The Present Good Works Model Versus Following Christ According to the Scriptures

Giving someone a care package or setting up a facility to school children is not you calling them to God.  God calls to Himself all whom He predestined before the foundation of the world.  Doing good works to people can even become evil when it seems to be the end of the matter.  Good works are a tool.  God draws people to Himself by His goodness.  We, God's hands and feet on Earth, in fact do good things to people - especially to those who are in God's household - and the whole World sees it and is drawn when God sparks Himself in the mind of the heart that is drawn.

Planting churches due to poverty is hideous when the cause of the church planting is not to tell people the good news about the guilt of sin being shifted off of the person who calls on the name of the Master Jesus Christ due to their belief that His death is effective to save (and He was buried, Resurrected and witnessed afterward by many witnesses), so that they can talk to God freely now and be with Him through eternity.

Those who confess and believe - and don't exist in continual unrepentant sin of *any* type - are our focus and the mainstay of the support of other Christians.  Does your community only regard those with a building?  Then the Christians there should go out of their way to not indulge that continual sin, and they should purpose to not have a building or to have a laughably small or ill-fitted building, not because they are not worthy to have one, but because they are more worthy to stay away from every outward appearance of that fleshy sin their secular community knows so keenly.  We should be focused on Godliness and not on secular, will-based attempts to coerce the ungodly through physical means!  Obviously.

Living the Christian life in accordance with the Scriptures is a wonderful, glad thing!  But it's not obvious to beaten-down, just getting along, secular Christians who think of everything in terms of material first instead of reliance on Christ first, which viewpoint shows what we should have believed when we read it in the Bible - that we don't need to be primarily concerned with food, clothing, shelter and such things, because that is what the World is concerned with, but God has bigger things to occupy His own.  Don't be like the World!  God is love!  He is fully cognizant of those in-your-face needs, and He does give them all the time, and He does use the local congregations to give them, sometimes, especially - like His Word says, which we should not only tacitly believe, but do - to the widow who is well-known for her good works and who will not marry a husband but will devote herself to God, and the church helps the fatherless, who doesn't have that provider.  We might even help a widow or fatherless who is in the World, but when we do that, we must make sure to not think of our good work as the call, but we must tell them of their sinfulness and give them the simple gospel of 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 and Romans 10:9, 10, 13, that explicitly says what to do and believe to be saved!  We must stop thinking of our good works to the World as anything other than what it is - a single meal or a single night's sleep.  To the church, that qualifying widow gets our support for her lifetime, so long as she doesn't have another to care for her, and they are supplemental to her salvation. But these good works in the World are hit and miss, and they are always in support of spreading the gospel - they are more of an advertising hook than the deep love and concerning for the Christian widow who has shown her good works for the last 20 years to the same congregation who has now taken on her physical burden.

See the difference!

Let the Church rise up in goodness according to God's Special Book, and follow what we actually read in His Word without a lot of mental gymnastics in order to simply do what we find in Paul's letters and in John's, etc., and do it that way!  It's there - for our learning - which means that those things are written so we will do them!  What I've said here is an attempt to draw our attention back to the knowledge that God gave to His Church.  It's not my imaginative and new formulation of anything, but it is a call for us to stop doing something we've grown accustomed to even though it seems to directly contravene the work described in the Bible.

Don't do good works - the later works even greater than the former - while forgetting our love of God first and then ourselves and others, using our love for Him as our model.  God is going to send all His enemies to Hell and then to the Lake of Fire!  He's concerned with our relationship with Him by confessing Master Jesus Christ and believing His great work of death clears our sin debt and Resurrection makes way - by that Spirit who both raised Him and is with us - to life!

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