How Do Good Works Happen to Good People? 

The doctrine of justification by faith came as genuine comfort to people who believed they needed to be righteous to merit God’s favor.  It taught that the only way for believers to satisfy the demands of the law was to look to Christ in faith and receive his perfect righteousness.  Only his life of obedience and his vicarious sacrifice on the cross could satisfy the demands of a perfect God. 

In other words, the Protestant answer to how am I right with God was – Jesus Christ and his righteousness, imputed to me by faith, makes me right with God.  Lutherans and Reformed Protestants both affirmed the sufficiency of Christ for satisfying the demands of the law.  No more were good works, Masses, the monastic life, or other forms of self-denial necessary for righteousness before God.  Simply by faith a believer could attain to that holiness that Adam would have achieved if he had not disobeyed God and that the Final Adam did achieve through his life of obedience and his sacrificial death.

Of course, Rome had not taught that Christians were capable of satisfying God on their own.  The Roman church held that grace was everywhere necessary if people were to be saved.  The question was whether the grace wrought in the believer would eventually generate the holiness necessary for salvation or whether Christ’s merits alone, credited to the believer apart from anything she might do, was the basis for escaping all claims of the law against sinners.  In effect, the Reformation distinguished justification from sanctification, and made the former the only way to achieve the righteousness (through faith alone) that God required. 

Obviously, this was a significant threat to the entire Roman Catholic system of piety. Not only did it contravene the teachings of Rome, but it seemed to remove any incentive for good works.  If believers were righteous simply by trusting in Christ, what motivation did they have to be good or virtuous?

The Reformed answer to this dilemma was to insist that the saints who were justified would inevitably produce good works.  The Heidelberg Catechism addressed this specifically in the following manner:

Question 86. Since then we are delivered from our misery, merely of grace, through Christ, without any merit of ours, why must we still do good works?

Answer: Because Christ, having redeemed and delivered us by his blood, also renews us by his Holy Spirit, after his own image; that so we may testify, by the whole of our conduct, our gratitude to God for his blessings, and that he may be praised by us; also, that every one may be assured in himself of his faith, by the fruits thereof; and that, by our godly conversation others may be gained to Christ.

Justification was never present in believers without the sanctifying work of the Spirit.  In fact, because believers no longer needed to fear condemnation – Jesus paid it all – they could seek to follow the standards of the law not out of sense of fear but from a grateful heart and out of genuine love for their heavenly father. 

But while the Reformers taught that justification would not make believers negligent about good works, they also recognized that sin continued to afflict saints.  Even the good deeds that believers performed were still tainted with sin – and no better than filthy rags.  As the Westminster Confession explained:

We cannot by our best works merit pardon of sin, or eternal life at the hand of God, by reason of the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come; and the infinite distance that is between us and God, whom, by them, we can neither profit, nor satisfy for the debt of our former sins, but when we have done all we can, we have done but our duty, and are unprofitable servants: and because, as they are good, they proceed from his Spirit; and as they are wrought by us, they are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, that they cannot endure the severity of God’s judgment.  (16.5)

For this reason, although justification was a once-for-all reckoning of the believer with God, and although sanctification was an ongoing work of the Spirit in those justified, saints needed continually to fall back on the righteousness of Christ.  Their own righteous deeds, though worked in them through the power of the Holy Spirit, were still marked by abiding sin and so incapable of satisfying God’s holy demands. 

Calvin explained the importance of justification to sanctification and good works in his catechism in the following way:

M. This then is your meaning — that as righteousness is offered to us by the gospel, so we receive it by faith?

S. It is so.

M. But after we have once been embraced by God, are not the works which we do under the direction of his Holy Spirit accepted by him?

S. They please him, not however in virtue of their own worthiness, but as he liberally honors them with his favor.

M. But seeing they proceed from the Holy Spirit, do they not merit favor?

S. They are always mixed up with some defilement from the weakness of the flesh, and thereby vitiated.

M. Whence then or how can it be that they please God?

S. It is faith alone which procures favor for them, as we rest with assured confidence on this — that God wills not to try them by his strict rule, but covering their defects and impurities as buried in the purity of Christ, he regards them in the same light as if they’ were absolutely perfect.

The Reformers saw clearly the predicament of the fall.  No amount of goodness achieved by Christians could overcome the guilt of sin or change a believer’s nature sufficiently so that their good works were good all the way through.  Only the righteousness of Christ could satisfy God’s righteous standard and provide believers with the comfort and motivation to endeavor to live lives worthy of their calling as sinners made righteous by the righteousness of Christ.