Are You…..a Good Person?

Are you a good person?

People are generally modest. You can’t ask them that question face to face without being rude. But, if you conducted an anonymous poll, I suspect that the vast majority……..almost all…….would say “yes, I’m a good person. It is the rare human who goes through life dogged by the sure knowledge that they are a fundamentally bad person.

So, if you ask me that question……….I would answer, “Yes, I’m a good person”. You would too. So far so good.

The trouble is this:

Adolph Hitler would have given exactly the same answer.

And here is the scary part…….Hitler would not have been lying. I am sure that he sincerely believed that he was a good German serving his people. His belief in his goodness was just as sincere as mine…….and yours.

Hitler’s belief that he was a good person was just as valid as mine is………and just as valid as yours is.

This speaks to the power of the rationalizations and justifications that we use…..all day every day. We all do bad things……all day every day. How can we say that we are good? It’s simple…….we have a justification for the bad thing…….in fact, we have a separate justification for each and every bad thing that we do.

Not me…….you say.

Well, do you keep track of your internet purchases, report them to your state revenue department, then calculate and pay the use tax on each of them?…..not likely. Do you donate to the charities fighting starvation in Africa……all of them. Do you give to the guy with the sign on the exit ramp?

That we fail to do good every day is a fact. That we fail to show love to our fellow man every day is a fact. But, that is not the point of this post. The point of this post centers around the absolutely reasonable justifications that we use hundreds of times each day…….. every time we fail to do good.

The point is that I cannot trust my opinion of how good of a person I am……….and neither can you. We are both far too skilled at justifying our failures to be able to honestly assess our goodness.

Every few days I hear something like this…..”I’m not religious, I don’t go to church, though I do believe in heaven. I’m going there……..because I’m a good person.”

Herr Hitler could easily have believed the same thing.

What to do?

Since we cannot rely on self assessment, it is clear that we need a stable, objective, universal, tool to measure our goodness against.

The Bible is such a tool. But there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that we don’t measure up. We continually fall short of God’s expectations. The good news is that there is a workaround……..Jesus. Accept him and the fact that you aren’t good enough…….that you never have been good enough…….becomes irrelevant.

With Jesus………the fact that you are not a good enough person no longer matters.

So……..you have two options:

Ignore God and trust in your own goodness……….trust in the quality and the validity of your justifications.

Or

Recognize your failures and accept Jesus’s “get out of hell free card”.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Jesus, ESV

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Paul, ESV