We'll conclude that song a little later in our service. Now I invite you to turn in the back of your Trinity Psalter hymnals to the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 24. Lord's Day 24, you can find on page 882, page 882, in the back of your Trinity hymnals. It has three questions and answers. We'll read responsively. So I'll read the questions and we'll respond together with these answers. It says there on the bottom of page 882, Lord's Day 24, this is question 62. Why can't our good works be our righteousness before God, or at least a part of our righteousness? because the righteousness which can pass God's judgment must be entirely perfect and must in every way measure up to the divine law. But even our best works in this life are all imperfect and stained with sin. How can our good works be said to merit nothing when God promises to reward them in this life and the next? This reward is not merited, it is a gift of grace. But doesn't this teaching make people indifferent and wicked? No, it is impossible for those grafted into Christ by true faith not to produce fruits of gratitude. So far from our catechism. And I invite you to open in the back of your Bibles then to Ephesians, I should say the latter part, to Ephesians chapter two. Ephesians 2, we'll read the first 10 verses there focusing particularly on the closing part of that section, verses 9 and 10. Ephesians 2, beginning at verse 1, this is God's holy word. and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. This is God's holy word. Dear congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, if you made some pancakes in your kitchen in the morning, you know, and instead of serving them on plates, you just sort of toss them out to the people at the table, it'd have to be a pretty good shot, right? Not overshoot, not undershoot, not, you know, the wrong consistency so that it would flop off, you know, even if you hit the plate. It'd have to be just right. And there's a lot of anxiety sometimes among Christians, and maybe for good reason, about how we talk about good works, because we want to be very careful about the way we speak about them. We don't want the disaster of throwing our food all over the place. We want it to be exactly where it should be. With the right biblical trajectory, as it were, with the right flight path and the right speed and the right angle, we have every reason to have joy about God's reward, our good works and the rewards that God promises. as it were, our payback, our due, our crown, our wages, our earnings. These are some of the terms of God's teaching about the rewards that God will give. And there's been a lot of distortion of this concept in a way that is worldly and it has turned the discussion of rewards and of sort of the gifts of God, it's sort of turned them sour so that we're worried about the misuse of them so much that we kind of quiet down about the proper a discussion of it. Um, you know, so the crash of pride is so awful that we're, we're concerned then, uh, about, you know, misusing something. So we leave it alone. And, uh, the, the fact of the scripture is that God rewards our righteous works according to his gracious merit in Christ Jesus. We're, we're made for good works. This passage says, but it's in the proper understanding. It's all a gift of the grace of God. So God rewards our righteous works according to his gracious merit in Christ Jesus. And we wanna talk first about man's impossible merit. to have the right approach. We want to approach the way that the catechism has shown us, the very structure of it helps us. We approach this question with a proper understanding of our sin and misery. We've already worked our way through them. We have to understand that it's impossible for us to merit according to our sin and according to our old nature. And even now, our works are stained with sin so that man's merit is impossible, but the grace of God overcomes this problem. The catechism has warned us to look closely and carefully at the truly devastating problem of our sin. And one of the most recurring errors against God's word has to do with this very question, you know, why can't Why can't we do actions or works or good deeds that restore a right relationship between us and God? Why is it that we as sinners are unable to do anything that restores and merits God's favor? You know, isn't there some program that we can get on? Isn't there some direction, you know, that you can point me in and I can fix this problem? And our issue is that we're, you know, we're fixers, we're solvers, we're doers. And so, you know, we sort of say like, look, you know, I can accomplish a lot. And if you allow me, sort of cut me loose, to do the task, give me a task to do, I think that I can fix this or I can make a lot of progress in solving this problem, the problem of my sin and this distance and estrangement from God. This is kind of an arc stumbling block, the true stumbling block for persons of a worldly mind. Can I fix this? Isn't there a way to do this with my own strength? And the scripture is so plain that we're dead in our sins, that we all fall short of the glory of God. No one is good, not even one. Think of Romans 3. We're helpless and hopelessly depraved. Everything we do tainted with sin, none of it measuring up to God's perfect law. And so sort of undaunted, we go back to the drawing board. We're like, OK, I can't fully fix the problem, but at least I can make a lot of progress. I may have missed perfection, but we all miss perfection after all. Some of us miss it by a lot more than others. Thankfully, that's not me. It's kind of the attitude you hear. Why can't my works at least help? Why can't they at least be a boost? And the problem with this view is like, you know, we're looking now for like a percentage grade on a test or sort of like the harvest in a field that's been damaged. You know, if redemption is like a grade on a test, we expect that God would say, well, you know, you did a great job. You know, you got 89%. That's not zero. And it's certainly not an F. You know, this is like a B or a B plus. And so, you know, I love you so much. that I'll pick up that extra 11% and you can make it. So we have some sort of hybrid type of thinking related to this first question in the catechism. Can't we at least make up a part? Or how about the field that's been damaged? There's been a flood, or there's been a fire, or there's been some kind of blight. And so half of your beautiful cornfield, I'm from Indiana, half of your beautiful cornfield was ruined. What a shame, but the other half is harvestable. The other half is workable and it could be gathered and stored up and stored away. There's nothing wrong with it. And so again, why can't there be some kind of scenario where our righteousness can be all or at least part earned through good works? And this is where our understanding of God in His perfection is so critical. The Word teaches us that with God there is no darkness at all, no spot, as it were, no blemish whatsoever. Think of 1 John 5. There's no darkness in Him at all. That His consuming fire will destroy all wickedness and refine everything good. That God's word tells us that his purity and holiness, you know, caused even the holiest men in the scripture to like turn white as a ghost and fall flat on their face. Think of Daniel, think of Isaiah before God in his glory. God will never tolerate or look favorably on the slightest speck of evil. And with that in mind, you know, we maybe would gain a better understanding when we think of the unrelenting holiness of God, which also happens to be sort of the theme of our worship for today. We're gonna look at 1 Samuel 5 and 6, and think about, you know, sort of the unrelenting holiness of God and its effect on the people, and its effect on Israel and their enemies, for that matter, and even idol gods of the Philistines. This week, I was watching the news. Maybe you were watching. There was the first spacewalk, the furthest from Earth that it had been done in 50 years. And so if you watch the video, it looked like they did almost nothing. They just kind of climbed up halfway, and they were holding a rail outside of the ship. But when you think about the risk that it is, then you think something else. If there's the tiniest imperfection in their helmet, If there's the tiniest imperfection in their suit, it kills them. The slightest error or miscalculation or flaw is deadly to the person who's out there and there's nothing between the vacuum of space but this suit. And when they described it that way, I said, you know, that really, that makes a lot of sense. Like, even though it doesn't look, like, shouldn't they be doing some tricks? I thought, like, oh, the guy would just want to float and, you know, make it dramatic. But they held right on the rail. And I'm like, you know, I wonder, I wonder if I was in their shoes if I would do anything else. Probably not. But even the slightest flaw would be death. Or imagine your beautiful dinner on the plate. We talk about this sometimes. And they say, oh, this dinner is like 99.9% pure. So go ahead and dig in. But you're like, wait, why did you say 99 point? Why couldn't you just say it was fully pure, clean, perfect? It's like, well, there's metal shavings spread throughout all the food equally. But it's only 0.01%. So dig in. And you're like, what? I don't think I want to eat any of it. If it's not fully pure, if it's not fully clean, 98% on a test, amazing. 2% mold in your food. Here's your fork. Go ahead. This would help us understand, in some practical way, the idea of the purity, the purity that we need, the purity that we desire. And if those lesser things are true, then how much more our God, who is pure altogether, and it's all or nothing. That's the point. It's all or nothing. Wholeness is wholeness, and everything else is everything else. And until we take this view from the scripture, we will never understand our salvation. That Jesus came to fulfill all righteousness. He came to make purity and atonement, to make propitiation, to satisfy and deliver total righteousness from God through faith. and without such righteousness, which we lacked, we lacked that perfection, we would never be able to be right with God. We would never stand before Him. We could not know Him except in His wrath. And this then is the point. Only by taking this biblical perspective will we ever be ready to evaluate the Bible teaching on good works. We'll twist our good works to be a statement about our own righteousness. We'll twist our good works to be some kind of platform for us to stand on, to impress God or to be right with him. And all of that reeks in God's nostrils. All of it is an offense to him. But properly understood, our good works are pleasing to him, a sweet, as it were, sacrifice, an aroma to him. So Ephesians 2.10, it gives us insight into the mystery of our reward. Ephesians talks about good works, but from a humble perspective, from a perspective that stands in awe of God, we were created by God to do good works. They're not to be thrown out. They're not to be whispered about. We're to vigorously work for God's glory. We're made to sow in righteousness and reap rewards of righteousness. We are God's workmanship created specifically to do an action. And I think of how my mom was clearing out her house. She's moving. And it's like, oh, there's stuff from when you guys were kids. And it's like the action figure that only does one thing. It karate chops, it does one thing and one thing only. You pull the lever and that's what it does. And we are Christians that are made for good works. When we're wound up, According to the energy of God's Spirit, it's to produce good fruit, good works, to walk in Jesus' way, carrying our cross. We are reborn, remade, recreated in the Holy Spirit because of the power of Christ. And his redemption then points us to a new life of freedom in Jesus. That's how we approach the law. You are set free. You were slaves, but now you're set free for a purpose, to live in right fellowship with God. God did the freeing, and now you have this life. It's given to you, it's granted to you. your freedom. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, great is your reward in heaven. These beatitudes, you are blessed, and when you suffer, even my sufferings, great is your reward in heaven. When you own Jesus and shine for him, even in the midst of opposition and hatred and mockery, great is your reward in heaven. That's upstream swimming. That's uphill walking. It's not natural to this world, but it is the new nature of the Christian. When you humble yourself in a world that is defined by angry people, you know, they kill each other over a traffic stop, defined by anger, defined by money-chasing, defined by pleasure-seeking, then we are living a new kind of life, one that God has afforded to us at the greatest cost, that is, even the very life of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the point. We are made for good works at an extravagant cost. We're refitted, we're renewed for this kind of life. So we don't need to make a big case for the fact that reward is not only mentioned but emphasized across the scripture. We should desire, we should want, we should be hungry for God's reward and for God's praise as we live the life that God has prepared for us. We don't have to apologize for it, it's there. The crown, the prize, the goal. In Matthew 19, Jesus says, those who would give up houses and lands and so on, their family, as it were, for his sake, they will receive a hundredfold an eternal life. We shouldn't doubt that there is reward. Instead, we want to know the character of this reward, which makes a big difference. So Ephesians removes the boasting. of question one and informs everything we need to know about question two, right? Question one is, do I have anything to offer God? And we're turning out our pockets and we're finding we don't have anything. Well now, how can our good works be said to merit nothing? So they don't merit anything for salvation, for our redemption, true. They're said to merit nothing When God promises to reward them in this life and the next, this reward is not merited, it is a gift of grace. Comes through so well. In fact, this is modeled seemingly right after Ephesians 2, though we don't see it listed. There's so many passages that speak to this. It's a reward of grace and not of merit. It's so critical. Ephesians removes all boasting and now we're dealing with instead the pure grace of God as Christians. God supplies the saving faith and every fruit that comes from it, every good work. He saves us and prepares us for a new kind of life. And then every single product of that life, every fruit of it, is a gift of His grace. That's incredible. He does it all out of the bounty of His kindness and generosity and goodness. And the generous rewards that He gives, even they are out of His kindness and blessing. Doesn't this make us indifferent, lazy, wicked, as it were? No, it's impossible that we should do anything but produce these good fruits. The apostle warns us to remember that boasting is foolish. It's very foolish. So God supplies, as it were, the wood, and then he supplies the paint, and he supplies all of the fixtures and features and so on, and this house is built And then we boast, you know, we have built this house. when every part of it, all the supply, everything that was needed to make this structure, it came from him. And then we're forced to admit, well, the life and the breath and the skill and the energy and the will and the deterrent, everything that it takes to do the work, he supplies. From what angle, from what part of this can we boast? It would be crazy to brag about our skills, to brag about the structure we built, Instead, we should be giving all glory to God. It should make us love Him and thank Him all the more. And we add on to that. that he does bless and reward our labors and craftsmanship because he truly loves us and he truly cares with deep and gracious devotion. He is like a father in that way, that even though your children, as it were, depend on you for everything, then you still are pleased with them and you still are encouraging to them about the work that they do that's sort of all out of your side. It's amazing grace. You know, what do people usually do? What does a man do when other people tell him things he already knows? You know, somebody starts to, you know, go on and on about something. You already know the answer. You already know what they're going to say. Your eyes start to roll up into the back of your head like, oh, you know, it's like this is a waste of time. I already know. What do people do, right, with a movie they've already seen or a show they've already watched? Oh, you know, half of us fall asleep or we, get disinterested, boring. Is that it? I've already seen it, I already know. God loves us and shows interest in every service we bring to him. and then is willing to reward that service, and come close to us, as it were, close to our lives to know us, and to care about us, and to encourage us on in Christian living, and Christian obedience, and Christian observance, and rewarding those features, as it were, in our lives to grow our faith all the more. What an interested father, and what an intimate relationship, and what kindness he shows directly to us. You have here represented in question 64 a historic attack on this doctrine, particularly the attack was from the Roman Catholic Church, and still today from many Arminian churches, that such teaching will make Christians lazy. The teaching of God's election, that he saves us to the uttermost and that we have complete assurance and security of salvation. And now this teaching that within that assurance, as we live a redeemed life, that the good works we do, that they are not meritorious, but they are something that is purely rewarded of God's grace. So there's no hybrid. You do for God, he does for you. Won't that make us lazy? You've got no skin in the game. You've got nothing invested. If you don't have to do good works to earn some of your salvation, then you'll be the laziest kind of Christians. There won't be any motivation. There won't, as it were, be any fear of God. And that's the attack. That's the slander of this teaching. Since we can't earn anything from God, we won't be vigorous. We won't be zealous. But these challenges do not take into account the radical nature of faith in Jesus Christ. They don't take into account the radical rebirth that Jesus teaches and the renewal that caused Nicodemus to sort of scratch his head and say, you know, how can a man be born again? That kind of slander of this teaching is of a similar sort of head-scratching character to the mystery of faith, when we believe that true faith lives with zeal. It lives in the power of the Holy Spirit. It lives with energy. that is supplied by God. We were made for this. This is what we are. So true faith seeks Jesus the way that fish can only live and swim in water. We need to be constantly within Christ and living in the power of his spirit. We are planted and rooted in a way that's pulling up the nutrients and pulling up all of the nourishment of the vine as God's branches. And so, of course, the slander, the shoe fits for some, right? For weak, for sad, for anemic, selfish kind of imitations of faith. They won't work where we see no self-serving reward. And that's a great indictment of the Christianity of our time. Of course, we're lazy. Of course, we're Christian consumers. Of course, we come to be served rather than to serve. And that is the selfish pride of our time, you know, sort of painted over lightly on the outside with a Christian covering. And so we see so much of it. Of course, there's this complaint. We need people to be motivated. Otherwise, yeah, they'll just be sort of selfish, lazy people. Well, we agree that that could be true. But true faith would suffer anything to know Christ and to cling to him, which is the true teaching of the apostles. true faith will carry a cross after him, which has seemingly no immediate benefit, no immediate reward, and yet we are certain that it leads to life, because Jesus carried his cross and died, but then rose again and is glorified, and this is our faith, it clings to him. And so, suffering service, we accept. service that brings us no immediate love or affection or thanks or recognition from others, we accept in the name of Jesus. And faith that carries the cross won't balk at these things or turn aside from insults or from difficult service. And the argument is answered simply. It's an argument about what we are. Think of the children's toy, like you pull the string, the dog goes woof. The cat goes meow. We've got toys for Gabriel. We've got our new crop of toys for a new baby. The cow says moo. And the Christian goes love. The Christian loves God and loves neighbor. and serves accordingly, that is lawfully. The Christian goes love. The Christian, the believer as it were, serves. The faithful grow. It's what we are. I listened to an interview of a notorious sinner of our generation. I won't say the name right now. But they were giving an interview, and they were somebody who was far from God. And so the interviewer was asking, tell us about what you do now. Tell us about the things that you promote now as a Christian. It was sort of like, do a plug for Christianity. and how you do it. And he answered so well, I was very impressed and I felt that he had truly grasped the gospel because he said, no, no, no, it's sort of like you asked the wrong question. He said, I'm not on a program and I'm not sort of pursuing a brand of faith that I want to promote to other people. I am a different person, I'm changed, God changed me. And I'm not doing a sort of a set of tasks. I am different. I'm reborn, is what he meant, of course. And so he was trying to describe how the Christian doesn't do a new program. Like, wow, I'm on a new diet. Feeling fabulous on my new diet. I am on a new diet. Didn't feel fabulous. for what it's worth. Anyways, we're not on a new craze. We are something else because of Jesus. And we are created for good works. The works themselves are so natural to the new life, to the new identity, that we don't even focus on them. We can only quack because we are ducks. We can only moo because we are the cows. We are the Christians, so we love, and we forgive, and we serve, and we think it a small thing. to have less so that others can have more, or to give so that others can be filled instead of ourselves, or to do the will of God over our own will, and to follow the authority of those who are over us in authority, because it's right in the eyes of our King. We are something else reborn in Jesus. That was very encouraging to me. Jesus taught in Matthew 20, whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Now we're understanding about our works when we have him at the very forefront, when we have him in our vision. He came to serve, not to be served. And his disciples would do the same, particularly the disciples that asked to be seated here at his right and left hand. And he came not to, as it were, fill himself, but to empty himself, even giving his life as the ransom so that others could live. Everything else comes accordingly down the pathway of the Christian life. God promises that as we give, he pours out his blessings on us in such a way that we can't truly prosper unless we model his generosity, unless we model the openness with which he gives. You can't be forgiven when you refuse to forgive others, he taught. And forgiveness has to come naturally to us. We are forgiven a certain way. That's the very nature of our start in the faith, to repent and believe and receive all of his forgiveness and what is more, the riches of the love of Christ. And now for us, quack, quack, quack, we forgive. We are different. We do differently. We make ourselves less and God lifts us up. We submit to authority, wives submitting to their own husbands, not because of some male-female power struggle, egalitarian power struggle. We submit because of him, Jesus completely humbling himself. and demonstrating what kind of dynamics will there be between the church that is his bride, all of us together, and the husband, Jesus, the bridegroom. And so wives submit to their own husbands, and it's not a shame. It's not, you know, we're slandered as living under the thumb and the oppression of toxic masculinity and so on. What a recipe for misery if everything in this world is a power struggle so that we can get what's ours. And that's the way that it's portrayed in race. It's the way that it's portrayed in gender. It's the way that it's portrayed in so many things, the rich to the poor, et cetera. There's this bitter, divisive power struggle, and you've got to get what's yours. and we are in a different category. We are remade so that we don't have to submit or subject our minds to that kind of miserable, rat-racing, scraping, biting life. We have the gracious gifts of God as our own, and God gives generously. And so we're able, we're able to submit children to our parents. We're able to submit to authority in the church, to our own elders. We're able to submit even to the governing authorities. And there is dysfunction and trouble in our nation, no doubt. But our attitude has got to be one of gentleness. Our conduct has to be the model conduct for the citizens of this nation. Because Jesus is our King, and because Jesus, to put it even more closely, He is our head and we are the body. We're going where He's going. And that is down a righteous pathway, and a pathway that leads to life, not to rebellion, not to degradation, not to death. We are free, we are free. And so even now, we can do as Jesus did. We can live even the lifestyle of slaves. We can live the lifestyle that's so low and carry our cross after him. We have no fear, no fear at all. because the gracious reward of God is ours. God has made us his own sons and daughters. God has the richest kingdom and the richest rewards and the crown of glory prepared for those who honor him in their lowliness. And Jesus has shown us that our future is bright, that our future is golden, that our future is full in every way. Amen, let's pray. Our Father in heaven, how glorious it is to meditate on your truth. There is nothing that we can lose. There is nothing that we suffer. There is no part of life where we fear that we will come up dry, come up empty. When the time comes, Lord, all of our sacrifices, all of our service, all of our good works, they will prove that they were worth it 100 times, 1,000 times over. Because Lord, you stand behind every promise to make good. And Lord, you have already poured out the life of your son Jesus for us, the richest sacrifice. What would you withhold of all your promises? What would you withhold since the life of Jesus is ours? Lord, we have all of it, and so we can have confidence now. Help us then, Lord, we pray, to put our pride aside completely, boasting only in Christ and what He's done for us, receiving His gifts with joy, sharing them with others. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.