| Doing Good Works |
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God has a pattern and a process and they must work together. Good works must be by grace through faith or they are just filthy rags. That is the process. God leads. We listen. Faith comes. Faith gives access to grace, the free gift of righteousness. God does His work through us. That is the process. When God leads, He always leads us into His pattern.
Here is how good works happen. This is the only way they happen. God starts it. He leads. He speaks. You hear. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, or literally, the utterance of God. Faith gives us access to God's grace (free gift of righteousness--righteousness is a free gift and good works are what righteousness does--there is no righteousness that can be apart from good works). God's righteousness flows through you as you yield to it. He does His work through you. He thinks His thoughts through you. He says His words through you. He does His acts through you. He gives you of His vision of reality. All of this takes only a moment. Another way to say this is: "The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost." All of this is closely tied to discerning the Body of Christ in many ways. You see, you have no existence in Christ that can be separated from the Body of Christ. If you do a good work in the way that is mentioned above, you do it as a member in particular of the Body of Christ, fulfilling a particular function in that Body which results in you and others being built up in love. That is why the Church must be built according to the pattern of Scripture. When you do good works (actually, you yield to God Who does the work), God plants good seed into your heart that leads to holiness and redemption by degrees from glory to glory. Righteousness is in the moment. Holiness is something you become. Redemption is freedom from sin that results from what you become. What you become is you become like Jesus, not all at once, but by degrees from glory to glory. That holiness is the gold. The redemption is the silver. Building up your brother or sister is the precious stones. Those are the only things that last. This is all flowing with God's faith, hope, and love. There is more on this here. This might also help to look at the pattern of Scripture. 
How can we know anything about anything? That’s the real question |
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