Ask the Pastor

 

The Question: If God gets all the glory for our salvation, does he get all the credit for anything good we do?  I'm wondering if sin is the only thing that defines our personality, since it's our fault that we are sinful, and it is our fault if we go to the fiery pit.

 

Pastor’s Reply: There are at least a couple of things to consider in answering this question. It is true that we are held accountable for our sin (which is really the absence of righteousness), while God is the one who rightly deserves credit for the righteous things we do in the sense that he is the source of those things and in the sense that he is the one supplies the fount from which such righteousness springs (faith). When we speak this way we are acknowledging the fact that we cannot make ourselves “right” before God. It is only by God’s grace that we are able to do truly righteous things because he has declared us “not guilty” [justified] of our wrongs through Christ.

 

Yet God also heaps honor upon us for our works when he speaks of them. The parable of the talents is one such example. The servant who took the 5 talents the master gave and earned 5 more, is glorified by his master. It wasn’t earning 5 talents that made him “right” with his master – but in utilizing his gifts and abilities in service to his master, his master expressed his appreciation and heaped praise and honor on that servant for doing so.

 

That is also true when it comes to the good we do. We don’t take credit for those good things as the reason for having a “right” relationship with God. Rather our good works are evidence that God is already at work in our hearts and lives. But we are not passive puppets in those righteous things as though God is pulling the strings within us and we have no part in what takes place. God made us as rational creatures with our own will. It is God’s desire that our will participates fully and freely in what he desires. It is only by saving faith in God that such a scenario is possible. And where that scene holds true – the good that we do as God works in us – is good that God praises us for and heaps his honor upon us, sometimes in this life, but most surely in the life to come.

 

Our sinfulness, of course, is not something God desires and therefore the “credit” for that disease belongs to us (and sin’s “author,” Satan). 

 

The human creature was not designed to be defined by sin. Spiritual re-birth is proof positive that sin need not define us. Rather God would have righteousness define our moral character. Personality as it relates to things that God has neither commanded nor forbidden (e.g. our interests regarding food, art, activities, manner of expression, etc.) is an expression of the variety that God has built into his creation. The Apostle Paul talks about that variety in using the metaphor of the body when it comes to spiritual gifts within the family of God (cf. 1 Corinthians 12). In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were both morally righteous and at the same time they were two unique individuals with regard to their personalities. The same will be true in heaven. We will all be morally righteous, that is, we will never sin. But we will also be unique individuals with our own, unique God-given mixture of gifts and talents. We have a taste of that already here on earth among the family of believers, in that we are made righteous through the blood of Christ and yet that doesn’t result in our becoming personality clones of one another. We retain those things that are a unique mixture of God-given personality-gifts but that mixture is purified of the immoral taint of sin.