteousness. You never reach a point where your works, rather than His, are the ground of your confidence before God. The man who has been a Christian for fifty years must go to bed each night with the same prayer on his lips as the man who was converted this morning: "God be merciful to me, a sinner." The imperfection of your works is not a problem to be solved by trying harder. It is a condition to be lived with, and the way to live with it is to bring your imperfect works to Christ continually, confessing their imperfection, trusting His intercession, and receiving from Him the grace to try again tomorrow — not to earn what is already given but to become what you already are in Him. Fourth, resist the temptation to compare your works with those of other Christians and find comfort in the comparison. The man who measures himself against his neighbour will always find someone whose sins are more visible than his own, and the comfort he draws from the discovery is poison to his soul. The standard is not your neighbour's obedience. The standard is the law of God, which requires perfection, and the example of Christ, who embodied it. Measured against that standard, the differences between one Christian's obedience and another's shrink to insignificance. Suppose one man can jump three feet and another can jump six. Neither can leap the Grand Canyon, and the man who can jump six feet is in no position to boast over the man who can jump three. The differences in sanctification among true believers are real and significant for many purposes — they affect usefulness, joy, assurance, and the degree of heavenly reward — but for the purpose of standing before God's judgment, they are irrelevant. No one, not the apostle who wrote half the New Testament nor the martyr who went to the stake singing, has a righteousness of his own that can survive divine scrutiny. Let this truth humble every impulse to spiritual competition and comparison. You are not in a race with the Christians around you. You are in a race with the law's perfection, and you are losing it, and so are they, and the only way any of you will finish is by clinging to the One who ran it perfectly in your place. Fifth, let the impossibility of supererogation liberate you from the burden of trying to be extraordinary, and free you for the joyful, ordinary obedience that God actually requires. The medieval doctrine of counsels created a two-tier Christianity: ordinary believers who kept the precepts and extraordinary saints who pursued the counsels. The ordinary Christian was always looking over his shoulder at the monk, feeling inadequate, wondering whether his mundane life of marriage and labour and child-rearing was really pleasing to God. The Reformation swept that two-tier system away. There are no counsels beyond the precepts; there is only the law of God, which binds every Christian equally, and the callings in which every Christian is to obey it. The mother changing diapers is doing a work as pleasing to God, when done in faith and for His glory, as the missionary translating Scripture in a remote village. The accountant who refuses to fudge the numbers is performing an act of worship no less genuine than the pastor's sermon. The child who obeys her parents with a cheerful heart is adorning the gospel as truly as the martyr who will not recant. The doctrine of imperfection eliminates every hierarchy of super-spirituality. You do not need to do more than God requires, because you cannot do more than God requires, and God does not require the extraordinary achievements that feed human pride. He requires justice, mercy, and humility — virtues exercised in the ordinary stations of life, in the strength He supplies, for the glory of His name. Rest in that simplicity. It is the liberty for which Christ has set you free. Sixth, let your remaining imperfection fuel your longing for heaven. The Christian who has learned to mourn the sin that clings to his best works will not be content to remain in a world where every obedience is partial and every prayer is distracted and every love is alloyed with self. He will yearn for the day when faith gives way to sight, when the flesh is finally and fully mortified, when the Spirit holds unopposed sway over every faculty of the soul, and when good works are performed not with struggle and imperfection but with the effortless perfection of a nature that has been made wholly new. The Confession's doctrine is not meant to make you comfortable with your imperfection; it is meant to make you grieve over it and long for its end. You will never be satisfied with your obedience in this life, and you should not be. The dissatisfaction is a gift. It is the Spirit's testimony that you were made for something better, that the half-obedience and quarter-love you render now is not the last word on your sanctification, and that a day is coming when you will serve God without the drag of indwelling sin, without the conflict Paul describes, without the falling short that every honest Christian confesses. Let that hope sustain you in the battle. The imperfection is real, but it is temporary. The holiness toward which you press is real, and it is eternal. And the Saviour who began the good work in you will be faithful to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who dwellest in light unapproachable and whose holiness is the standard before which the heavens are not clean, we come before Thee confessing that our best works are as filthy rags and our most devoted obedience falls short of what Thy law requires. We have not loved Thee with all our heart, nor our neighbour as ourselves. Even when we have done what Thou commandest, we have done it with divided attention, mixed motives, and lingering reluctance. Our prayers wander, our charity seeks recognition, our patience is thin and our forgiveness is measured. If Thou shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? We bless Thee that there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared, and that the ground of our acceptance is not the perfection of our works but the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, counted as ours through faith alone. We thank Thee that when we had no surplus of merit to offer, Christ offered a surplus of obedience so complete, so boundless, so divinely perfect, that it avails for every sinner who trusts in Him. Teach us to rest there, not occasionally but continually, not as a doctrine we assent to but as a refuge we inhabit. Keep us, we beseech Thee, from the pride that imagines we have done more than duty requires, and from the despair that imagines our imperfect works are worthless in Thy sight. By Thy Spirit, enable us to see our works honestly — to acknowledge their imperfection without excusing it, to grieve over their defect without being crushed by it, and to bring them daily to the cross where alone they are cleansed and accepted. Grant us grace to press forward, not as those who have already attained but as those who follow after, straining toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. And hasten, O Lord, the day when we shall serve Thee without the warfare Paul described, without the falling short the Confession confesses, without the sin that clings to every prayer and every deed, and shall see Thee face to face and be made like Thee, for we shall see Thee as Thou art. Until that day, keep us humble, keep us hungry, keep us clinging to Christ alone. We ask it in His name and for His glory. Amen.