Do Good Works Earn Salvation

Here is the dilemma: The Bible insists we aren’t saved by or without good works. What is the relationship between the two? Does faith plus works save us, or faith that works?

If we must produce good works to be saved, faith plus works conflicts with salvation as the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8-9). Faith that works explains what God’s grace and our gratitude empower us to do after receiving God’s gift of salvation.

Good Works Can’t Earn Salvation

Bill O’Brien donated sixteen gallons of blood.¹  He was confident that it was his ticket to heaven. Did he have a false sense of security?

Do good works earn salvation? The problem is that our good works aren’t good or pure enough. They are like offering Jesus a drink of water from an obviously sewage-polluted stream.

I threw the javelin in college. My best throw was 210 feet in 1970. In 2025, one of the girls I coached asked how far I had thrown it. When I told her, she exclaimed, “You were good!” Compared to whom? In 1970, the American record was 300 feet.

My college botany professor didn’t permit us to use a pen for exams. We made too many mistakes. We were pencil and eraser people. Our best efforts with a pen weren’t good enough.

Miss Messer taught English at my high school. Her punctuation tests were legendary.  When she detected a single mistake in a sentence, she marked the whole sentence wrong. I scored a 20% on the test and a 0% on the retest.

Many think they’ll satisfy God by good deeds that outweigh their bad deeds. Not so! Those good deeds are of an inferior amount and quality, while even one bad one renders us worthy of death.

God is Holy, Righteous, and Just. I capitalize those traits to highlight how different and other He is compared to us.

Because He is just, He must punish all moral imperfections that fall short of His holy character. Only Jesus was flawless. According to James 2:10 (NIV), “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” 

We all stumble at too many points to count. God doesn’t accept our good deeds as payment for entrance to heaven. That would be like accepting worthless money from a Monopoly game instead of real currency. As we shall see, only Jesus has genuine moral and spiritual currency.

When I worked at a Gulf station on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, we accepted only Gulf credit cards. People asked if we would accept many other cards, but we took only Gulf credit cards. God accepts only Jesus’s righteousness credited to our accounts by faith (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus’s words, actions, and attitudes are God’s “good” standard. We can’t stand alongside Him and fully measure up to His righteous living, talking, and thinking.

A desire to please and bring glory to His Heavenly Father motivated His good works. He never fell short of the Father’s will and had no sin requiring punishment (John 8:29, 1 Peter 2:22, 1 John 3:5).

That is why He alone qualified to pay the penalty of our sin. He had none of His own to pay for. “Christ suffered for our sins once for all time. He never sinned, but he died for sinners to bring you safely home to God. He suffered physical death, but he was raised to life in the Spirit” (1 Peter 3:18 NLT).

We grossly underestimate how good we must be to please God and overestimate our virtues. Jeremiah 17:9 (NIV) describes the core of our personality as “deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” We excel at fooling ourselves.

We receive no credit when we do “good” things to supply ammunition for boasting. We naturally want others to know how good we are. If good works were the basis of salvation, the world to come would be an eternal boastathon.

But we won’t boast about how good we are before God. ^“God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NLT).

God doesn’t accept our good works card. Our obedience record is pathetic. We can’t be made right with God by obeying the law (Galatians 2:16). That is why Jesus paid our death penalty for our sin (Romans 6:23). Salvation is undeserved. That is what grace means. We receive it freely as God’s gift made possible by Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection for us.

Our good deeds can’t take us to heaven. If they could, why did God at tremendous personal cost send his Son to earth to die on a cross? Would not that mean that Jesus suffered and died for nothing?

Good Works Always Follow Salvation

Good works don’t earn salvation, but always follow it. Saving faith in Jesus’s atoning sacrifice changes our character and conduct. We become new people. The old life is behind us, and a new one has begun (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Like a match that doesn’t light, a salvation that doesn’t produce useful good works is defective (James 2:17, 18, 20, 26). Good works, gratefully performed, prove that we are God’s children (3 John 1:11).

Grace transforms us while it saves. It glorifies Jesus and transforms us so that we become like Him (Romans 8:29).  

We don’t naturally do good unless God enables it (Romans 3:12). He unites us with Christ to be fully committed and devoted to good works (Romans 7:4; Titus 2:14, 3:8). Like a boulder falling from the sky and striking a lake, grace leaves the unmistakable ripples of a changed life. Let’s consider some ways that God’s grace changes us.

We talk about and glorify Jesus (Acts 4:33, 2 Thessalonians 1:12) while growing in the grace and knowledge of Him (2 Peter 3:18).  We give to meet one another’s needs (Acts 4:34, 2 Corinthians 8:7).

Because God builds us up in the faith (Acts 20:32), sin loses its grip on our lives (Romans 6:14). We strengthen the church, Christ’s body, and work hard, using the gifts God has given us to serve each other (Romans 12:6, 1 Corinthians 15:10, 1 Peter 4:10).

Integrity, godly sincerity, holiness, and thanksgiving to God, more and more with time, describe our lives (2 Corinthians 1:12, 4:15; 2 Timothy 1:9). Although weak in ourselves, we become conduits of God’s power (2 Corinthians 12:9), receiving faith, strength, love and God’s appointment to do specific good deeds (Ephesians 2:10, 1 Timothy 1:12, 14). God’s wisdom punctuates our conversations (Colossians 4:6).

Salvation so invariably changes our character and behavior and produces good works and fruit that the latter are the basis for God’s judgment (Matthew 3:10, 7:17, 7:19; Luke 3:9, 6:9; Acts 26:40; Galatians 5:22-23). Their absence reveals we’re not saved. Their presence demonstrates that we belong to God (Matthew 12:33). God saves us by grace through faith that works. See additional free spiritual growth resources for Christians.

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1.     William O'Brien Obituary - Staten Island, NY

God has empowered me to write His Power for Your Weakness—260 Steps Toward Spiritual Strength. It’s a free, evangelistic, devotional, and discipleship e-book. Pastors have used it in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia to lead 7,010 people to Christ and teach the basics of Christianity to 17,361 people. I invite you to explore and use it in your setting.

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