Introduction

This evening we continue our series of meditations on the doctrine of covenant fellowship or the doctrine of unconditional covenant fellowship.¹ The specific doctrine that we are dealing with in these speeches is the doctrine of the covenant but that aspect of the covenant that is the actual experience of fellowship with Jehovah God, the actual walk of God with his people and speech of God to his people—the fellowship and friendship of the covenant. We are dealing in these speeches with the very essence, therefore, of the covenant because the essence of the covenant is friendship and fellowship between Jehovah God and his elect people in Jesus Christ. That is the topic, that is the doctrine, that is the subject we are dealing with: covenant fellowship with Jehovah God.

We have seen in these speeches that this covenant fellowship is something that belongs to Jehovah God himself, even apart from us as his church and as his people. God is a covenant God. God does not have to have creatures in order to be in a covenant relationship, but Jehovah God in himself is covenant family—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. As covenant family, God lives as the triune God in eternal life and lives as the triune God in perfect fellowship.

God in his mercy has willed that we as his church be brought right into that fellowship, so that when we deal with covenant fellowship, we are not dealing with some insignificant thing in our lives; but we are dealing with the very covenant life of God himself. When God takes us into that covenant fellowship, we enjoy fellowship with the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We enjoy that fellowship with him as creatures. He enjoys that fellowship as divine; we enjoy that fellowship as creatures. We are taken right into that very fellowship through the Lord Jesus Christ. The whole doctrine of the covenant and the whole doctrine of covenant fellowship find their focal point in the Lord Jesus Christ because he is the head of the covenant, and he is the mediator of the covenant. And it is through Jesus Christ alone—through his atonement, which covers all of our sins, and through our union to him as our head—that we have that fellowship with Jehovah God.

God creates that union between Christ and us by his Spirit, so that last time we met we looked at the truth of the Holy Spirit, especially the Holy Spirit’s gift of faith, where the Holy Spirit is the author of faith. And by that faith, which itself is union with Christ, we are united to Christ, and therefore through faith we have covenant fellowship with God.

Along the way in all of these speeches, we have been seeing that because covenant fellowship is a triune reality, because fellowship is through Christ, because fellowship is by the Spirit, and because fellowship is by faith, our good works that we do as believers do not enter in as that which causes the fellowship or as that which is the means by which we have the fellowship. That fellowship does not depend upon those good works in any sense.

What Are Good Works?

Tonight we are going to turn our full attention to the truth of good works and continue developing the doctrine of unconditional covenant fellowship by looking specifically at good works: what they are and their place and function in relationship to covenant fellowship with God.

Let’s look then at the truth of good works and see what these good works are.

Good works are the works of obedience to the law of God that Jehovah God has decreed for his people, that he works in his people, and that he gives to us as a gift. Good works are the thoughts, the words, and the actions of obedience to God’s law. And these thoughts, words, and actions of obedience to God’s law are his gift. They come from God and are worked in us by Jehovah God. That’s what a good work is.

Now, important for this topic of covenant fellowship is that these good works are fruits. That is the place and function they have; that is what they are. These good works are fruits. And it is not the invention of the church to call them fruit. That is the word of God in John 15, where Jesus says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit” (vv. 1–2). What Jesus is talking about there in his description of fruit is the good works of the child of God—the obedience to the law of God that God gives to his people. That is the fruit.

That is a common figure throughout scripture and also, therefore, the figure that our confessions take up. In article 24 of the Belgic Confession regarding man’s sanctification and good works, we confess that faith is always a fruit-bearing faith.

We believe that this true faith, being wrought in man by the hearing of the Word of God and the operation of the Holy Ghost, doth regenerate and make him a new man, causing him to live a new life, and freeing him from the bondage of sin…Therefore it is impossible that this holy faith can be unfruitful in man; for we do not speak of a vain faith, but of such a faith which is called in Scripture a faith that worketh by love…These works, as they proceed from the good root of faith, are good and acceptable in the sight of God, forasmuch as they are all sanctified by His grace. (Confessions and Church Order, 52–53)

The Belgic Confession there takes up this language of fruit and calls our good works the fruit of faith.

The picture then that scripture draws for us is that of a grapevine—as Jesus says, “I am the vine”—and the branches that spring from this vine: “Ye are the branches.” That grapevine has a root in the soil, and it is from that root and that vine that all of the branches in that grapevine that are truly united to him receive all of their sap and all of their life. And the result of that life in the branches is that the branches bear fruit. There are grapes, clusters of grapes, hanging from the branches, which are the good works of God’s people—that fruit of faith.

And if we press that illustration a little further, that connection of the branch to the vine is faith: that is the graft by which we are united to Jesus Christ, so that by faith we produce these fruits of good works. That is the truth of good works. Our good works are the fruit of faith and, therefore, are the gift of Jehovah God.

Now, we can even go further and say that our good works are Jesus’ good works. They are his good works. Jesus himself leads us there in John 15:5 when he says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.” Without the Lord Jesus Christ, there is no fruit. Only by the Lord Jesus Christ, by his power, by his life, and by faith—which is not itself a work but is the opposite of working—by faith, which unites us to him—only by Christ and by faith does that branch bring forth fruit. And so we may say that these are the works of the Lord Jesus Christ, which he works in us and which he works through us. This is no denial that the child of God works and obeys by the power of God through faith. But those works that the child of God produces must all be ascribed to the Lord Jesus Christ and to the Holy Spirit, who unites us to Christ. For that Holy Spirit is the author of faith, and that Holy Spirit is the author of every good work that we do.

That is confessional language in Canons 3–4.16. The author of every good work works these in us. The confession that these good works are Jesus’ works that he works in us and through us is the same thing as confessing that these good works are the fruit of faith and the fruit of salvation and the fruit of the work of God.

The Place and Function of Good Works

To zero in on the place and function that these works have with relation to covenant fellowship with God, there are four points.

First, these good works have an expansive place, a huge place, in the life of the child of God and in God’s purpose for the child of God. Good works are not a small matter. Good works are not insignificant things that we have no real use for. The truth of good works and the good works themselves have an expansive place. The good works of the child of God are the purpose of our salvation. The reason God saves us is in order that we may bear fruit and in order that we may do good works. 

The scriptures teach that in John 15, for example, when they call our good works the fruit that is borne by the branches. Why does a husbandman have a grapevine? Why does he plant a grapevine and tend it? His purpose with the grapevine is the fruit of the grapevine. So also Ephesians 2:10: “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” God has created us unto, for the purpose of, these good works and living in and walking in these good works. That is a huge place for good works, a beautiful, expansive place. It is not the place of ground. Good works are not the ground of salvation. Then we say, no. Good works are not the means of salvation or the instrument. No. But purpose? Yes. God has saved us by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to his glory alone, and his glory is served by the doing of these good works. That is an expansive place.

Also with regard to the expansive, large place of good works, good works are the demonstration of our faith. Good works are how other people know that we are Christians. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). How do men know if you are a disciple of Jesus Christ? You can tell them, and you can show them. And you show them by your love of God and your obedience to his law, your keeping of his commandments. That is a huge place for good works, so that other people see those good works, and the elect among them are led to glorify our Father who is in heaven. They are led to ask us a reason of the hope that is in us. This is a huge and an expansive place for good works.

That takes us to the second main place and function of good works: they have a very desirable place. The child of God loves good works; he wants to do them. He does not go around wanting not to do them. He does not say to himself and to the church, “I hate good works. I wish I could stop doing good works.” The child of God loves good works. He wants to obey the law of God. In fact, he insists on it that he must do good works and that he wants to do them. 

This is an answer to the accusation that the church that teaches salvation by grace alone without works, and the church that teaches covenant fellowship with God by grace alone without the imposition of good works for that fellowship, has no use for works, that that church is against the law of God, that that church is lawless and delights in sin and eventually will become a congregation that runs in sin and that is completely antinomian and anti-law. The accusation that a church that teaches salvation by grace alone hates works is false. That is a slander.

The church that teaches salvation by grace alone loves works. We want to do them; we love the law of God that teaches us what those good works are. The child of God loves to bear fruit; he wants to bear fruit. And that child of God reproaches himself and is sorry before God when he does not bear the fruit that the word of God requires of him. The child of God loves good works and finds good works to have a very desirable place. In fact, we can say it this strongly: the child of God is truly happy when he is doing good works. That is when he is truly happy: when he is doing good works. And he is not truly happy when he is walking in sin and not doing good works. That doesn’t mean that he is happy because he is doing good works. It does not mean that he is happy by means of doing good works. No to both of those. The child of God, loving good works and loving the law of God, is truly happy when he is doing good works, and he is not truly happy when he is not doing good works. The believer sings and believes Psalm 1: “Blessed [happy] is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night” (vv. 1–2). Amen, we say to that. Blessed is that man, happy is that man who loves and obeys that law.

And we believe and confess Canons of Dordt 5.5. We are sometimes made out to be enemies of Canons 5.5, which says that by “melancholy falls” (Canons 5.6) the child of God may “lose the sense of God’s favor for a time” (Confessions and Church Order, 174). The child of God interrupts the exercise of faith until, returning to the right way of repentance, the light of God’s fatherly countenance again shines upon him. We are made out to be enemies of this article. That is a slander too. We love this article. We believe and confess Canons 5.5. There is a delightful and desirable place for good works.

Third, the main place and function of good works is that they are necessary. It is a necessary place. Works are commanded. Fruit is commanded. Fruit is promised too. And fruit is produced not by the law and not by our efforts to keep the law, though God gives us those efforts and calls us to expend those efforts. God gives us that fruit, but that fruit is commanded. The law of God requires the child of God to obey. The church that teaches salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and the church that teaches fellowship with God by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, is not a church that sets aside the law of God as the rule, guide, and standard of our thankful lives for the salvation that God has given to us. The child of God hears that law and knows that the command, “Thou shalt have no other gods” is a command for me and that God requires of me that I have no other gods before him. Now, I know that that obedience does not earn me a thing. And the moment I try to make it earn me something, I have ruined the whole thing. That obedience is strictly fruit. But that obedience is required fruit. The church that confesses salvation by grace does not deny the necessity of good works and the command of the law of God but teaches that command and teaches that law, even vigorously. And the church then also calls to repentance her members for disobeying that law and rebukes the members for their sins against that law and calls them to repentance for those sins and to faith in Jesus Christ for the covering of those sins and for the doing of good works. Because only by faith in Christ—only by faith in Christ, which is not work—does the child of God do those good works.

Those are the three places so far with regard to the place and function of good works: an expansive place, a desirable place, and a necessary place.

Now fourth, a restricted place. Good works have a place, but it is a very specific place. And good works must be kept in that place. It is the place of fruit. That is the place of good works. It is fruit. And it is only fruit. It is only ever fruit. Good works never become something more than fruit in the life of the child of God. Good works, for example, never become the graft that unites us to Christ. What a foolish thing. What a foolish farmer who would come to his grapevine and pluck off a grape and take in his hand a dead branch and try to make that grape hold that dead branch to the vine. That fruit is not the graft. It is the fruit, and it remains the fruit. The graft is something else: the graft is faith. That is the union to Christ. That is how the child of God does these good works—by faith and by faith alone. The fruit, the good works, remain only the fruit.

And neither is the fruit the root of the plant. The fruit cannot be plucked off and smashed onto the base of the vine where it enters into the ground, so that that grape becomes the root of the plant. The root is the root, and the vine is the vine, and the good works are the fruit. Jesus Christ alone has the honor of being the vine. And he alone has the honor of producing the fruit in the branches, which is why it is by faith, which is not a work. Jesus Christ alone has that honor, so that the good works remain fruit. That is what they are. That is the very restricted place of good works.

Good Works and Covenant Fellowship

That means then that the covenant fellowship that we enjoy with Jehovah God is not because of your works and not by means of your works. The works are the fruit of that faith, by which faith alone we have this fellowship. The works are the fruit of the Spirit’s work uniting us to the Lord Jesus Christ, so that it is not by those works that we have covenant fellowship. You could put it this way: that covenant fellowship is walking and talking. That is Genesis 3:8. After Adam and Eve fell, “they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Here comes God walking, walking with his people. Here comes God speaking, talking to his people. Walking and talking. That’s covenant fellowship with God. He walks and talks with you. He walks with you by his Spirit and speaks to you by his gospel. And that is your fellowship with him. That is his fellowship with you. That is how you enjoy that friendship with him.

We can even say this: our good works are then the response and the result in this fellowship of walking and talking with God. How do we respond to his fellowship with us? By obedience, by taking out his law and by seeking the Lord Jesus Christ by faith to obey that law, and by saying, “This is how I will walk and I will speak to him in worship.” That is really what worship is. Worship is the speaking of Jehovah’s people to him in praise. That is what our confessions call our part in the covenant. Our part in the covenant is obedience to God.

But all of that part in the covenant does not obtain the fellowship and does not obtain the walking and speaking of God with us. You have that fellowship with God by faith through the Spirit and in Jesus Christ alone. You have that fellowship with God before you ever do a good work.

That is how it was with Adam and Eve. When they fell God came to them, and he fellowshiped with them. He spoke to them the most blessed word of promise: the seed, the seed of the woman who would deliver them. That was God’s fellowship with them. They heard it with their ears; they saw God standing before them as he spoke it. And he walked with them in that fellowship when he took an animal and slew it and shed its blood as a picture of the shed blood of Christ and covered them with the skin of that animal. That was God’s fellowship with them before they ever did a good thing. While they were still wallowing in their sin, afraid in their sin, God came and fellowshiped with them. And the fruit of that was their obedience in teaching Abel what a right sacrifice is and what right worship of Jehovah God looks like. 

The child of God enjoys fellowship with God by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. And our good works are the fruit of that faith—not the cause of it, not the condition for it, not the instrument of it.

Doctrinal Heritage

I want to impress upon us that this is our heritage. This doctrine is our heritage as a congregation, and it is our heritage as the Reformed Protestant Churches.

It is this place of works that explains the difference between this church and other Reformed churches. And it is the place of works in this specific arena of covenant fellowship and friendship and enjoyment of the covenant that is the difference between this church and mother. This is the doctrine that is distinctive and separate. And this is the doctrine for which we have separated: unconditional covenant fellowship. If someone asks you, “Why aren’t you Protestant Reformed anymore?” your answer is not this: “Well, they deposed Reverend Lanning” or “They suspended Reverend Langerak.” That all is something, but that is not the reason you are not Protestant Reformed anymore. The reason you are not Protestant Reformed and had to come out and had to exist separately is unconditional covenant fellowship. That is what has been lost in mother. That is what is being corrupted in mother. And that is the truth you cannot stand to see corrupted and must stand in favor of: unconditional covenant fellowship.

Now, if anyone challenges that and says, “We never corrupted unconditional covenant fellowship,” indeed mother did. These are two quotations from writings or sermons after Synod 2018, quotations that stand; and the ministers who spoke them are not only in good standing in mother [at the time this speech was given] but also leaders in mother. “If a man would be saved, there is that which he must do.” That is bad enough in itself. “If a man would be saved, there is that which he must do.” But what did the minister mean by that? What arena of theology was he working with when he made that statement? He went on later in the same article to clarify this way: 

That the writers of the Canons insisted that the gospel preached was a necessary means of grace (cf. the opening sentence of Art. 17) means they confessed and taught that if a man with his household was to be saved and consciously enter into the kingdom, placing himself with his family under the rule of Christ as his Lord and Savior, he was called, he was required, to respond obediently to the call and command of the gospel—“Repent and believe, that thou mightiest [sic] be saved with thy house.”²

Did you catch the arena that he was working with? Consciously entering the kingdom. That is fellowship. That is the arena of covenant fellowship with our mind, with our understanding: knowing the fellowship of God. And what is his theology of that covenant fellowship? It is this: If a man would have that, there is that which he must do. That is the wrong place for good works. That is a condition for good works. That is mother. That statement stands to this day. That is intolerable. That is the need for a separate existence.

Then, in a sermon by a different Protestant Reformed minister:

God’s sovereignty, man’s responsibility.

God’s gifts and Christ’s merits does not exclude God’s use of means, does not exclude God’s gift of the use of the means of our obedience.

One more time: God’s gifts and Christ’s merits does not exclude God’s sovereign use of the means of our obedience.

So as the inspired word in Hebrews 4:11 says, Labor to enter into the rest, lest ye fall in unbelief. Labor to enter into the rest, lest ye fall in unbelief, Hebrews 4:11. And that labor is what we identified in Deuteronomy 10:12: keep his commandments.³

Did you catch the arena that he was working with? Entering rest. That is fellowship; that is covenant fellowship. And what is his theology of entering into rest? You must labor to do it. That is good, biblical language; but that good, biblical language in Hebrew 4:11, Labor to enter into the rest, is not a reference to the law. That is what he makes it: “That labor is what we identified in Deuteronomy 10:12: keep his commandments.” How do you get into rest? How do you enjoy that fellowship? Labor by keeping commandments. That is conditional; that is the wrong place and function of good works.

That is the reason that there had to be separation.

And now take warning, because that same error of conditions is going to come back. The devil is not finished with that false doctrine in the church of Jesus Christ. How that will look, who knows? But that has always been the attack of Satan from the beginning, from the moment Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves to cover themselves by their work. And that remains the attack of the devil to the present day. Beware.

Good works are beautiful. They are a lovely fruit that God gives, but they have a very specific place, a very restricted place: they are fruit.

And so let us maintain by the grace of God that place for good works. Let us not heed those who would say, “Good works are not only fruit; they have other functions too.” 

Good works are beautiful fruit but only fruit. And that to the glory of Jehovah God and to the glory of Jesus Christ, so that our salvation and our covenant fellowship and our enjoyment of that covenant fellowship is by grace alone through faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ alone, to the glory of Jehovah God alone.