Created for the Works and Never Once Saved by Them

There is a question a careful person cannot answer about their own life, and it has kept better people than me awake.

The question is: why did I do that.

Last week he did a good thing. He gave up an evening, or he drove somebody somewhere, or he stayed behind when everybody left and stacked the chairs. Nobody made him. He was glad to.

And underneath the gladness there is a second thing that he cannot get a clear look at, and it feels like relief. Not the relief of a job done. Something more like the relief of an account being kept in order, and he cannot tell whether that second thing was there the whole time or whether he noticed it afterward and invented it.

So he does not know whether he loves God or whether he is paying God, and there is no test he can run, and if he stops doing the good things to find out, he will simply be a man who stopped doing good things.

Ephesians 2 puts the whole thing in three verses, in an order almost nobody has had explained to them.

The first two verses close the door completely

Start with the pair everybody knows, and let them be as absolute as they are.

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, King James Version)

Not of yourselves. The gift of God. Not of works. Three closures in two verses, and each one shuts a different door.

And then the reason: lest any man should boast. Which tells you what God was protecting against, and it is worth noticing that He was not protecting against laziness. The danger named in the text is boasting, which is a danger that only exists for people who are actually doing things.

So this passage is not aimed at the man doing nothing. It is aimed at the man doing a great deal, which is the person reading this.

You are saved by a gift, and the door on every other route is closed by name. Ephesians 2:8 says it is the gift of God and verse 9 says not of works, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 1:13, that a believer is sealed rather than kept on a running account.

Verse 10 comes after verse 9, and the order is the teaching

Here is the verse that hardly ever gets read with the other two, and its position is everything.

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)

Unto good works. Not by them. Unto them, which is a direction word. The works are downstream.

And created in Christ Jesus unto them, which means the works are what a person was made for rather than what a person is charged for. A branch is made for fruit. Nobody bills the branch.

If verse 10 came before verse 9 the whole shape would flip and the Christian life would be a job with a review. It comes after, and that ordering is deliberate, and it means the works in a believer's life are evidence of a completed transaction and never an installment on an open one.

You are His workmanship, made for the works rather than assessed by them. Ephesians 2:10 puts the works after the gift and calls a person the workmanship rather than the worker, and it is by the Spirit, Philippians 2:13, that God works in a person both to will and to do.

The word before ordained does something to the anxiety

There is a clause at the end of verse 10 that most people read past and it is the one that answers the sleeplessness.

Which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

The works were prepared. In advance. By Him. Which means the good thing done last week was not something a man thought up to keep himself covered; it was something laid out ahead of him that he walked into.

Read the picture: a path with things already on it, and a person walking. He is not generating the path. He is not responsible for how long it is. He is walking, and the things are there.

That does not settle the motive question by itself. But it moves the weight off a man's shoulders long enough for him to look at it, because a person who believes he is manufacturing his own standing every week has no spare capacity to examine anything.

You are walking in works that were prepared before you arrived at them. Ephesians 2:10 says God hath before ordained that we should walk in them, and it is the Spirit who leads, Romans 8:14, rather than a person laying out their own road.

What Scripture says the actual motive is

Since the motive cannot be read from the inside, it is worth hearing what Scripture names as the engine, because it is not duty and it is not fear.

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead. (2 Corinthians 5:14)

Constraineth. The word carries the sense of being hemmed in, pressed, moved along by something with force behind it. And the thing doing the pressing is a love that belongs to Him rather than an enthusiasm that belongs to us.

And Titus says what He did it for.

Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. (Titus 2:14)

Zealous of good works. The zeal is the outcome of the purifying, in that sentence, and the purifying is His verb. He did not save people and then hope they would become willing. He redeemed them in order to produce exactly that willingness.

You are moved by a love that belongs to Him rather than by an enthusiasm you have to keep up. 2 Corinthians 5:14 says the love of Christ constraineth us, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 5:5, by whom the love of God is shed abroad in a heart rather than generated in one.

The honest answer to the motive question

Here is what I would say to somebody who cannot tell whether last week was love or payment, and it will not be satisfying and I believe it is true.

It was probably both.

Almost nothing anybody does has one clean motive in it. A man carries a chair out of love for God and out of habit and out of wanting to be seen doing it and out of not wanting to sit down yet, all in the same four seconds, and he cannot separate those and neither can anybody watching.

That is why Paul says he does not judge his own self, and says it about exactly this.

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self... but he that judgeth me is the Lord. (1 Corinthians 4:3-4)

I judge not mine own self. From the apostle who worked harder than any of them. He declines the audit, and he declines it about himself, and he hands the assessment to somebody with better instruments.

You are not the appointed examiner of your own motives, and being released from that is not carelessness. 1 Corinthians 4:4 has Paul declining that audit by name, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, including the deep things a person cannot get a look at.