"Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ (Matthew 7:21-23)
I recently heard a preacher who stated that the passage above was perhaps the scariest and saddest in the Bible. People who believe they are Christians, who believe they are saved, will discover on Judgment Day that they are neither. They will be sentenced at that time to eternal damnation, to an eternity of suffering. They will be dumbfounded to discover that despite having prophesied in Jesus’ name, after having cast out demons in His name, and after having done many wonders in His name, that God never knew them, that they were to be cast into the fiery pit along with all the other lawless, unforgiven sinners.
Every Sunday we admit our guilt, we plead guilty to the charges that we are poor, miserable sinners, that we have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, and we recognize that we deserve God’s wrath, God’s righteous judgment, in this lifetime and eternal damnation in the next. We admit our failures, both in the things we’ve done and the things we’ve left undone. We do not justify our actions, we do not attempt to take credit for any good, we do not boast of our deeds. Just the opposite. We confess that we are guilty, and we beg for mercy from the court. We accept our guilt, and we implore that, because of what Jesus has done for us, because of His innocent sufferings and death, because He took on the punishment that was rightly ours, that almighty God will have mercy on us and not sentence us to the damnation we so deserve.
There is no works-based righteousness in Christianity. We can try our absolute hardest to obey the Ten Commandments, we can devote our lives to doing good works, we can give it our all and it won’t make one iota of difference. We can prophesy in God’s name, we can cast out demons, we can do other wonders, and it won’t matter. Nothing we do can bring us one inch closer to Heaven.
Salvation is 100% the work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, almighty God, creator and preserver of the universe and everything in it, became man, humbled Himself to be born into a poor family and laid as a newborn baby in a manger surrounded by farm animals, a very lowly estate to begin life. As a child, His parents fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath and, upon returning, lived in Nazareth, a nothing town atop a small hill. He grew up with the limitations of a human man, lived a perfect sinless life, performed numerous miracles, and preached throughout Israel and Samaria, only to be falsely accused of crimes He didn’t commit and hung on a cross to die. For our sins. For everything we have done wrong. For everyone except Himself. By His atoning death on the cross, Jesus took on our punishment and exchanged His righteousness, His perfection, for our filth, for our unrighteousness.
Before God came to us, before He graced us with faith, we were spiritually dead. Only by God’s grace are we not still in that state. Our faith is a gift from God. It is not something we have somehow earned. It is a gift, something for which we can take no credit. And it is the only thing that saves us from eternal damnation. Not our works. Not our best efforts to do what God has commanded us. Just our faith. And that is a gift from God.
Thanks be to God that He has not left us in our miserable, wicked state. Thanks be to God that He sent His Son to be our Savior, the propitiation for our sins. Thanks be to God that He has graced us with faith, that He has adopted us as His sons and daughters, that He has given us an inheritance of eternal life with Him, with the Heavenly host, with all our fellow believers. We are so blessed that God has done this for us. We certainly don’t deserve it.
I half agree with the statement the preacher made regarding those who thought they were saved by their actions. This is perhaps the saddest passage in the Bible. It’s terribly sad that many people will believe that they are saved by their actions only to discover too late that they were wrong. But scary? No. We know we are not saved by what we do. We know we are saved by Christ’s atoning death. We know we are saved by the gift of faith.
We are saved, not because of anything we have done or will do, but purely because of what God has done for us! We are saved because God loves us so much that He gave up everything for us, that He died for us, that He has given us the gift of faith!