"Those who are in the flesh cannot please God." I continue to ask the question, "When the unregenerate mother loves her baby or when she nurses her baby, does that not please God?" I have yet to have anyone answer that question positively. I maintain that God indeed is pleased that anyone, saved or not saved, who demonstrates love for others or who does obey Him in anything.
When the unregenerate act in a manner that is externally similar to God's value system, that is indeed a morally positive thing.
But they do not do it with the perfect desire to honor God above all in every relationship and the sincere sacrificial love of Christ.
Yes, they can sacrifice externally, and it is commendable, but it is not holiness, and it is not purity, and it is not righteousness.
Because our very best love is idolatrous, in each value we make we never put God first, we idolize our emotional feelings and relationships, and even when we sacrifice for someone we do it for ulterior secret motives of feeling good about ourself or trying to win the favor of our idols. The most virtuous act a fallen human has ever done—ever in all of history—is so far short of God's glory it can only deserve God's wrath for it's failure to genuinely honor him. And that includes me, even as a Christian, my best work on my best day, still deserves hell, because Christ is not perfectly manifest through me yet.
And it is very important to discern this difference, because in truth we are all drawn to self-righteousness, and it is the single most readily available and most easy to commit sin of the entire race, and the most transgressed in as well. Even an outwardly evil man thinks somehow he is justified or someone else is worse, and an outwardly moral man, is filled with a sense of being superior and above those who fail to meet his standard. But pride, although the cardinal and most prevalent sin, is also the hardest sin of all for each person to see, because the mind is blinded with a false image of what the heart really is.
Once we establish we really cannot please God in our flesh, and that Scripture is actually true, we will not harbor those secret feelings that Jesus just partly pays for the portions we fall short in, and instead we realize Jesus had to pay the whole thing, and we do not share the tab with him, and contribute our own righteousness with his sacrifice being the cherry on top of it. "Not having a righteousness of my own," says Paul, because "there is no good thing in me."
Now we can find actual humility in the full acknowledgement of the truth of our unworthiness and see hell is not an overstatement or injustice to how bad we really are, but rather simply the declaration and revelation that we all actually really do deserve hell, because we are evil. No one righteous, no, not one, all have sinned and fallen short, no one is good. Could Scripture be more clear? But the heart deceitful above all things and desperately wicked that cannot know itself, finds a way.
Now we see that a true free choice is only a bestowal of the mercy and grace of God by acting on our sinful desires and changing them into something better, showing us the truth, and empowering us to desire the good, which we cannot do on our own, because by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified in his sight, and all have been sold to sin such that the law brings life to no man, woman, boy or child, since we are born under a Law the Scripture clearly tells us we cannot even potentially keep.
And this is where the Calvinist goes wrong, because he thinks grace is a bullet to the head and a man raping his wife with a love potion, instead of choosing this day whom we will serve, and saying "I do" to God's proposal.
