Good works call for our devotion. After all, they’re what we were “created in Christ Jesus for” (Eph. 2:10). We must actively “learn” to do them. The ability to do good works is infused into us when we’re born again—so the potential is there. But the actual doing of them is a learned skill (like riding a bike or reading), and part of Great Commission discipleship is teaching people to do them (Matt. 28:20).

The Bible has a lot of negative things to say about “works,” especially “works of the law.” Paul stresses repeatedly that we’re justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. Salvation is “not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Eph. 2:8, NKJV).
But “good works” are another matter. By my ESV search, the phrase “good works” (plural) is used 13 times in the New Testament, with eight occurrences in the Pastoral Epistles. Without exception, the phrase is used in a positive, nonironic way to describe exemplary Christian activity.
Few chapters are as relentless in advocating good works as Titus 3. If someone tells you Paul and James disagree about the need for good works, point him to this chapter. Here we can identify three facets of good works: their foundation, their importance, and their definition.
Foundation of Good Works
No less a do-gooder than William Wilberforce once defined Christianity as “a scheme . . . for making the fruits of holiness the effects, not the cause, of our being justified and reconciled.” Good works are the fruit, not the root. Or to tweak the analogy, good works are what goes on in the house, but they’re not the foundation of the house. 
This is exactly what Paul says in Titus 3:8: “The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works.”
Notice that the people who are told to devote themselves to good works are “those who have believed in God.” Saving faith and good works aren’t like our two separate hands—rather, faith in God is the foundation for good works.
Paul isn’t referring to a general faith in God’s existence but rather a specific faith in God’s loving kindness for us in the gospel. Notice how he begins verse 8. Good works are the result of Titus “[insisting] on these things.” We insist on these things so that believers will do good works. But what are “these things”? What is this “trustworthy saying”? The answer is found in the immediately preceding verses:
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. (vv. 4–7)
The only message that can be trusted to produce good works is the message that tells us our works can’t save us. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s the gospel. If we want a house filled with good works, we must first lay a solid foundation for them.
Importance of Good Works
Sometimes gospel-centered people can be skittish about good works. We think, Just preach the gospel, and good works will happen on their own without any sustained focus on them. But this isn’t what we see in Titus 3. Instead, Paul says things like “let our people learn to devote themselves to good works” (v. 14) and “[let believers] be careful to devote themselves to good works” (v. 8). There’s an urgency here that’s often missing in our preaching.
Good works call for our devotion. After all, they’re what we were “created in Christ Jesus for” (Eph. 2:10). We must actively “learn” to do them. The ability to do good works is infused into us when we’re born again—so the potential is there.
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It’s bad enough when public school parents have to fight against the woke indoctrination happening in those schools, but when Christian institutions are threatened with the same agenda, it’s time for dissenting voices such as Dr. Schulz to step up and alert the Church. Hopefully the good professor can not only keep his job but will cause positive change at Concordia because of his bold stand.

Dr. Gregory P. Schulz is a tenured professor at Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW), a Lutheran Church/Missouri Synod institution. He teaches philosophy and is a Lutheran pastor with over 40 years of experience in ministry either in a local parish or in higher education.
When Dr. Schulz published an article on February 14 critical of CUW’s “woke-ness” in its search for a new university president for the 8,000-student institution, he was immediately suspended from his teaching duties until he publicly recants.
And for good measure, Dr. Schulz was immediately barred from campus. The callous swiftness of the administration’s retaliation was stunning. He had hit a nerve.
“Woke Dysphoria at Concordia,” the title of Schulz’ February 14 article in The Christian News, complained that CUW was “coming under the influence of Woke-ism,” which he described as “a potent cocktail of Progressivism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Marxism.” Instead of searching for a new president from a list of 11 candidates given to the university’s Board of Regents by the Synod – a list which included Dr. Schulz as a qualified candidate – the Board decided to ignore the Synod and start a new search for a candidate with social justice credentials.
Those credentials include a president who exhibits a “demonstrated belief in and commitment to equity and inclusion” and promotes racialized “diversity in all its myriad forms.”
“These are aggressive-progressive Woke mantras,” Schulz warned in his article. What the university is really looking for, he said, is someone “who would thus be radically different from spiritual and educational leadership as authoritatively described in the Scriptures.”
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Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, October 21, 2022
We live in an age whose moral barbarisms eclipse what Schaeffer saw in his own day. Were he alive today, Schaeffer would not be shocked in the least. Instead, watching the wreckage of the world, he might say with tears, “You should have listened to me” (cf. Acts 27:21). Contemporary society is living proof of Schaeffer’s correctness, and we should not fail to listen to him now. It should not go unsaid that Schaeffer’s chapter ends with chastising those who should have seen what was happening in their respective disciplines and did nothing. So, too, shall we ask ourselves the question Schaeffer would ask of them: Do we see the rot before us? 

The famous political philosopher Leo Strauss once answered the question regarding what is a just political order “par excellence” as “how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.”[1] All nations are still trying to determine the correct formula. Strauss was not a Christian, but his statement captures the same tension and dilemma described in chapter three of Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto on “The Destruction of Faith and Freedom.”
Schaeffer’s chapter captures what political philosophers and public theologians alike refer to as the “theo-political question”: How does a society secure its future in perpetuity when varying degrees of religious, ideological, and moral diversity confront it? In other words, how much moral diversity can a society withstand before it collapses beneath the weight of relativism and moral subjectivism? What ultimate standard can serve as such a guide?
Some degree of moral consensus is necessary for a social order to persist, even if it is modest in scope. The question is how “thick” or “thin” such a consensus must be before the outer boundaries of social cohesion are stretched beyond their limits. Scripture teaches the same principle as well (Prov. 29:18). Society needs a shared moral horizon to offset the corresponding temptations of totalitarian rule by the state and autonomous rule by the subjective self. A just political order comprises neither too much liberty (license) nor too little liberty (oppression). Some Being, authority, force, order, or object must be present to shape that moral vision and measure the extremes of license and oppression. Schaeffer sees Scripture’s God as the only sustainable option given the reality of divine revelation. When God is denied, ignored, or treated as inconsequential, rival systems offering rival moralities contend for the space left vacant by God’s “absence.” The result is confusion—and one or many systems that are inimical to a rightfully-ordered society.
To make his argument, Schaeffer draws attention to three main areas where he sees the creep of secular humanism making inroads. All three areas converge at the point of making morality a product of human design, which subverts the long-term viability of moral cohesion, social order, and the principled basis of liberty.
Three Areas of Rising Secularism
First, Schaeffer identifies the legal landscape, which impacts the nature of power. Schaeffer sees law as having been emptied of anything resembling theistic natural law and having taken a turn toward “sociological law,” which rejects “higher law” (Divine Law). Whether knowingly or not, a culture that rejects the “higher law” will inexorably substitute something in its place, with the intended impact being that man-made authorities or ideologies, over time, are bent toward self-aggrandizement, thus reshuffling where the presumption of liberty resides. In a Christian worldview, the state is inherently limited. In a secular worldview, nothing inherently limits the state other than its own discretion.
Second, Schaeffer draws attention to the area of science, which impacts the existence of any sort of binding morality. An intelligent Creator has been exchanged for the blind forces of evolution and materialism. Again, because morality is collapsed into the material, nothing outside the observed world can impose any form of morality.
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