When I was 11, my class had a discussion about what it takes to get into heaven. Most of my peers thought that, in Christianity, if you’re basically a good person, you go to heaven. It’s your behaviour that wins the favour of God and puts in you in a nice place when you die.

To put that more theologically, my friends thought Christianity was a works-based religion.

In fact, salvation is by faith as a result of God’s grace, which means that it isn’t earned.

The apostle Paul explains in Romans 3:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.

So it’s faith, not works, that causes people to be saved.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

We can’t just claim we believe in God and turn up to church once a year at Christmas, but otherwise reject God’s influence on our lives. Being a nominal Christian doesn’t work: you have to be a real one.

James, the younger half-brother of Jesus, explains this in chapter 2 of his book (NIV):

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

But someone will say, ‘You have faith; I have deeds.’

Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that – and shudder.

You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? … You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone… As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

It’s not works that saves but they are a consequence of real faith. The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, born of the English Reformation, explain the issue as follows:

XI. Of the Justification of Man

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

XII. Of Good Works

Albeit that Good Works, which are the fruits of Faith, and follow after Justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s Judgement; yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively Faith; insomuch that by them a lively Faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by the fruit.

So there you have it: good works “do spring out necessarily of a true and lively Faith”, even though they are not what gets us saved.