THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

People who consider themselves Christians, may find themselves in one of three different places, where it comes to their perspective on the subject of good works or living a life of holiness.  I want to talk to you this morning about those three conditions and I have given a name to each of them. As you may have noticed, the title of this mornings sermon is the good, the bad and the ugly.  But I’m actually going to deal with them in the reverse order. The ugly, the bad and the good.  The ugly represents a place we definitely do not want to be, because according to the scriptures, this is not even a place of true Christianity. The bad is a place where we can be as Christians, but yet it’s not a healthy place to be. The good, of course, is exactly where we want to be and exactly where we need to be, if we want to grow and have the joy of our salvation.

THE UGLY - Giving lip service to God. - No conversion of the heart.

If we find ourselves in the ugly place, it is generally due to one of two different causes. The first one being that we have responded to the gospel only with our heads, but never allowed it to reach our hearts. Therefore, our hearts are not really broken over our sinfulness and we are unable to really appreciate the great debt that was paid for us, by Christ’s death on the cross. We see the need for this represented in 2 Cor. 7:10a which says, 

“Godly sorrow brings repentance which leads to salvation and leaves no regret.”

Without this experience, we make a confession of faith because someone has convinced us that this is what we need to do in order to avoid eternal punishment and for some, they may believe this is all they ever need. It doesn’t reach their heart because they don’t consider the fact that they were such an offense to God and they don’t consider the great sacrifice that was made to redeem them from their guilt. The understanding of this ought to break the heart of anyone who truly receives it.

But many are content to just say a sinners prayer, believing they’re safe and so they go their way and they continue to live for themselves.  Therefore, they have come to Christ with nothing more than a mental assent and their hearts are never converted. As a result, they really only give lip service to God and they carry a dead faith that has no real desire to please God. The gospel of Christ needs to touch both your head and your heart in order to change who you are, and make no mistake, the true children of God will be changed.

But how do we know the heart needs to be changed? What’s wrong with the heart we have? In Matthew 15:19 Jesus had this to say about the heart of mankind. 

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 

If such a heart remains unchanged, how can we say we know God?

I make this contention, if someone can talk you into salvation, someone else may be able to talk you out of it. But if the heart is converted as well as the head, this gives you an anchor that will not be moved. Let us consider Deut. 30:6 which says,

The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.

Free grace - is much more intentional and is generally a response to an overly legalistic gospel. It comes as an act of rebellion against those who teach that our struggles with sin may cause us to become unacceptable to God. That of course is also a mistaken notion, and I’ll deal more with that later. But for now, the problem that we have are those people who over react to the legalist gospel by inventing a totally permissive gospel.

Easy believism is the "popular slogan for the view that one simply has to believe in order to be saved and that there is no corresponding need for a committed life of Christian discipleship." The result is that sanctification is divorced from justification, and discipleship is seen as a path that some Christians follow, but not others. The term carnal Christian is used to describe such a supposed Christian, who once made a "decision" but has not continued in discipleship. Names applied to this doctrine by opponents include no-lordship and cheap grace as it suggests that "accepting Jesus" does not involve any further commitments. Proponents of this view, on the other hand, prefer the term the "free grace" to describe their position. Easy-believism is also said to overemphasize the doctrine of assurance of salvation at the expense of personal authenticity.

The part that really bothers me here is the idea that you can divorce justification and sanctification. True justification always results in on going sanctification. For sanctification is both instant and progressive. I’ll go into more about that later, but they have this idea that you can be a Christian without making Jesus the Lord of your life and they have this idea that you can be a Christian without living a life of Christian discipleship.

But you might say, the Bible says we are saved by grace through faith and not by works so why is this a problem? Well, it’s true you can’t be saved by works and it’s true you must be saved by faith, but it’s also true that any faith which does not produce good deeds is a dead faith that is powerless to save you.  

James 2:14-17

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

So the very idea that you can follow Christ without being his disciple and you can follow Christ without making him the Lord of your life is ridiculous and completely without a biblical foundation. But they will tell you these things are optional and they will tell you there are rewards for those who do follow Christ, but there is really no obligation to anything other than even a passing moment of faith in Christ as savior.

So regardless of whether the people in this condition come by it as the result of lip service and an unconverted heart or whether they come by it as the result of reacting to a heavily legalistic gospel, the problem is the same. They have accepted the idea that a confession of faith is all that matters and that a life devoted to godless pursuits will be of no eternal consequence. Discipleship has become optional. The only thing that matters is that passing moment of faith. Fruitless though it may be. But let us consider the scriptures on this matter.

1 John 1:6

If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.

1 John 2:3-4

We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.  The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

1 John 2:15-17

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.

1 John 3:9-10

No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.

Now let us take a look at the book of James to see what our attitude about sin should be.

James 4:7-10

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

 
Now this brings us to our discussion of the “THE BAD”. The bad comes when we go beyond that Godly sorrow which led us to repentance and we enter into self condemnation and perpetual guilt. The bad is the result of failing to understand our place in Christ and his grace. Again, this is often due to an overly legalistic gospel which adds the law to the gospel and suggests that our struggles with sin, just might make us unacceptable to God. Therefore, good hearted believers who are doing their best to overcome the temptations of this world, are left feeling like they can never be quite good enough. But this is not the gospel we find in the Bible and this is not the level of grace we find in the Bible.

We must first understand that we were not saved by our works and therefore, we can not become unsaved by our works. We were, rather, saved by grace through faith and this not of ourselves, it is the gift of God, so no one can boast. Once we have been truly converted to Christ, heart, mind and soul, our place is secured by our faith in Him and no struggle with sin can take that away from us. If it could, we would surely have no hope. Let us consider Romans 7:14 which says,

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

And 21-25

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So here we see Paul wrestling with the fact that he still struggles with the old sin nature and he hates the fact that he does. He sees that there is still this wretched place inside of him and he begs the question “Who will save me from this…?” But in the end, he rests in the knowledge that Jesus already has. And so, we see him proclaim, as we begin chapter eight.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.  And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

Yes, our lives must bear fruit as we have already established and if we are truly in Christ, there is no doubt that they will, but we must also understand that sanctification is both instant and progressive. That is to say that when we are saved, we cross over from death to life. We become a new creation in Christ. The old has gone, the new has come. Our sins are no more, they are forgotten, they are as far as the east is from the west. We are in that moment declared innocent before God and we stand that way, by grace, through faith.

This is a righteousness that we gain because the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us, on our behalf, that we may gain the reward for his perfect and holy life.  But this does not address the practical reality of changing who we are in the natural sense. None the less, God’s grace is big enough to cover that as well, and this is where progressive sanctification comes into play. Progressive sanctification is where the righteousness of Christ is imparted to us, by and by, through the years, throughout our lives. Changing us and making us more and more like him.  Let us not forget the promise we find in Philippians 1:6 which says, 

“He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”  

We see further evidence for progressive sanctification when we look at 2 Cor. 3:18 which says,  

And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. 

And our part in all of this is nothing more and nothing less than what we are told in Philippians 3:12-14 which says…

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

We must understand that moving on toward perfection is a process that takes time. And we may never be perfect, but we will always be perfectly forgiven. And yes, we are going to feel bad when we sin, but that’s a good thing, it means we are being convicted to be better than we were. But we should never forget the promises we find in God’s word. Let’s go back to 1 John.

1:7

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

Ah, yes, the blood. We have to remember that we are under the blood.

2:1-2

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

So in the end, we must come to understand that if we have given ourselves to Christ, heart, mind and soul, if we have made him the Lord of our life, and if we are trusting in his work on the cross, we must not return again to trusting in our own works to find the assurance of our salvation. Our good works come as the Holy Spirit works with us, and changes us, by and by, to become ever more and more like Christ himself. But they can add nothing, no, not one single thing to the finished work of Christ.

And we must remember that when we fail, it’s just our failure.  It doesn’t take anything away from the finished work of Christ. It doesn’t reduce his love for us, it doesn’t make him angry with us and it doesn’t change our place in God’s grace.
 

My friends, when we have set our hearts and minds on the things above, we will, in time, reflect the glory of God. Jesus told us, remain in me and I will remain in you. He didn’t put any conditions on that. He didn’t need to. He is the vine and we are the branches. The branches will bear good fruit. It’s a matter of fact.

So what about “THE GOOD”? Where does the good come into my message? The good is found when Christ is truly the center of our lives. When we leave behind the affections of this world and strive toward the things of God. The good is found when we learn to love the conviction of the Holy Spirit, which urges on to ever increasing glory. And yet, we refuse to condemn ourselves for not being able to do that, which God himself has already done for us. If we could have done it for ourselves, we would have never needed Jesus.

 
But we do need him. We need to be washed in his blood and we need to be under his blood. In this, we will find rest for souls, peace for our minds and joy in our hearts.

Turn with me to Hebrews 9:13-14

The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!

That’s your freedom my friends. Not a freedom to sin, but freedom to live a life unto God, no longer condemned by sin.

Always give God your best. But remember, perfection comes only by the blood of Christ and not by anything you or I may try and add to it.