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Yeppers. Very well said.

I’m no where near as concise if only because I often get reminded of other stuff when people displaying the soul of wit speak up.

… soooooo…

You or I cannot have works unless we’re first saved. Also the Lord prepares the works for us that we should walk in them.

Being a diligent worker does not make you more saved because salvation is not your work, but justification is Christ’s work.

Scripture describe the judgment of our works as determining their quality by a some standard. By that standard SOME works are imperishable and endure and with that apparently comes rewards while OTHER works are perishable and are destroyed BUT the saved person is not lost even if they may suffer loss of potential rewards.

I reason that the standard has something to do with how we obey the Holy Spirit, where works that are a result of obeying the Holy Spirit are the imperishable works BUT if we labor in our own strength without His guidance, if we should for instance act from out of our old body of death and attempt to ape the fruits of the spirit so we should obey it rather than the Holy Spirit, then those seem to me to be the perishable works.

I think the second part of what I just said needs explaining and to do so I will go back to Genesis.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was not just the tree of the knowledge of evil. Before the fall our parents were not just innocent but they were holy creatures, and they had a relationship with the Father that spanned some number of years that constituted a basis for them being able to resist the temptation.

Which is to say I vehemently disagree with people saying they were somehow set up to fall, that I hold that the Lord knowing is very different than Him causing.

So in the fall they ceased to be holy creatures and became merely moral creatures knowing good and evil and being responsible to choose well (even as them, or us after them, choosing well is only what they ought to do, and no basis for boasting before the Lord).

So the natural state of fallen man is not to be as bad as bad can be but, as merely moral creatures, to be unholy creatures. So it should not be impossible for the old body of death to try to ape the fruits of the Holy Spirit and the reason it would do so, I maintain, is that we might obey it rather than Him, the Holy Spirit.

There’s an old joke that I think may help to illustrate this point. In it a young preacher just out of seminary was giving what he thought was a rousing set of sermons to a small country congregation, people he thought of as uneducated and backwards. The room was full but stoic and unresponsive for all services and when nobody responded to the evening invitation, not for anything, he later asked the grizzled old country preacher what he’d done wrong?

The older man looked him straight in the eye and asked him if he was sent or did he just went?

Being sent is working in obedience to the Holy Spirit, faithfully walking in the works which the Lord has prepared for us beforehand.

Being just went is working in your own strength and by your own understanding, even if it’s an appointed work but your attitude is simply wrong.

For the last I think of Paul how referenced people who proclaim the Gospel from bad motives, that it is applicable to my point. Paul was (up to a point) content that the Gospel was being proclaimed even though he clearly would have preferred it to be proclaimed for the right reasons rather than from working some angle. Paul was sent, these others just went.

But again no one can actually be sent unless they are first saved. The lost have no ability to work at all. So don’t anyone say I’m saying works save or that the saints cannot have works.

Justification is like being proclaimed born alive, and the proof of life is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Sanctification is an out working of heeding the Holy Spirit.