I am brutally hard on clothing, especially footwear. This is mostly because I tend to go seamlessly from preaching to wading through mud to deal with some electrical or plumbing issue needing to be quickly addressed. So after a few years of ruining things that did not need to be ruined, it finally dawned on me that I needed to have work boots lying around in every location I tend to inhabit.
This past week and a half has been very rainy. All of that precipitation served to expose a small issue with the HVAC system in our new fellowship hall, The Hope Center. The return duct cutting through the wall was not caulked properly, and water was leaking into the building. So when the rain stopped for a few hours, I waded through the mud with a caulking gun and several tubes of silicone. Half an hour later, everything was water-tight.
I threw away the used tubes and made my way up to the church. When I got to the front door, mindful of the mud that was covering my work boots, I removed them and laid them down before entering.
Right between our front doors there is a huge wooden cross, riven with three large, rusty nails. I had laid my work boots down right at the foot of the cross. I took about two steps before the Holy Spirit drove that thought home to me and demanded that I pay attention.
True Christianity is at once the hardest-working and the least work-based thing in existence. People who have been born again work and serve the Lord very hard; knocking on doors, engaging in mission work to foreign lands, feeding the hungry, tending to the homeless; the list could go on forever.
But as to salvation itself, there is an utter, shocking prohibition in reference to works. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Romans 3:20 says, "Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight." Isaiah 64:6 speaks along the same lines, "But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags."
Simply put, a person who thinks their works can earn them salvation knows nothing of real Christianity. Not only will works never avail to save us, they will actually hinder us from being saved in much the same way a person having open-heart surgery would hinder the surgeon by staying awake and trying to participate in the surgery.
Salvation was entirely purchased for us on the cross of Calvary when Christ sacrificed himself as the payment for our sin. 1 John 2:2 says, "And he is the propitiation (the satisfactory sacrifice) for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. When Jesus died, that and that alone satisfied the Father. If there was any work possible that any one of us could have done to be saved, or even to help ourselves to be saved, then the death of Christ would have been the most ludicrous, foolish thing imaginable.
But it was not ludicrous, not foolish, not even close. What Jesus did was the most lovely, precious thing in time or eternity. We owed a debt we could not pay, so he paid a debt he did not owe, thereby offering us the free gift of salvation. All that is left for us to do is receive that free gift.
What will it require for us to do so? Here is what it will not require: works. There is no religious rite we can perform or have performed on us; there is no good deed that we can do; there is no charity we can give; there is no list of commandments we can keep; there is no new leaf we can turn over; there is no effort of our flesh that can save us or even help to save us. All that is left for us to do is lay our sinful selves at his feet, believe that he is the sufficient sacrifice who died on Calvary and rose again, and ask him to save us.
That will work. Work will not. If a person intends to be saved, he needs to lay his work boots at the foot of the cross.
Bo Wagner is pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church of Mooresboro, N.C., a widely traveled evangelist and the author of several books available on Amazon and at www.wordofhismouth.com. Email him at 2knowhim@cbc-web.org.