Holiness, Legalism, and Grace

Holiness, Legalism, and Grace; Navigating the Narrow Way

Our Gracious Resources in Christ (Part 2)

By Jay Wegter

God is righteous; we are not. How can we be right with God—right with His own righteousness? Christ was given so that guilty sinners might have right-standing with God. It is humbling to our very core that the righteousness God requires must be perfect; therefore we cannot supply a speck of it. It must be supplied by Another, by Christ. This is so closely tied to Who God is. It is man’s pride which keeps him from submitting to God’s righteousness (Rom 10:1-3). A person only knows who God is IF he welcomes the good news of the Gospel. All others have a concept of God that is merely a figment or idol of their imagination. The saving knowledge of God is revealed in the Gospel—namely that God deems a believing sinner righteous apart from works. There is no sliding scale. This humbles us; we cannot contribute to the absolute righteousness which God requires. God is giving His righteousness to believing sinners as a gift. This is God’s preemptive strike at our legalistic hearts (Rom 4:3-8).

When Luther realized that “Salvation is not a reward for the righteous; it is a gift for the guilty. ... That was the pivotal moment; perhaps in all of western civilization. As Martin Luther now comes a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. He now is a dangerous man because he now is equipped with the Gospel of grace and with his potent personality he will be a force for God” (Steve Lawson).

This very doctrine of justification is the pillar upon which the church stands or falls, for no one knows God unless they know Him as the God who deems believing sinners righteous apart from works! This has everything to do with quenching a legalistic bent. Each day we get out of bed either as the Pharisee or the publican—either looking to our works to justify us, or looking to the full sufficiency of Christ’s finished work as our right-standing before God.

In Luther’s introduction to his exceptional commentary on Galatians, he drives home the importance of the difference between passive and active righteousness. The righteousness which justifies us is passive righteousness—we lay hold of Christ by faith and are justified by His righteousness (an alien righteousness outside of us). By contrast, it is an active righteousness by which we pursue progressive sanctification. We put sin to death, bear the fruit of the Spirit, serve God, and are zealous for good works. That is active righteousness at work which is central to our advance of sanctification.

Getting these two kinds of righteousness straight is critical to your fellowship with the Lord and your progress in the faith. One pastor found that this phrase helps sum up the issue: God is impossible to satisfy, but easy to please. Christ’s work of propitiation alone can satisfy God. But we please God by BUILDING on that foundation which God has laid (Christ)—being supported by it (1 Cor 3:10-11). “According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each man must be careful how he builds on it, for no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

God is holy, He is love, He is just, merciful, and Judge. These attributes meet completely ONLY in the cross of Christ. Thus the cross reveals who God is as well as our moral condition. God manifests His love by giving Christ to be our Substitute at Calvary. There is no saving knowledge of God but by the Gospel. We are saved by means of a true knowledge of Him. To know God is to have salvation (John 17:3). All of this is necessary in order to be right with God, accepted by Him, and to walk before Him as an adopted son.

To deny God’s ownership of us is to deny what we owe God. Sinners refuse to believe the Gospel because they find it too humbling because they do not wish to owe all to God and to be His possession, controlled by His goodness, love, and commands. But men will not gladly receive the good news of the Gospel until they take God’s side against their sins. Only then will they see a God-approved righteousness as infinity treasure (2 Cor 5:21; Phil 3:8-11). Christ our penalty; Christ our righteousness— faith in Him alone unites the soul to Christ so that all the benefits of His saving work become ours.

God is made known by how He saves. The Gospel believed imparts the saving knowledge of God—the knowledge we lost in the fall due to sin. By the power of God in the effectual call, the knowledge of the glory of God floods the heart (through the Gospel of Christ crucified for sinners). But Christ, the Son of God given by the Father is the great divider of men. Get the doctrine of salvation wrong, and you do not know God, or have a saving knowledge of Him (you don’t have salvation). So we reiterate: the saving knowledge of God is revealed in Christ and Him crucified.

We preach that there is one Mediator and He has come in the flesh (1 John 1:1-3). The Gospel brings the saving knowledge of God to those who believe BECAUSE it reveals God as just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26). In the Gospel God exerts His almighty power to bridge the gap between His own self-existence and the spiritually dead sinner. The God-man comes in our flesh in order to bring us to God—He is able to do this because He is our suffering substitute, representative, surety, city of refuge, covenant, kinsman redeemer, Lamb of God, covenant, and Shepherd who lays down His life.

It is glorious that God has made justification the foundation of our relationship with Him. How liberating this is that Christ carries our worth, acceptance, and lovability. Righteousness without works is foundational to all of the believer’s relationships. How profound this is in a world of self-justifiers. Righteousness without works alone can deliver us from our addiction to self-differentiation with all of its detrimental consequences.

Christ’s bloody wounds on our behalf open up an endless fountain of living water. By His wounds the riches of the God-head are exported to us. That truth alone stands in stark contrast to all the other religious claims in the world which imagine you can pacify, mollify, and obligate God. Part of Gospel paradox is that God’s grace is totally free, but obligates those who receive it. To be a saved man is to be a sanctified man who is possessed by God (temple, bought with a price, ransomed, redeemed, indwelled).

The saint is always entering (pressing into) the Kingdom of God, but the confidence to press into it come from the promises of grace in the Gospel. In Christ, are hidden all of the treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge (Col 2:3). In Christ we find all the resources needed for living the Christian life. The term or phrase ‘in Christ’ not only means where these resources are found but it also means He is our life and we are hidden in Him.

This union with Him is so comprehensive we can say Christ is our sphere, realm, and domain. Sovereign grace demands that we understand that God has called us to Himself when we were spiritually dead. I cannot accurately say, “I, a totally depraved sinner, inclined my will to seek the holy God of the universe.” In reality I was in my grave clothes of spiritual darkness, deadness, rebellion and pollution. Our text says God called us by His own glory and excellence. Ephesians 1:19-21 says the same magnitude of power necessary to raise Christ from the dead was exercised in order for me to believe (to make me believe).

The ‘mind grenades’ Peter drops on his readers involves the fact that God’s own glory and excellence formed the Gospel promises necessary to give you the knowledge of His glory and excellence. And, the attributes of God stand behind these gospel promises so that they have the power to ultimately bring you into the presence of His glory and excellence.

Thus, these Gospel promises were cast or forged in the foundry of God’s perfections. Our Creator formed these promises in order to harness His glory and excellence so that God’s power might be directed at making you a new creature, a possessor of the divine nature, and an escapee from the world that is by lust. In revealing the majesty and might behind these promises, God is speaking from His throne of glory and He is speaking about your redemption. This is the only vantage point which counts. How God see’s us is ultimate reality, God defines the real and the true. You may not feel like it, but if you are in union with Christ, you are an escapee from the prison bars of the Alcatraz of lust and corruption. Now you permanently house God’s spirit.

Jesus tells His disciples that once the Spirit comes in, in an indwelling way they will become cognizant of the fact that Christ is in the Father, the believer is in Christ, and Christ is in the believer (John 14:20). The Holy Spirit will grant a penetrating awareness of mutual indwelling. He will lift the cover off of the mystery and let us experience the presence of Christ (Jn 14:21; 17:21-23; Col 1:27). Once you were not a people, now you are the people of God, His own possession, a new humanity.

So why is Peter writing these things? He wants his readers to know that these Gospel promises have the almighty power necessary to get you all the way to God—to get you all the way to His glory and excellence—to get you from dust to glory. When we live upon these promises which take us from dust to glory we will get to know more and more of God for His glory, excellence, and majesty are put on display and made known in these Gospel promises.

Then Peter has a theme change in verse 5. The redeemed are the objects of God’s power and might calling and choosing. We are the objects upon which these promises are acting in order to take us from dust to glory. For this very reason you have an all-consuming ethical obligation to have your life conformed to the mold of God’s purposes. When your life is poured into the mold of the Gospel promises, it provides the shape and contours of your walk.

Now this immediately touches our subject of discussion: what constitutes a drift into legalism in our effort to walk uprightly and be zealous for good works? Peter’s introduction is letting us know that all moral exertion is Gospel-promise-driven. We are to pursue Christian character with all our might— but we are to do so with the promises of the Gospel in view. It is holiness by grace.

Peter tells us that if we pursue universal obedience in our walk, there are four guarantees. These guarantees are as follows: 1.) It will make you fruitful and effective in the knowledge of the Lord, 2.) You will confirm your election and calling and demonstrate the fruits of faith, 3.) It will stabilize you and keep you from having a major fall, 4.) You’ll be granted rich, bold, confident entrance into the glorious Kingdom at the revelation of our glorious Savior.

By way of immediate application we ought to ask ourselves, “How greatly do I hunger to be fruitful for God?” In the O.T. Jacob’s wife, Rachel said, “Give me children or I die” (Genesis 30:1). Another application question, “Do you fully associate fruitful service with abiding in Christ?” How you greet the King when He returns is a function of whether or not you’re abiding in Christ now (1 John 2:28). Abiding in Christ is communing in Christ. Communing in Christ is how we take care of the relationship given at salvation—it is living as God’s blood-bought possession.

Peter’s epistle is a powerful jolt out of our sleepy state in which we think we are safe merely because we think we know things. Happy is the man who does what the Gospel requires (Jn 13:17). We do not know in theory alone but by spiritual sense of tasting, doing, and partaking. The Gospel promises believed can never leave you spiritually static. The growing saint can say “My heart is cast into the mold of the doctrine my mind has embraced.”

The man of God has a spiritual sense of these promises turning like a dynamo in his heart. Consequently, by these promises he communes with God and his heart I garrisoned and fortressed against the assaults of temptation. Is it your goal as a living stone in God’s temple to display God’s glory and moral majesty in your personal holiness? Do you see this goal as inseparably joined to communing with Him? Do you see the connection between your personal holiness and the glory of God? If so, how would you describe that connection?

This is where the evangelical church is so weak today. The knowledge of the Lord spoken of here in our text is the strengthened form of the Greek word which means familiarity, intense, experiential knowledge. Instead what we see in the evangelical church today are heads crammed with notions without experiential knowledge of Jesus Christ. EXAMPLE: I think of a story I heard about a couple who tired of rising at night to feed their screaming baby. So they would feed it as much cooked oatmeal as it can possibly eat and they were guaranteed six hours of uninterrupted sleep. The baby was too packed with oatmeal to hunger the real food of his mother’s milk. So in Evangelicalism today we see a weakness in soul yearning. There is very little panting after God. We see men and women embracing notions but not the transforming knowledge of God. Why is the church feeble today? The answer is that we frequently see a complete absence of turning doctrine into life.

So we lay down this timeless principle from Scripture, in reality you only know the truth that you do live and practice. All else remains mere theory and abstraction. Peter is writing to us so that we will understand that the reason so many professors of Christ are spiritually dull is because they are not being conformed to the truth in proactive obedience. No wonder they don’t experience streams of glory and light and blessed testimonies of His love. They’ve contented themselves with religious notions and are not practicing assiduous fervent, fierce mediation on the Word and fervent prayer.

Peter makes it clear that resolute pursuit of Christian character is absolutely essential to the maintenance and care of our relationship with the Lord. This commitment to grow in Christian character is an indispensable aspect of communion with the Lord. Now, by contrast with our culture, which is plunging deeper into degradation, a Christian looks godly by comparison to the world but the issue is we live in a culture that worships sex, youth, self-esteem, vigor, beauty, brains, money, power, possession, and pleasure. You may be on a higher step on the escalator, but what if the whole thing is going in a downward direction?

All of these false gods hide from us the fact that we are dying, headed for eternity, and that God alone is the source of all life, light, truth, meaning, and blessedness. Psalm 49 provides the perfect critique. It says we are like the beasts that perish in terms of our spiritual dullness. But the true saint is fixated on the promises of the Gospel—namely that eternal life has evaded time, space, mass history to give endless life to dying men and women and there is a true church made up of believers who have life in Christ in common.

So by way of review, according to 2 Peter 1, to see God’s glory is to repent of idols of self-will and a false treasure. But in order to apply 2 Peter 1 you must answer this question: “How is my pursuit of personal holiness tied to the glory of God?” In part the answer is you exist for the glory of God. It is why you were created, it is why you are here, it is all consuming (1 Cor 10:31). God’s glory marks out your life direction. This means you’ve been created and created anew to know God and make Him known. There is no other way to live in a God-ward fashion.

To live for His glory is to make it your pursuit to know Him and to become conformed to Christ; that is to be abandoned to God as His purchased possession. He is to come alongside God’s purpose of glory with utter deliberateness so that you give your life back to God daily as your reasonable, rational service of worship. This all begins with knowing who God is, that He has a boundless propensity to share Himself and expand His glory to rational creatures. To live for God’s glory is to make God’s cause my cause. It is to have a passion for His glory made known by your aim to know God and become like Christ.

To live so as to be conformed to Christ is only possible if the cross has been applied to what you are by nature. Otherwise your disposition to who God is remains in a state of enmity and apathy. Unregenerate men have no sentiment for His glory. Even as Christians we ought to ask ourselves what it is that fills our minds, what do we long for, worry about, and seek. The answer may answer your default god or functional god.

If the burden of truth and obedience of 2 Peter 1 is to truly rest upon us we will have to face this statement: my level of commitment to personal holiness reveals what I think of God’s glory. No wonder Peter said add to your faith these aspects of Christian character for He has already established in his first epistle that we are no longer to be conformed to our former lust but be holy like the one who has called us. We are to conduct our lives in fear while on earth, we are to gird up our minds for a fight, and to fix our minds on the hope to revealed to us. We are to conduct life with the confidence that our works glorify God and that we are to follow in Christ’s footsteps so as to be conformed to Him (1 Pet 1:13-17).

Therefore, the kindest thing you can do for your eternal soul is to devote yourself to God’s will and love God with your whole being. By birth we are slaves of sin, and therefore we worship and serve the creature and the creation as our default god. How needful it is to constantly seek God in faith, for the world holds out the offer of bogus bread to us on a continual basis (Is 55:2). Our faithful panting after God as our highest good—as what matters most will safeguard you from sinful compromise.

“Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, ‘YOU SHALL BE HOLY, FOR I AM HOLY.’ If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth; knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ” (1 Pet 1:13-19).

The logic is unbreakable; if you have been called into God’s glory story you will want with all your heart to have your life count for His glory (you will be zealous for good works—Titus 2:14). The glorious promises of the Gospel are received by believing—these promises bring us under the lordship of Christ; then His cause becomes our cause. “This is a trustworthy statement; and concerning these things I want you to speak confidently, so that those who have believed God will be careful to engage in good deeds. These things are good and profitable for men” (Titus 3:8).

To have ‘seen’ the glory of God is to have repented of the idols of self, sin, false treasure (and to keep repenting of these false gods). You are never the same after the cross of Christ has been applied to your nature. The cross crucifies the obstinacy of our flesh (Gal 2:20; Rom 6:3-13; Gal 5:24; Col 2:11-14). The cross radically re-aligns a person to God’s holiness.

Jonathan Edwards demonstrates in his most important book (The Religious Affections) that love to God starts with the affections perceiving the excellence of God’s nature—self-interest will be secondary, but self-interest will be primary in the hypocrite. The believer’s affections express true gratitude for who God is in Himself (Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections, pp. 172-173).

The nature we were born with is against God’s holiness, therefore, delight in God’s holy nature (His moral excellence), without self-love coming first, is a good test of true salvation. We love God for the beauty of His holiness, for His moral excellence (which includes His love, for He loved us first)—it is the start point for the appreciation of all other virtues and attributes in God. Loving God’s holiness is the only way to acquiesce to God’s way of salvation (Ibid., pp. 182-187).

Prior to salvation, the holiness of God bore no attraction for us, it disturbed us and stirred up our craven fear and added to our bondage and misery of guilt. We assiduously avoided thinking upon God’s moral majesty. The new birth is needed to see the beauty of holiness, for the Spirit’s enlightening is required in order to perceive and love the moral majesty of God. The new birth gives a new sense to perceive the beauty of divine things (Ibid., pp. 192-193, 196-199, 202-203).

The cross of Christ changes everything. The cross alone can transform our orientation so that we are properly aligned to God’s holiness (His foundational attribute). For the cross makes believing sinners acceptable to God, and the cross makes God’s holiness beautiful to us. The Spirit-filled saint is often lost in wonder at the suitableness of Christ for the sinner’s dilemma (Ibid., p. 200).

The world is increasingly comfortable in its rebellion and unbelief. Your holiness of life before the watching world is a testament to an unseen eschatological fact: the glory of God is about to fill the earth and the cosmos. "Do all things without grumbling or disputing; so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I will have reason to glory because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain" (Phil 2:14-16).

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Why does righteousness apart from works prepare us for good works?
2. Why is a genuine believer known by his zeal for good works?
3. Where does the motive for good works arise? (Hint: among other things, zeal for good works flows from grace, glory, gratitude, and the gospel.)
4. If our hearts were created to be captivated with the glory of God, how do we go about seeking that glory?
5. Why is it common for a believer to be accused of legalism if he points out a sin problem in a brother?
6. What is the connection between God’s absolute ownership of us and what we owe God?

7. Why did Jesus refer to Himself as the divider of men?
8. Is it possible to make it to heaven without following Christ? Since Jesus said that He would make His followers ‘fishers of men’ and disciple-makers—and that His followers would keep His Word, how can we have true assurance of salvation if we are not personally interested in evangelism and disciple-making?
9. Passages like 2 Corinthians 5:14-15 indicate that the cross applied to a believing sinner will make that person willing to yield to the cost of true discipleship. Respond to this statement: only the cross of Christ can make a disciple.

10. What do you think Peter means when he says to make your election and calling sure?
11. Through Christ God is restoring sinners to the perfect image of God. Explain how Satan uses idolatry in an attempt to obliterate the image of God. Why is your role as a disciple of Christ tied to God’s work of ‘re-creating’ His image as new creatures in Christ.
12. Why is your commitment to personal holiness so closely linked to what you think of the glory of God?
13. What are the fruits of faith? Why are these fruits joined to making one’s election and calling sure?

14. How can we know if any of our religious motives come from a legalistic bent?
15. What is your understanding of the concept of holiness by grace?
16. How may Romans chapters 14 and 15 assist us when it comes to sorting through the issue of holiness, Christian liberty, and unity in the body?