 Throughout the series, Mike has frequently identified the passages where the writer of Hebrews stresses the importance of belief in Jesus. Yet it seems the folks to whom Jesus refers in Matthew 7 21 through 23 thought that they believed in Jesus. Yet he says he never knew them and he cast them out because they did not do the will of his father. In my own attempts to reconcile these passages, I find that the same word justified appears in James 2 24. Quote, you see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone, end quote, as well in Romans 328 quote, but they are justified freely by his grace throughout the redemption that is in Jesus Christ, end quote. So maybe the folks in Matthew 7 21 through 23 either did not believe or they didn't believe the right stuff. I think I'm in the red zone. Can Mike help me get this across the go line? I only hope he said that because you won't fantasy. I don't know, but yeah, I love that's a nice. Yeah, right? It's a nice turn of a phrase there. I Think the key here is verse 23. This is Matthew 7 21 through 23 verse 23 Jesus calls these people quote workers of lawlessness. I would say that Jesus is targeting pretenders here. They had a profession, you know, Lord, Lord, you know, I mean this profession of their allegiance to him, but their lives showed they did not really believe they were workers of lawlessness. Now, if that isn't the way to take that passage, then we'd have to affirm that Jesus called genuine believers workers of lawlessness. I think that's a stretch to say the least. Another way another way of looking at this, you know, let's ask who is Jesus exposing? Okay, again, who's he targeting here? Is he targeting disciples or believers whose behavior was imperfect? Is he targeting disciples or believers who struggle with sin? Is he targeting disciples or believers who have times of weakness? Well, guess what? All three of those things describes the 11 disciples who weren't Judas. They all got scared. They all forsook Christ. They bickered with each other. They debated their own self-importance. Would Jesus really call those guys workers of lawlessness? I don't think so. I think again, he's targeting pretenders, you know. Where do we get the idea? I mean, honestly, sometimes we sort of subconsciously have this idea that the apostles and Paul were perfect, you know, and this becomes part of this works, you know, problem, this discussion. They faltered. They faltered. Disciples forsook Jesus. I mean, how bad can it get? They struggled with sin. You know, Paul, Roman 7. Okay, you know, and like it, you know, people, you know, love to try to argue Paul, you know, out of that passage and he wasn't really a believer struggling with sin. Well, frankly, I think they do that because they somehow assume that Paul, you know, was some like sort of peon of perfection. Can Paul is human? He's as human as anybody else. Now, he might sin less, okay, but his sin will probably bother him more. Again, you could look at things like that, but he's struggling. He's struggling. There's no reason to think that he didn't struggle. Okay, he's not glorified. He's Paul. He's a human being. Again, that list, struggling with sin. Behavior is not perfect. They chicken out. They are weak. Those are the 11 disciples. So I don't think Jesus would look at those 11 guys and say, you guys are workers of lawlessness. Just don't believe that. So I think what Jesus is targeting again is his pretenders. Again, we have to remember, if we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. Everyone is going to sin. Everyone's going to struggle. Everyone's going to fail. So if Jesus is shooting at all those people who struggle and fail, well, I guess he doesn't have any disciples there. I guess nobody's a believer. Again, you have to think about the ramifications of where these different conclusions lead. Everyone fails. I mean, just who would Jesus have as a disciple? Again, I don't think he's targeting believers who are struggling here or who fail. I think he's targeting pretenders. They're not really believers. They might think they are, but they're not. Now that takes us to James. And this whole faith and works show me a man's faith and show me his works and then I'll consider his faith real. All this kind of talk, again, that James 224 was quoted in the question. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Okay. Well, what we mean by that, what James means by that, I don't think it's terribly complicated. I think it gets complicated because we have been browbeaten into a merit mentality. We think we have to merit God's love. If we believe that, if we swallow that pill, then we create these conundrum. Works, according to James, justify faith and what that means is they validate faith. Works don't replace faith in anything James says ever. He doesn't replace faith with works. Works show faith is real. Works serve to point to genuine faith. Faith is the thing that we need to find out if it's real. Real faith is shown by works. Again, the problem is thinking of works like they can be interchanged with faith or that they replace faith. Works are not a substitute for faith in the book of James. He never says that. I like to think of, I like to marry Ephesians 2-8 to James. For by grace, you're saved through faith without works is dead. You know, smash the verses together. I think to me it's helpful anyway. Maybe it's not helpful at all. But if you think about that, for grace, are you saved through faith without works is dead. The absence of works doesn't say, oh crud, I just didn't work hard enough to merit eternal life. No, the absence of works says faith isn't here. Works are not a substitute for faith. Faith cannot be exchanged for works. Works show that faith is in the building. Now let's, this isn't a syllogism, but to try to illustrate this, I've been thinking a lot about this. And let's try to do it this way. Let's try to illustrate it this way. Let's try to swap in some other terms. So let's start with works and faith. So works or actions, maybe if that helps you. Works don't produce faith. Works don't replace faith. Works validate or demonstrate faith. In other words, works shows us that faith is there. Works are necessary to show that faith is real. Their absence invalidates a claim of faith. Now he's really talking about basically a total absence here. Remember, James says faith without works is dead. He doesn't say faith with 60% works. He says faith without works is dead. So he's really talking about the situation where there's basically a total absence. But we have to fix in our minds, works don't produce faith. They don't replace faith. They validate or demonstrate faith. Now let's use some other vocabulary and see if this doesn't help. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. I have three sets of these. Let's use the phrase kind gestures and love. Kind gestures don't produce love. Just think about the truth of these statements. Kind gestures don't produce love. Kind gestures don't replace love. But kind gestures validate love. In other words, kind gestures are necessary to show that love is real. Their absence would invalidate a claim of love, wouldn't they? Let's try obedience and loyalty. Obedience doesn't produce loyalty. Obedience doesn't replace loyalty. But obedience validates loyalty. In other words, obedience is necessary to show that loyalty is real. Its absence would invalidate any claim of loyalty. To be a little more philosophical here, let's try effects and causes. Effects don't produce causes. Effects don't replace causes. Effects validate causes, though. In other words, effects necessarily require a cause. If there's no effect, there's no need to look for a cause. I don't know if any of that helps, but I think if we start substituting other words, because we have this works and faith thing that creates a lot of confusion, my advice is always to people, focus on merit and discipleship. As soon as you start using the word merit, it sort of cleans out the room a little bit in some cases a lot. When someone is talking about works, that's got to be part of salvation. What you're really saying is that we merit eternal life in some way. Anybody who really understands the gospel is going to be caught short by that and go, well, boy, I sure don't want to say it that way because then it sounds like God owes us something. Yeah, you're right, it does. But that's actually where you're at theologically. If your behavior is a necessary ingredient to salvation itself, then that's merit. That's merit. That's what that is. There is no merit before God. God doesn't want it. He doesn't expect it. He doesn't need it. He knows he ain't getting it. He's just not. That's why we have Jesus. That's why Jesus is the one who sets us apart and sanctifies us and so on and so forth. So merit, I think, can clear the room in a lot of ways. When we talk about sanctification, things like, let's use the word discipleship. And hopefully, we know enough about discipleship where we realize that that involves imitating Jesus. It doesn't have anything to do with merit, but it has everything to do with trying to mimic the experience, the life of Jesus, again, as a follower of him, not trying to earn salvation, but just trying to follow him, trying to imitate his life. The real question again, I've said this before, is why should we live a holy life? Shall we sin so that grace may abound? I want all the grace God has to give me, so I'm going to keep on sinning to experience that grace. This is a New Testament problem. Paul says in Romans 6, too, God forbid. He says, how can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk into this of life. Died to sin is Paul's expression for, quote, you know, chose to follow Christ. How can we who have chosen to follow Christ instead of living for our own passions think this? And when we believed, when we chose to Christ, we were united to his body, you know, the body that died and the one that rose again. So the Christian life is the process of mimicking Jesus, dying to yourself, not putting yourself above showing gratitude to God as a son or daughter in his household, and of course, treating your neighbor as yourself. That's what Jesus did, being conformed to his image now that you believe. That's discipleship. That's what we're supposed to be doing. You know, we're supposed to be dying with Jesus, again, preferring others over ourselves and living according to what God wants us to do. We need to try to imitate that, not to earn the status of sonship or daughtership. Jesus was already God's son. He's doing this. He learns obedience by weakness, you know, all this stuff in Hebrews that we've talked about. Okay, we need to imitate that, not so that we merit God's love. God loved us before. This was even an issue. He loved us before he even sent Jesus. And our behavior isn't what sparks a feeling of love in God's heart for us. That's already there. But in terms of discipleship, we try to imitate Jesus. We die to ourselves. We prefer others over ourselves. We prefer what God wants us to do over our own desires. And this is what we try to do. And you know what? If we do that, it's going to produce suffering. There's going to be a consequence to it, just like it was for Jesus. Now, in his case, he became obedient unto death. But guess what? He rose, so we should walk because we're united to his resurrection body, too. We're not just united to the one that's going to die. We're united to the one that rose. And so we should live. We should walk as though we're raised from the dead, meaning we're freed from the dominion of the curse of sin. We're freed from the penalty of sin. The point is imitation, not trying to merit God's love. Can he already loved you while you were a sinner before you ever had any thought about any of this? Your behavior doesn't spark that inside God. It's been there the whole time. So discipleship is to be like Jesus, not so that God will say to himself, gosh, here, she is so good. I want them up here with me. No, no. Be like Jesus because he did what was necessary to have you up there with him. You serve out of a grateful heart. If you do, God will reward that by using you like he'd love to use you to further his own purposes. So discipleship is about experiencing in your own body what it was like to be Jesus. That includes suffering and struggle. It doesn't mean doing whatever the heck you want, knowing that God loves you anyway. And we are to imitate Jesus' love for the Father, which was reflected by the way he lived. And then take the consequences, just like Jesus did, knowing that a more abundant life is waiting for you on the other side. Jesus knew that. No doubt Jesus enjoyed being human, but it came with a huge cost. His life was never about pleasing himself. Rather, he, just like Paul says in Philippians, he took upon the form of a servant and he humbled himself becoming obedient, even to the point of death. So discipleship, this thing we call sanctification, isn't filling out checklists, isn't doing things so that God looks at us and says, gosh, they're good. I want them up here. They've earned it. No, discipleship is about experiencing in your own body what it was like to be Jesus. We live for God. We live for others. It's servanthood. I mean, there's any number of ways you can express it. There are lots of reasons, again, these are the big ones, to live a certain way. But meriting favor with God, trying to spark some love inside God for yourself, is not one of those reasons. Just isn't.