Good Works and Dead Works

The person, who objected to my post entitled "You think you are saved but are you, really?", started a new thread entitled "good works vs. dead works".

He wrote the following:

Good works are doing things because God loves you and you love Him.

Dead works are doing things in an attempt to earn something from God or to make you more "acceptable" to Him.

We are qualified for all the promises of God, not based on anything we do but based on what Jesus did.

I suspected that he's unhappy with me insisting that saving faith requires a step of faith.

Here's my reply:

It looks like your definition of good and dead work is driven by the principle that you can not earn your salvation and by extension, you can not earn God's love.

While I agree that you can neither earn your salvation nor God's love, I don't find it an appropriate way to define good and dead work.

The problem is that to do so, you will only be defining the terms within a limited set of conditions and your definition would fail to apply universally.

By your definition, whether the deed is good work or dead is determined by motive. Is it out of gratitude or is it out of a desire to gain something? While that may apply in some cases, does it apply to all cases?

e.g., If a person who is saved is so grateful that he ran to the nearest church he can find and started doing yard work and fixing broken fixtures. Would that be good works? (Assuming that he asked someone with authority in the church.)

His motive is driven by gratitude and not by desire to get something from God.

Well, what if God didn't intend for him to do so? What if God had wanted him to do something else?

Is what he did still considered good work?

What if God had intended someone else to do the work and this guy prevented that someone else from doing it?

Is what he did still considered good work?

If a person yields to God's call with joy but is motivated by the promise that God would bless him for doing it, would that be considered dead works?

As you can see the definition falls apart in this case.

Let's define these term a little bit more universally.

Good work is that which you are called by God to do and you do so with a joyful heart.

Dead work is that which you are not called by God to do or that which you do begrudgingly.

As for your statement:

We are qualified for all the promises of God, not based on anything we do but based on what Jesus did.

You are now in the area of the debate between predestination and free choice. This is an area over which Christians have be arguing since the first century.

If Abraham withheld his son Isaac from God, would Abraham had been counted righteous?

If Jesus didn't die on the cross, but Abraham was obedient to God's call to sacrifice Isaac, would Abraham had been counted righteous?