Letting Your Good Works Be Seen

Having laid out a provocative sketch of the blessed life in the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus then turns to foundational matters. The inward and outward characteristics of the blessed life correspond to the call for personal integrity and illuminating good works in the lives of those who follow Christ. That the Christian life is more than personal piety is made clear by our Lord when he calls his disciples to let their “light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 5:16 ESV). This call is then followed by a sobering warning: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:20 ESV). There is, then, a component of practicing one’s righteousness that must include outward action, the exercise of good works.

And yet, Jesus will later say, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 6:1). If a disciple of the Lord Jesus is supposed to practice righteousness in public as a city on a hill, i.e. so that others may see one’s good works, how does the disciple do that without forfeiting reward? At least one part of the answer involves the nature of good works, and that is what this reflection endeavors to address.

So, what are the good works that Jesus has in mind? These works are simply the deeds, the actions, which God has commanded his people to do and even prepared beforehand for them to do (cf. Eph 2:10). These actions are good because they come from God, who alone is good (cf. Mark 10:18). They are revealed to us in God’s word and do not originate from our own imagination about what is good (cf. WCF 16.1). Herman Bavinck notes that properly good works are distinct from the many virtues and good deeds which all people can do as an outflow of God’s common grace. But the “truly spiritually good, the good in the highest sense as it can only exist in the eyes of God, can in the nature of the case be accomplished only by those who know and love God.”[1] The key distinction, then, is the goal of any given deed, and that is the point that Jesus makes in Matthew 6. If you practice your righteousness, i.e. you do your good works, before others with the goal of glorifying yourself, then you have not done a properly good work. If, however, you practice your righteousness before others with the goal of glorifying your Father in heaven, then you have. Bavinck notes that properly good works must, therefore, flow from true saving faith. “Having first received, it can now also give. [Faith] opens our heart to the grace of God, to communion with Christ, to the power of the Holy Spirit, and thereby enables us to do great things.”[2]

But what exactly are the good works which God has established for us to do? Part of the point of the following paragraphs of the Sermon on the Mount is to lay out those good works positively and negatively in the six antitheses and the other teachings about almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. But good works are broader than that. Bavinck writes that “the moral law that confronts us in the Decalogue, in the Sermon on the Mount, and further throughout the Old and New Testaments … comprises universal norms, great principles, that leave a lot of room for individual application and summon every believer to examine what in a given situation would for them be the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God (Rom. 12:2).”[3] This means that there is not only Christian freedom to do good works but also freedom to express or practice righteousness in a situationally appropriate way. This also means that we cannot treat the word of God as a rule book. Rather, it is a means of grace by which we come to know God, who alone is good, and to love him. And when we come to know and to love God more, we gain a deeper understanding of the difference between letting our works be seen so that our heavenly Father may be glorified, and practicing our righteousness before others so that we may be glorified.

[1] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, 4 vols. (Baker Academic, 2003), 4:257.

[2] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:257.

[3] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:259.