2 Corinthians 5:9-11
Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.
“A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify. A never-dying soul to save and fit it for the sky.” So begins the hymn by Charles Wesley, a Methodist, inspired by the writing of Matthew Henry, a Presbyterian, in his commentary on Leviticus:
“We have every one of us a charge to keep, an eternal God to glorify, an immortal soul to provide for, needful duty to be done, our generation to serve; and it must be our daily care to keep this charge, for it is the charge of the Lord our Master, who will shortly call us account about it, and it is our utmost peril if we neglect it. Keep it “that ye die not”; it is death, eternal death, to betray the trust that we are charged with; by the consideration of this we must be kept in awe.”
This to me is all very interesting, and very instructive. Aren’t both of these godly men essentially saying the same thing? Neither considered their good works as meriting salvation. Yet both believed good works were a necessary part—in some sense the only true expression of—their faith in God, that self-conscious faith which is itself a divine gift.
This is just another way of expressing the divine-human interaction in salvation that, no matter how it is systematized, is ultimately a wonderful mystery.
