You’re saved by being a good person — not

By Robin Schumacher, Exclusive Columnist Monday, December 15, 2025

If you’re a Christian, then you know how to obtain eternal life with God.

To be “considered worthy of the Kingdom of God” (2 Thess. 1:5), it all comes down to being a “good” person. To living a life where your good outweighs your bad, where you work hard to prove yourself to God and show Him that, deep down, you don’t resemble those that the world considers evil.

Like dentists.

By your merit, you win the approval of God and thus exemplify the words of James: “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24). That’s the way to spend eternal life with God.

At least, that’s what a recent report by Arizona Christian University said a slim majority — 53% — of “self-identified Christian” Americans believe. From a total survey perspective, “nearly half of this segment (42%) believed that good people can earn Heaven. More than one-third (38%) said repentance only takes admission of sin, not behavioral change. One-fourth (27%) argued that there are paths to salvation apart from Jesus.” The biggest percentage (73%) of Christian-identified respondents who believe being good gets you into the presence of God forever were Catholics.

Why would so many people identifying as Christians believe that?

Where Catholicism is concerned, this isn’t so surprising. Its debate with the Protestant Reformers came down to the rejection of one word: alone.

Faith alone. Grace alone. Christ alone. Scripture alone.

But the large percentage of non-Catholics embracing a works-based salvation doctrine is both confusing and troubling and begs the question of why so many believe that.

Maybe it’s bad core teaching. Pretty much every Christian cult (e.g., Jehovah's Witnesses) believes in works salvation, as do some liberal denominations that reinterpret sin and salvation in existential or social terms.

Maybe it’s bad inferred teaching. A lot of Christians believe you can lose your salvation if you commit one or more sins on their subjective you-better-not-or-else damnation list (e.g., a YouTube video I recently saw that proclaimed, “5 sexual sins that lead to Hell”). Hence, you work to stay good, and presto, your works implicitly become a safety net or ticket to Heaven.

Maybe it’s just an unwillingness to believe that salvation by grace is legit and we, not God, must play the primary role in making it happen. Tim Keller says the Gospel can be a biblical double-slap in the face of people: “Grace is insulting. One side says they don’t need forgiveness whereas the other side says that’s too easy.” G. K. Chesterton said the same thing about the latter when he wrote, “What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true.”

And it’s not just your average church folks falling into this trap. For example, during his last hours, the great John Knox woke from sleeping with a heavy sigh, and told his friends that he had just been tempted to believe that he had “merited Heaven and eternal blessedness, by the faithful discharge of my ministry. But blessed be God who has enabled me to beat down and quench the fiery dart, by suggesting to me such passages of Scripture as these: ‘What hast thou that thou didst not receive?’” “By the grace of God I am what I am.” “Not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”

The incorrect spiritual formula of Faith + Works = Salvation seems hard to break for everyone, even for people like Knox.

But the Bible tells us explicitly through its didactic texts and numerous examples that “by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). There are lots of examples of that in Scripture, but let me tell you a powerful one, which I didn’t understand for a long time.

The account of Moses being denied entry into the promised land always bugged me. God asks him to speak to a rock and bring water from it for Israel, and Moses gets angry with the crowd and says, “Listen now, you rebels; shall we bring forth water for you out of this rock?” (Num. 20:10). And due to that, God says, “Because you have not believed Me, to treat Me as holy in the sight of the sons of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them” (Num. 20:12).

You mean after slugging it out with Israel, enemies, and natural adversities for decades, after one slip-up, he gets the promised land’s door shut in his face? That always seemed a bit harsh to me.

But there’s a bigger picture thing going on there. When you step back and look at the broad picture of the Old Testament, there are two major personalities: Abraham and Moses. Two men, representing two types (faith and works/the law), and two covenants. The spiritual lesson behind Moses being denied entrance into the promised land is this:

The man of law/works does not enter the promised land; only the man of faith does.

The same is true of us today. The formula of Faith + Works = Salvation isn’t true. But — and this might be a shocker for you to read — neither is Faith = Salvation.

The correct equation is Faith = Salvation + Works (or holy affections as Jonathan Edwards calls them). Works are the fruit of salvation, not a cause of it.

This is what James means when he says: “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone”. “Justified” in the verse means “proven,” “demonstrated,” indicating that it’s the fruit and evidence of salvation.

If you want a works-based salvation religion, head over to Islam, which tells its adherents: “Then those whose balance (of good deeds) is heavy, they will be successful. But those whose balance is light, will be those who have lost their souls; in Hell will they abide” (Sura: 23:102-103).

But Christianity says there is only one “work” needed for salvation: “Jesus answered and said to them, 'This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent'” (John 6:29). Do that, and you’ll spend eternity with God.

Even if you’re a dentist.