RECHARGE | The Church: Mission – Good Works

What happens when the church sees the need—but does nothing? This message confronts passive faith and calls believers to action.

In Mission – Good Works, Pastor Jason Smith teaches that while we are saved by grace alone, God has designed our salvation with a purpose: to walk in the good works He has already prepared.

Key Takeaways:

• Salvation is entirely by grace, not earned by works
• We are saved for good works, not by them
• The church is called to engage, not withdraw from the world
• Good works make the gospel visible to others
• Every moment is an opportunity to live out your faith

Scripture: Ephesians 2:8–10; Titus 3:3–8; Matthew 5:16

Church link: fbcboerne.org

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Transcript

Welcome And Series Framing

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Happy Wednesday to you. Welcome back after spring break. A reminder on Wednesday nights, we've been looking at uh just a study of the church, right? Because I want us to think well uh as in scripturally and to have deep thoughts about the church, about who we are and what we are to be about. No doubt culturally we become very consumer-driven, and so we just have been taking a deeper look through the scripture at the church. Um, there was a tragic case that made its way all the way to the Supreme Court called uh Yannia versus uh Bigon. Two men, Paul Yannia and Roger Bigon, were standing together, they were working together, and they were standing near a pit that was filled with water. And uh it was a bit of a dangerous situation, but the conversation grew and Bigon began to goad uh Yannia to jump into the water. And shockingly, he did. Yannia jumped into the water and almost immediately began to struggle. He wasn't able to swim to the side, he couldn't get out, he was fighting and fighting, and it was clear that he was drowning. Bigon stood there. He watched, he did nothing. No attempt to rescue, no call for help. And Yannia drowned. The case went to court because the obvious question that was where, but that was there is how could someone stand there and do nothing? Shouldn't he be held responsible? But the court, the Supreme Court, ruled this way: the law can create no legal obligation to save him. Although it is morally troubling, there is nothing that the law can do. The law cannot force someone to act. In fact, this case was upheld as recent as 2017 when in Florida a man was drowning and a group of teens pulled out their phones and recorded and did nothing in response to help. Now, I know you feel the weight of everything that I've just said, because every one of us, right, hears that story, and something inside of us cries, that is wrong. Even if the law doesn't require it, something in us says, you should have done something. You had the opportunity, you saw the need, you could have acted and you didn't. Now, here's where it applies to us today. Because we've been trying to think well about the church, who we are. And most recently, we've been looking at the mission of the church. Previously, uh, we looked at the mission of the church is to glorify God, okay, in all the earth. And then last time, Chad did an excellent job of showing us, right, that uh Jesus' mission to glorify his Father continues with us in our command to go and to make disciples of all nations to the ends of the earth. And so tonight we have the question: Is it right for the church to sit idly by and do nothing while the world decays? For the church to isolate and to say, well, I'm not doing anything wrong? Now, of course, you know that the answer to that is no. Just saying it, right, sounds like a tragedy. And yet, how often is that the picture of the American church? Now, tonight I want us to look at scripture from the positive angle, where the scripture continues to call the Christian and the church forward in good works. Look on the screen. I'm gonna read for us Ephesians 2, uh, eight, nine, and ten. Very familiar passage. I could have chosen all the way back in Ephesians 2, 1. It says, for you were dead in your sin. But picking up in verse 8, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as 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 before him, that we would simply walk in them. Okay, let me read one other scripture passage. Well, uh, keep that Ephesians 2 in your mind. Um, but uh I'm gonna start with, I'm gonna walk us through Titus 3. I need you to agree with me at the outset that Titus III has the same progression as Ephesians did, okay? Because I'm gonna walk through it together. But what I need you to know is Titus 3 in verse 8 ends with the same conclusion of Ephesians 2, and that is you were created for good works. So, Titus 3. Uh for we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lust and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, uh, hating one another. In both accounts, right, we begin with our own fallen nature and where we were when God found us. As Ephesians 2, 1 says, you were dead in your sin. You weren't partially alive, you weren't pursuing God, you were dead. D.E.D. dead, as dead as could be. I did that a few years ago, and uh I had some some people literally think, I don't think our pastor knows how to spell the word dead. It's a it's a joke from uh Robin Hood Menonites, all right? That's a Mel Brooks joke, okay? But here's the point. Where you started from, you were dead in your sin. Look at this list in Titus 3. Look at all that was in your nature. You were foolish, you were spiritually blind, you were disobedient. The purpose of this, this kills pride, believer, right? You don't serve, we don't get to the point where we serve at the end of this because we are any better. Okay? You don't serve, right, because you are better than anyone. You serve because you've been rescued, because you were in their spot. The church doesn't do good works out of superiority, it does it from humility, the humility of the gospel. So we were once foolish ourselves, but when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, he saved us, not on the basis of deeds, which we had done in righteousness, no, but according to his mercy, by the washing of regeneration and the renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior, so that being justified by his grace, we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Guys, this is straight gospel. And the order is so very important, right? It's not because of anything that you have done that Christ saved you. We do not do good works for acceptance with God. Instead, we are accepted by God, and out of that acceptance, it produces good works in us. Most of you know my oldest son, Ian, is adopted. Okay. We adopted, we it we adopted him as our own, based on no merit or anything in him outside of the fact that we had chosen him. This is literally the way the scripture speaks about you in your salvation, that you were chosen from the foundation of the world, that you would be in Christ, that he adopted you into his family. It is all by grace that you have been saved. Okay? Now, when I speak to my son, do I charge him to do good works? Well, yes, of course I do. I don't tell him to do good works in order to get in the family. And if he doesn't do good works, I'm gonna kick him out. No. I he's already adopted, he's already mine, he is already, I've already bestowed upon him all that is mine of being part of me. But I usher him into good works because he's a representative of me. My character, my wife's character, should be infused in him. That's why I charge him to good works. And it's that exact same thing for the Christian, right? This order is very, very important. It is always by grace, but it is because of grace that it produces the good works in us. In other words, it's very important, Christian. I know we know the gospel and you hear it routinely. It's very important that we also take this next necessary step. And that is that it in these passages, it tells you why you were saved. There is a purpose attached to your salvation. And here in Titus 3.8, it says that that God saved you so that you would engage in good deeds. And in Ephesians 2.10, it says the same, that God has prepared, God has already prepared good works that you would walk in them. You see, uh, we are not saved by our good works, but we are saved for good works. And our good works actually becomes an illustration of our salvation. It is it is proof that the grace of God is in us and flowing through us. Grace produces that. I want you to think back just to the entire movement of the scripture, how Israel, under the law, was commanded to do all the things that make God look good and to represent God, right? They're commanded to pursue God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, but they continually chase other things, care more about other people's opinions. They're commanded vertically to love their neighbor as their self, and yet they forsake the vulnerable, they do not live out justice. They cannot complete any of that. And yet, with the church, we have the Spirit of God. It's the grand revelation through through scripture that now that there's a heart change, we actually can live out the commands to love God with all of our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And so then it's the question, right, of the church. Is this what the church does? So the gospel goes in and a church is established. And then is that church beginning to bless and have tentacles that just reach out into the community with good works? Right? Matthew 5, uh, what is it, 16? Let your light shine before men in such a way that they see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven. And so we would we would say part of the the command of the church is to display God's character because he has saved you, and we are now representatives of him to the community, the church, every local church must be passionate about letting their good works shine before men. Not because that's how you get saved, but because it's proof that there's genuine faith. Our good works are the gospel made visible to a community that may not be open to the gospel yet. Doesn't that make sense? So often that's the first gospel they hear. I'm gonna close with this illustration. There was uh a Frenchman in the uh, you got that picture? There was a Frenchman at the end of, nope. Oh, I sent you a second one. My bad. Uh I'll tell you the story anyways. There was a Frenchman named Adolph uh Kamensky, and he was uh he was in France and Paris when the Nazis came in and took over. And he uh discovered that he could uh with with a certain chemical of acid uh that he could erase uh parts of ink on documents, and uh he worked his way into uh a job, a position with uh within the Nazi regime uh there in Paris in their documents department. And when uh when Jews would be detected either on birth certificates or certain uh things where they were being sent essentially to death, and they would stamp and they would mark the certificate, he would take those into uh a secluded room by himself, and and he would pull out this this ink and uh and he would be able to erase that death certificate. And he figured out that it would take him about two minutes to erase a certificate. Okay that's that's uh 30 people in in one in one hour that he could save from certain death. As he thought about that, he um he had some people that were helping funnel him documents. Um he began to just be incredibly passionate and and he stopped sleeping because every time he thought about it, if he slept an hour, that's that's 30 people. And so he would stay up 20 hours, 24 hours, sometimes 48 hours in a row. And if he if he in his days uh fell asleep at his desk, he would he would wake up and immediately get back to work, erasing documents, knowing that every two minutes was an individual's life. And he his uh uh there were uh effects from inhaling the fumes all the time, his hands were cracked. There were there was a cost to all of this, most certainly. But by the end of the war, there were more than 14,000 people that he saved. Now, if we think about the picture at the beginning of the one who sat there and did nothing while the people drowned, and then we look at Adolf Kaminsky, we would say the heartbeat of the church should be to do the good works that have been given to us by the Father with a passion and with an urgency, knowing that our work, whatever he has given us to walk in, brings eternal weight and glory. And every day, every moment is an opportunity, every season of life is an opportunity for you to glorify the Father who is in heaven because there's a lost and dying world around us. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the way that it charges us, and we thank you for the church that you have entrusted us with such an incredible mission. May we be found faithful in Jesus' name. Amen.