"All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good (agathos) work." (see note 2 Timothy 3:16-17). 

See related resource by A W Pink - The Scriptures and Good Works

Consider the fruit tree. It is not "conscious" of the bearing process. We are to be like the fruit tree for it is God Who is causing fruit be borne in good works which blossom and ripen as we are walk obedient to His revealed will.

Vine comments that every good work

"signifies every kind of activity undertaken for the name of Christ; everything so undertaken is a means of fruitfulness, and the operating power is the indwelling Holy Spirit, upon whom the believer is entirely dependent." (Vine, W. Collected writings of W. E. Vine. Nashville: Thomas Nelson )

One way to think of this is as a process, so that in salvation God does work for us, in sanctification He does work in us and in service He does work through us and bears fruit that remains. God builds character before He calls to service. He must work in us before He can work through us. God spent 25 years working in Abraham before He gave him the promised son Isaac. Remember too that although we are not saved by good works, we are saved unto good works.

Luther said

“It’s not against works that we contend, it’s against trust in works that we contend.”

The Protestant Reformers spoke of this as "Sola fide justificat sid non fides qua est sola" which translated means

“Faith alone justifies but not the faith which is alone.”

True faith will issue in good works. Now not necessarily seen by you or me, but there must be good works.

The KJV Bible Commentary has this summary...

Christ in us still goes “about doing good” (Acts 10:38). We are saved apart from good works, but saved unto good works. Good works are the aim of our salvation and the evidence of our faith (Jas 2:17-18). Works never produce salvation, but salvation always produces good works. A man is not justified by works, but a justified man works. Works are the consequences, not the causes of salvation. They are the fruit, not the root of salvation. One must be a Christian before he can live as a Christian; he must be good before he can do good. God is still working.

By grace (Eph 2:8), it was Christ for us;
Through faith (Eph 2:8), it was Christ in us; and
Unto good works, it is Christ through us.

(Dobson, E G, Charles Feinberg, E Hindson, Woodrow Kroll, H L. Wilmington: KJV Bible Commentary: Nelson)

“It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone.”

We are not saved by faith plus good works, but by a faith that works. Any declaration of faith that does not result in a changed life and good works is a false declaration. True saving faith can never be by itself for it always brings life, and life produces good works. The person with dead faith has only an intellectual experience. In his mind, he knows the doctrines of salvation, but he has never submitted himself to God and trusted Christ for salvation. He knows the right words, but he does not back up his words with his works. Faith in Christ brings eternal life right now (John 3:16), and where there is life there must be growth and fruit. (cf Js 2:17)

Are you bearing fruit in every good work? Dearly beloved, be encouraged for Paul is writing here in Ephesians 2:10 that your very purpose for existence is good works.  And God never expects anything from us without first enabling us. We need to walk forth empowered by this truth and the indwelling Spirit.

Many believers minimize the place of good works in the Christian life reasoning that because we are not saved by good works, then good works are something to be shunned.  But our Lord reminds us that our incredible privilege is to

"Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father Who is in heaven.” (see note Matthew 5:16)

It is not only by words that we give testimony to the greatness of God, but also by our works. Our good works in fact pave the way for witness with good words. If our walk contradicts our words, we lose our testimony. Our “walk” and our “talk” must agree. Good works and good words must come from the same yielded heart. Too many believers today emphasize guarding the truth, but downplay living the truth. One of the best ways to guard the truth is to put it into practice. It is good to be defenders of the faith, but we must not forget to be demonstrators of the faith by letting them see our good works!

You are writing a Gospel,
A chapter each day,
By the deeds that you do
And the words that you say.
Men read what you write,
Whether faithful or true:
Just what is the Gospel
According to you?
                        --- Author unknown

When doing good works, also remember that the following question is irrelevant

Paul reminded Titus (and us) that Jesus

"gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous (afire, ardent, fervent, eager, enthusiastic) for good deeds." (see note Titus 2:14)

The writer of Hebrews exhorts believers

Please do not misunderstand. Believers do not manufacture these good works but instead they are the fruit of God's Spirit working in a tender, surrendered, obedient heart. "Good deeds" differ from "your deeds". Let me explain. Paul is calling for "good" (agathos = "good" in character or constitution, beneficial in effect) deeds, and the only "good" deeds are those borne by believers (like "branches") who are abiding in Christ ("the Vine"). Good deeds reflect Christ's life flowing through us, initiated and energized by His Spirit and bringing glory to His Father for as Paul reminds us

“it is God Who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” (see note Philippians 2:13)

Peter emphasizes the vital importance of good deeds exhorting his suffering readers to...

Thus our good works serve as testimonies to the lost and even win us the right to be heard.

"consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds." (see note Hebrews 10:24)

"present (our) bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God" (see note Romans 12:1).

"redeem (buy up) "the time (opportunities), because the days are evil" (see note  (Eph 5:16)

And finally we must daily be diligent to discipline ourselves for godliness which is

"profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come." (see notes 1Timothy 4:7; 4:8; 4:9;  4:10; 4:11)

William Penn wrote: “I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore there be any kindness I can show or any good thing I can do to any fellow-being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

In the summer of 1805, a number of Indian chiefs and warriors met in council at Buffalo Creek, New York to hear a presentation of the Christian message by a Mr. Cram from the Boston Missionary Society. After the sermon, a response was given by Red Jacket, one of the leading chiefs. Among other things, the chief said: "Brother, you say that there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the Book?

Charles Swindoll has a comment  that relates to works...

In his book I Surrender, Patrick Morley writes that the church's integrity problem is in the misconception "that we can add Christ to our lives, but not subtract sin. It is a change in belief without a change in behavior." He goes on to say, "It is revival without reformation, without repentance."  (C. Swindoll, John The Baptizer, Bible Study Guide, p. 16)

Martin Luther who as a zealous monk well knew about fleshly works carried out in an attempt to earn salvation had the following to say regarding faith and works...

The question is asked: how can justification (one being declared righterous) take place without the works of the law, even though James says: "Faith without works is dead"? In answer, the apostle distinguishes between the law and faith, the letter and grace. The 'works of the law' are works done without faith and grace, by the law, which forces them to be done through fear or the enticing promise of temporal advantages. But 'works of faith' are those done in the spirit of liberty, purely out of love to God. And they can be done only by those who are justified by faith.

An ape can cleverly imitate the actions of humans. But he is not therefore a human. If he became a human, it would undoubtedly be not by virtue of the works by which he imitated man but by virtue of something else; namely, by an act of God. Then, having been made a human, he would perform the works of humans in proper fashion. Paul does not say that faith is without its characteristic works, but that it justifies without the works of the law. Therefore justification does not require the works of the law; but it does require a living faith, which performs its works...God our Father has made all things depend on faith so that whoever has faith will have everything, and whoever does not have faith will have nothing...The true, living faith, which the Holy Spirit instills into the heart, simply cannot be idle.

William Booth founder of the Salvation Army made the interesting statement that...

Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again -- until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other.

Dr Harlan Roper discussing the relationship of faith and works writes...

To illustrate dead faith, "It is that kind of faith which would lead a man to take a bottle of medicine from his medicine cabinet. Looking at the instructions on it, he says, 'I'm sure they're correct. I have all confidence in the source of the medicine. I know who wrote these directions. I believe everything about it. I know this will relieve my headache, if I just take it.' But he takes the medicine bottle and puts it back on the shelf. He doesn't lose his headache. It continues on. Yet he can say I believe that medicine. I believe all about that medicine. But still he won't take it. That's dead faith."

Alexander Maclaren (God's Workmanship and Our Works) writes that...

THE metal is molten as it runs out of the blast furnace, but it soon cools and hardens. Paul’s teaching about salvation by grace and by faith came in a hot stream from his heart, but to this generation his words are apt to sound coldly, and hardly theological. But they only need to be reflected upon in connection with our own experience, to become vivid and vital again. The belief that a man may work towards salvation is a universal heresy. And the Apostle, in the context, summons all his force to destroy that error, and to substitute the great truth that we have to begin with an act of God’s, and only after that can think about our acts. To work up towards salvation is, in the strict sense of the words, preposterous; it is inverting the order of things. It is beginning at the wrong end. It is saying X Y Z before you have learnt to say A B C. We are to work downwards from salvation because we have it, not that we may get it. And whatever ‘good works’ may mean, they are the consequences, not the causes, of ‘salvation,’ whatever that may mean. But they are consequences, and they are the very purpose of it. So says Paul in the archaic language of my text — which only wants a little steadfast looking at to be turned into up-to-date gospel — ‘We are His workmanship, created unto good works’; and the fact that we are is one great reason for the assertion which he Brings it in to Buttress, that we are saved by grace, not by works.

Now, I wish, in the simplest possible way, to deal with these great words, and take them as they lie before us.

I. We have, first, then, this as the root of everything, the divine creation.

Now, you will find that in this profound letter of the Apostle there are two ideas cropping up over and over again, both of them representing the facts of the Christian life and of the transition from the unchristian to the Christian; and the one is Resurrection and the other is Creation. They have this in common, that they suggest the idea that the great gift which Christianity brings to men — no, do not let me use the abstract word ‘Christianity’ — the great gift which Christ brings to men — is a new life. The low popular notion that salvation means mainly and primarily immunity from the ultimate, most lasting future consequences of transgression, a change of place or of condition, infects us all, and is far too dominant in our popular notions of Christianity and of salvation. And it is Because people have such an unworthy, narrow, selfish idea of what ‘salvation’ is that they fall into the bog of misconception as to how it is to he attained. The ordinary man’s way of looking at the whole matter is summed up in a sentence which I heard not long since about a recently deceased friend of the speaker’s, and the like of which you have no doubt often heard and perhaps said, ‘He is sure to be saved because he has lived so straight.’ And at the foundation of that confident epitaph lay a tragical, profound misapprehension of what salvation was.

For it is something done in you; it is not something that you get, but it is something that you become. The teaching of this letter, and of the whole New Testament, is that the profoundest and most precious of all the gifts which come to us in Jesus Christ, and which in their totality are summed up in the one word that has so little power over us, because we understand it so little, and know it so well — ‘salvation’ — is a change in a man’s nature so deep, radical, vital, as that it may fairly be paralleled with a resurrection from the dead.

Now, I venture to believe that it is something more than a strong rhetorical figure when that change is described as being the creation of a new man within us. The resurrection symbol for the same fact may be treated as but a symbol. You cannot treat the teaching of a new life in Christ as being a mere figure. It is something a great deal more than that, and when once a man’s eye is opened to look for it in the New Testament it is wonderful how it flashes out from every page and underlies the whole teaching. The Gospel of John, for example, is but one long symphony which has for its dominant theme ‘I am come that they might have life.’ And that great teaching — which has been so vulgarised, narrowed, and mishandled by sacerdotal pretensions and sacramentarian superstitions — that great teaching of Regeneration, or the new birth, rests upon this as its very basis, that what takes place when a man turns to Jesus Christ, and is saved by Him, is that there is communicated to him not in symbol but in spiritual fact and spiritual facts are far more true than external ones which are called real, a spark of Christ’s own life, something of ‘that spirit of life which was in Christ Jesus,’ and by which, and by which alone, being transfused into us, we become ‘free from the law of sin and death.’ I beseech you, brethren, see that, in your perspective of Christian truth, the thought of a new life imparted to us has as prominent and as dominant a place as it obviously has in the teaching of the New Testament. It is not so dominant in the current notions of Christianity that prevail amongst average people, but it is so in all men who let themselves be guided by the plain teaching of Christ Himself and of all His servants. Salvation? Yes. And the very essence of the salvation is the breathing into me of a divine life, so that I become partaker of ‘the divine nature.’

Now, there is another step to be taken, and that is that this new life is realised in Christ Jesus. Now, this letter of the Apostle is distinguished even amongst his letters by the extraordinary frequency and emphasis with which he uses that expression ‘in Christ Jesus.’ If you will take up the epistle, and run your eye over it at your leisure, I think you will be surprised to find how, in all connections, and linked with every sort of blessing and good as its condition, there recurs that phrase. It is ‘in Christ’ that we obtain the inheritance; it is ‘in Christ’ that we receive ‘redemption, even the forgiveness of sins’; it is in Him that we are ‘builded together for a habitation of God’; it is in Him that all fulness of divine gifts, and all blessedness of spiritual capacities, is communicated to us; and unless, in our perspective of the Christian life, that expression has the same prominence as it has in this latter, we have yet to learn the sweetest sweetness, and have yet to receive the most mighty power, of the Gospel that we profess. ‘In Christ’ — a union which leaves the individuality of the Saviour and of the saint unimpaired, because without such individuality sweet love were slain, and there were no communion possible, but which is so close, so real, so vital, as that only the separating wall of personality and individual consciousness comes in between — that is the New Testament teaching of the relation of the Christian to Christ. Is it your experience, dear brother? Do not be frightened by talking about mysticism. If a Christianity has no mysticism it has no life. There is a wholesome mysticism and there is a morbid one, and the wholesome one is the very nerve of the Gospel as it is presented by Jesus Himself: ‘I am the Vine, ye are the branches. Abide in Me, and I in you.’ If our nineteenth century busy Christianity could only get hold of that truth as firmly as it grasps the representative and sacrificial character of Christ’s work, I believe it would come like a breath of spring over ‘the winter of our discontent,’ and would change profoundly and blessedly the whole contexture of modern Christianity.

And now there is another step to take, and that is that this union with Christ, which results in the communication of a new life, or, as my text puts it, a new creation, depends upon our faith. We are not passive in the matter. There is the condition on which the entrance of the life into our spirits is made possible. You must open the door, you must fling wide the casement, and the blessed warm morning air of the can of righteousness, with healing in its beams, will rush in, scatter the darkness and raise the temperature. ‘Faith,’ by which we simply mean the act of the mind in accepting and of the will and heart in casting one’s self upon Christ as the Saviour — that act is the condition of this new life. And so each Christian is ‘God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.’

And now, says Paul — and here some of us will hesitate to follow him — that new creation has to go before what you call ‘good works.’ Now, do not let us exaggerate. There has seldom been a more disastrous and untrue thing said than what one of the Fathers dared to say, that the virtues of godless men were ‘splendid vices.’ That is not so, and that is not the New Testament teaching. Good is good, whoever does it. But, then, no man will say that actions, however they may meet the human conception of excellence, however bright, pure, lofty in motive and in aim they may be, reach their highest possible radiance and are as good as they ought to be, if they are done without any reference to God and His love. Dear brethren, we surely do not need to have the alphabet of morality repeated to us, that the worth of an action depends upon its motive, that no motive is correspondent to our capacities and our relation to God and our consequent responsibilities, except the motive of loving obedience to Him. Unless that be present, the brightest of human acts must be convicted of having dark shadows in it, and all the darker because of the brightness that may stream from it. And so I venture to assert that since the noblest systems of morality, apart from religion, will all coincide in saying that to be is more than to do, and that the worth of an action depends upon its motive, we are brought straight up to the ‘narrow, bigoted’ teaching of the New Testament, that unless a man is swayed by the love of God in what he does, you cannot, in the most searching analysis, say that his deed is as good as it ought to be, and as it might be. To be good is the first thing, to do good is the second. Make the tree good and its fruit good. And since, as we have made ourselves we are evil, there must come a re-creation before we can do the good deeds which our relation to God requires at our hands.

II. I ask you to look at the purpose of this new creation brought out in our text.

‘Created in Christ Jesus unto good works.’ That is what life is given to you for. That is why you are saved, says Paul. Instead of working upwards from works to salvation, take your stand at the received salvation, and understand what it is for, and work downwards from it.

Now, do not let us take that phrase, ‘good works,’ which I have already said came hot from the Apostle’s heart, and is now cold as a bar of iron, in the limited sense which it has come to bear in modern religious phraseology. It means something a great deal more than that. It covers the whole ground of what the Apostle, in another of his letters, speaks of when he says, ‘Whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, if there be any virtue’ — to use for a moment the world’s word, which has such power to conjure in Greek ethics — ‘or if there be any praise’ — to use for a moment the world’s low motive, which has such power to sway men — ‘think of these things,’ and these things do. That is the width of the conception of ‘good works’; everything that is ‘lovely and of good report,’ That is what you receive the new life for.

Contrast that with other notions of the purpose of revelation and redemption. Contrast it with what I have already referred to, and so need not enlarge upon now, the miserably inadequate and low notions of the essentials of salvation which one hears perpetually, and which many of us cherish. It is no mere immunity from a future hell. It is no mere entrance into a vague heaven. It is not escaping the penalty of the inexorable law, ‘Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,’ that is meant by ‘salvation; any more than it is putting away the rod, which the child would be all the better for having administered to him, that is meant by ‘forgiveness.’ But just as forgiveness, in its essence, means not suspension nor abolition of penalty, but the uninterrupted flow of the Father’s love, so salvation in its essence means, not the deliverance from any external evil or the alteration of anything in the external position, but the revolution and the re-creation of the man’s nature. And the purpose of it is that the saved man may live in conformity with the will of God, and that on his character there may be embroidered all the fair things which God desires to see on His child’s vesture.

Contrast it with the notion that an orthodox Belief, the purpose of revelation. I remember hearing once of a man that ‘he was a very shady character, but sound on the Atonement.’ What is the use of being ‘sound on t