All But a Cooler Hell For Lost Sinners Who Try to Work Their Way to Heaven

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There is one thing that people say, "Just be a good person and you are certainly assured of Heaven." However, there is one thing that can be certain - all that trying to be morally good enough for Heaven will still bring you to Hell. Unfair? Isaiah 64:6, Romans 3:10-19 and James 2:10-11 warn that you cannot keep God's entirely perfect standard. God cannot accept the slightest blot of sin even in the most moral person.

Here's a devotional by Puritan pastor Thomas Brooks to the tragic reality that all secular goodness and morality will get you is to a cooler Hell which should also shake the foundation of self-righteousness:
"God, I thank You that I'm not like other people—greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of everything I get." - Luke 18:11-12 
Many please and satisfy themselves with mere civility and common morality. They bless themselves that they are not swearers, nor drunkards, nor extortioners, nor adulterers, etc. Their behavior is civil, sincere, harmless, and blameless. 
But civility is not sanctity. Civility rested in—is but a beautiful abomination—a smooth way to hell and destruction. Civility is very often . . . the nurse of impiety, the mother of flattery, and an enemy to real sanctity.  
There are those who are so blinded with the fair shows of civility—that they can neither see the necessity nor beauty of sanctity. There are those who now bless themselves in their common morality, whom at last God will scorn and cast off for lack of real holiness and purity. 
A moral man may be an utter stranger . . . to God, to Christ, to Scripture, to the filthiness of sin, to the depths and devices of Satan, to their own hearts, to the new birth, to the great concerns of eternity, to communion with Christ, to the secret and inward ways and workings of the Spirit. 
Well, sirs, remember this—though the moral man is good for many things—yet he is not good enough to go to heaven! He who rises to no higher pitch than civility and morality—shall never have communion with God in glory. The most moral man in the world, may be both Christless and graceless. 
Morality is not sufficient to keep a man out of eternal misery. All morality can do, is to help a man to one of the best rooms and easiest beds which Hell affords! For, as the moral man's sins are not so great as others—so his punishments shall not be so great as others. This is all the comfort that can be given to a moral man—that he shall have a cooler hell than others have. But this is but cold comfort. 
Morality without piety is as a body without a soul. Will God ever accept of such a stinking sacrifice? Surely not! 
"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God." Luke 18:13-14

Also, the very warning of the Lord Jesus is that the best of people who are good in human terms are but doers of iniquity. Matthew 7:21-23 warns that many will even try to use whatever goodness they have to avoid Judgment on Judgment Day. Instead, Jesus will tell such people to depart from Him as they are but doers of iniquity. The same morally right people by secular standards and without Christ are headed to Hell as the same morally rotten rotten whose rottenness proves they are without Christ.

What is true good works according to the Bible? A true good work is one that comes out of a saved life. The saved person knows that he or she is not saved by works yet continues in good works out of a grateful heart. A good person only by worldly standards bears rotten fruit - such a person only does good works in the hopes of bribing God into his or her way to Heaven. The difference of the motive of doing good works also draws the line between someone who has been doing good works as an inevitable result of being saved by grace and the other who is trying to get saved by his or her works.

It's certain that even the lowest Heaven is better that the highest Hell. Punishment is punishment. Unquenchable fire is still unquenchable fire. Are you still trying to work your way to Heaven? Then stop doing so. All you will get is a cooler Hell but never an inch closer to Heaven.

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