Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1829
“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them.” Ephesians 2:10.
THIS text is written by the Apostle as a reason why salvation cannot be a thing of human merit—“not of works, lest any man should boast, for we are His workmanship.” The for indicates an argument. It is a conclusive reason why salvation cannot be by our good works, because even when we have an abundance of the best of works, they are far more due to God than to ourselves! We, ourselves, in our saved condition, are the workmanship of God, and with each of us the argument holds good—“Not of works, for we are His workmanship.”
We are so completely the Lord’s workmanship that we are also styled a creation! We are “created in Christ Jesus,” and a creation cannot possibly be the creature’s own work—such a supposition would be absurd upon the face of it! It would be a misuse of language to speak of anything as creating itself. Whatever, therefore, we are in Christ Jesus is the result of God’s work upon us and cannot be the cause of that work.
Moreover, our good works, be they what they may, are the subjects of an ordinance of God—“which God has before ordained that we should walk in them.” Truly they are purposed by ourselves and our will and heart determine them, but far at the back of all this lies the Divine Purpose by which they were settled from of old. If good works are ordained, as well as the salvation of which they are the evidence, then the whole matter is of Divine ordaining and there is no space left to impute salvation to human works! The tree is not created by its fruit, for the fruit is created with the tree, and is one purpose for which the tree was created. Good works are not the cause of salvation, for they are the result of it and were contemplated as a result by God when He saved us. The argument deserves to be worked out at greater length, but we have not space for it now.
I want, at this time, to call your attention to four things in the text. And if you can carry in your mind’s eye the first creation, the making of Adam and what he was made for—and where he was put when he was made—it will serve as a background to the picture of the second creation which I shall attempt to paint. I would dwell upon man as God’s workmanship in a still higher sense than by his first making. I would set him forth as created anew “unto good works, which God has before prepared”—for that is the word properly used in the new translation—“which God has before prepared that we should walk in them.”
I. To begin, then, notice first, THE SINGULAR ORIGIN OF A Christian. Of all Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles—of all Christians, even if they are the highest Apostles, like Paul, or the least of all the family of love, such as we may be—as many as are truly saved and brought into union with Christ, they are the workmanship of God!
No Christian in the world is a chance production of Nature, or the outcome of evolution, or the result of special circumstances. “By the Grace of God I am what I am,” may be said by every man who is saved. To nothing can we ascribe the fact that we are in Christ except this—that we are God’s workmanship. Of regeneration, we must say, once and for all, “This is the finger of God.”
The spiritual life cannot come to us by development from our old nature. I have heard a great deal about evolution and development, but I am afraid that if any one of us were to be developed to our utmost, apart from the Grace of God, we should come out worse than before the development began! Our flesh would be apt to produce, by evolution, something exceedingly brutish and devilish. Mr. Whitefield once raised a great outcry against himself by saying that man by
nature was half beast, half devil—I have never seen any reason why the description should be altered, but I have sometimes wondered which was the worse of the two—the devil in the man, or the beast in him!
As to spiritual life coming out of our unrenewed nature, it is impossible! “Out of nothing comes nothing.” There is no spiritual life in men dead in trespasses and sins—how, then, can life come out of them? Out of death, truly, there comes a something congruous thereto—horrible are the forms of corruption that arise from the body in which death holds sway! But this is dissolution and destruction—not life. What the corruption of a human soul may be, I cannot attempt to say. Terrible as Hell must be, there is nothing in the Pit more awful than those who are in it. The lost, themselves, are more unutterably dreadful than any punishment that justice may have imposed upon them. Developed manhood, developed without any restraining influences, if it is shut up in vast numbers, must be a fermenting mass of hate, envy, malice, lust, cruelty and pride. Speak of evolution—here it is—“When lust has conceived, it brings forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.” Darkness never begets light, filth never creates purity, Hell never yields Heaven and depravity never produces Grace.