Ephesians 2:8-10
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
“For we are what he has made us.”
Ephesians 2:8-9 is, with good reason, one of the central confessions of protestant evangelical Christianity – that our salvation in Christ Jesus is pure gift – pure grace – that we can’t earn it or work for it but receive it from our extraordinarily merciful and loving God. Not because of what we have done, but because of who God is and how God desires to envelop us fully into God’s communal love.
Verse 10 offers an interesting re-framing of works then. Too often we abstract verses 8 and 9 as a stand alone theological truth and in so doing jettison the place and purpose of “works” all together. We have indeed been created for good works. Verse 10 makes that clear. But how is it that we come about finding and doing this work? By discovering who he has made us to be. “For we are what he has made us.” At first pass, this statement seems to be tautological or circular at best. Of course we are what he has made us, who else could we be other than who we are. Until we remember that we were dead through the trespasses and sins 2 in which we once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. Paul is saying that for too long we have been someone other than who God made us to be. We have followed a different course, pursued a different end, driven by a different desire, with a wholly different and distorted understanding of who we were.
To be made alive together with Christ is to discover – or rediscover – who God has made us to be. This is what it means to be saved. In discovering who this person is – what some theologians call this True Self – we at the same time discover what this person is created to do.
We are certainly not saved by our good works, but we are most certainly saved in order that we might get about the business of accomplishing our good works.