Jesus We Talk About What Good Is It?
Dear Thomas,
In question six you ask, “I know people who are really good people but who are not Christians. I also know other people who say they are Christians but who are not so good when it comes to morals and ethics. What good is it to be a Christian if it doesn’t affect the way people live, except for maybe the way they spend their Sundays?” This question is one that engenders sadness in me.
I will address this question by talking about how some people use the church for personal reasons and how others discover spiritual connection and growth both within and outside the Christian church. I also need to talk about the goodness factor outside the Christian community and how that relates to Jesus Christ.
Your reflection on some of the lives of churchgoers is probably true. There are those who go to church out of habit. For others, going to church is just something they ought to do. It is good socialization for their kids. It helps their status and respectability in the community.
It is an insurance policy against the flames of hell. It is about spiritual record-keeping, making sure the heavenly books are in order and in their favor. It is about being reminded of what they should or should not do in regard to moral and ethical living. And it may be just about getting a good pep talk once a week.
For still other people, being a Christian and going to church have nothing to do with worshipping God or developing a relationship with Him. Instead, it is all about social networking and self-serving interests.
In such cases, it would not be surprising that the moral and ethical values expressed in Christianity might not get transferred to the daily lives of those who claim to be its adherents.
Toward the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which is recorded in Matthew 7:16, Jesus said, “By their fruit you will recognize them.” Then in verses 21 to 23, He said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”
Nonetheless, I must tell you that a vast number of others within the church are seeing their lives being changed and discovering strength and power in reading and hearing the meaning of God’s Word in Scripture. They look forward with much delight to the opportunity to worship God collectively.
Church gatherings, fellowship, and instruction aid their process of becoming free of the sin problem through Christ and finding healing from its effects. God calls us to this kind of corporate activity because it results in our growing up from that beginning state of being justified, absolved, and put right with God, as talked about in earlier questions.
It also assists in healing us from the damages of sin foisted on us by others as well as the damage we have inflicted upon ourselves. It can strengthen our resistance to our natural inclination toward sin as well as release us from the power and control of sin over our lives. It can be where the Holy Spirit is most active in our lives.
Church can be a place to exercise our faith and find aids for that faith. It can be a place of learning how to love as God loves, to look outward, to be other-directed instead of self-serving and inner-directed. It is a fellowship with others who are also in the process of becoming what God intended them to be.
All this is done not from self-effort but by the work of God’s Spirit within us. It is letting God remold our minds from the inside out (see Rom. 12:2). Thus, church attendance can certainly be a place of growing and maturing in our relationship with Jesus Christ.
Church provides a place where we can ask like the apostle Paul asked when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, “What shall I do, Lord?” or, “Lord, what would You have me do?” (Acts 22:10).
It is a special gathering where you and I can willingly relinquish sovereign control of our lives into the hands of the Creator, who loves us and always has our best interests in mind. And together as the church we can also support and encourage one another to do so.
The rewards for our participation can be awesome. The Bible speaks of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22—23, saying “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Wouldn’t it be nice to experience the fullness of these attributes beginning with loving each other and experiencing its joy?
Living in a broken world, wouldn’t it be wonderful to walk in a peace that leads us to be patient and kind? Another result of giving our lives faithfully into the hands of the Creator is goodness that is expressed in a gentle and self-controlled spirit.
Think of what it would mean if everyone around us demonstrated these character traits. Jesus talked about “the kingdom of God.” These attributes are what the kingdom is about.
The Spirit within becomes the means of life transformed. Beyond the good news of Jesus Christ, this is what the true church is all about. As some say, it is a hospital for sinners. It is the communion point where healing takes place.
It is a place of celebration of this healing and of the God who heals. It is a family of believers, and as in all families, though there are some dysfunctional members, they are yet still family. It is the collective expression of God at work in His people.
There was another part of your question that needs to be addressed. Where does the goodness in non-Christians come from? What makes them good, caring, and loving even though they have nothing to do with a church, do not claim to be Christians, and do not believe in Jesus Christ in the terms I have talked about and may even question the very existence of God?
First, let me say what a privilege it is to be in a relationship with a personal God. What a privilege it is to sense the love, peace, and joy of His presence, to pray or just talk to Him and experience His answers in the form of thoughts, an inner voice other than your own, or an arrangement of circumstances.
What a thrill it is to hear His voice through Scripture, the words of other writers, and other people’s personal experiences in their own“prayer and fox” story (see chapter 2). The privilege of belonging to God as an individual family member is awesome!
Knowing what it is like to know Jesus Christ personally by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, I do not understand why anyone would not want to have and enjoy that relationship. It is the most freeing and liberating experience possible.
Every human being not only needs this experience but also has the privilege of accepting it. I also think that every human being would long for this relationship if each understood the true nature and character of God. And it is there for the asking and there for the taking, a free gift from the God who loves us.
However, much of the world’s population, both now and in history, has not experienced a personal relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Much of the world has never heard of him. Even if they have, many are culturally locked into other religious belief systems. Or if they have heard of Jesus, the ones presenting Him did it in such a way that they rejected Him.
For much of the world Jesus Christ is just a Western Christian belief system just as the Western Christian world thinks of Buddhism, Confucius, or Mohammed as an Eastern or Middle Eastern construct.
At the same time, because of the doing and dying of Jesus Christ, no one comes to God except through Jesus Christ. There is no other way to salvation. All men are saved by the grace of God through Jesus. That fact is very clear in Scripture. Jesus said, as quoted in John 14:6
Does that mean that anyone who does not know and claim the name of Jesus Christ is lost irrespective of the reason why? Does it mean there is no salvation or rescue for human beings who have the misfortune of being born in the wrong culture or the wrong time and place in history?
Does this mean the millions of Asians, Indians, and Africans who happened to live prior to Christ’s birth or prior to the expansion of Christianity through Western missionaries were just out of luck? Does this mean that in God’s eyes, these are just unfortunate human beings? Does He just throw them away? Or worse, does He condemn them to eternal destruction? What a ghastly thought!
I think not. This is not the way a loving, caring, gracious God acts. God isn’t so egocentric that His name, as Scripture identifies it, is an absolute must for salvation. Those who lived before Jesus Christ are still saved through Jesus Christ, just like those who lived during and after His time.
Romans 4:3 clearly states, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” He did not know Jesus Christ in the sense that we know Him after His physical presence on earth. Nor did all those other people of faith listed in Hebrews 11. So if there are those who were saved before Christ without knowledge of Him. Likewise, there will be those saved after Christ without knowledge of Him.
Scripture says that the laws of nature, the glory of the earth and heavens above, are adequate to instruct the conscience. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities —his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). “For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.
Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them” (Rom. 2:13—15).
Thus, “God will give to each person according to what he has done” (Rom. 2:6). The “done” here refers to our response to the promptings or wooing of God’s Spirit in an attitude of repentance. “To those who by persistence in doing good. he will give eternal life” (Rom. 2:7).
There is an alight of truth about right and wrong, about the ability to love that is given to every person who is born. God has created the ability—a place if you please—for God’s Spirit or the Holy Spirit to dwell within every person.
Every person at some time in his or her life, regardless of the historical time, culture, or beliefs, has the opportunity to respond to that Spirit, to respond to love. “For God is love” (1 John 4:16).
Jesus said in Matthew 22:37, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
However, God may be unidentified or unknown, as the apostle Paul noted in his address to the Romans at Mars Hill (Acts 17:22-23), or it may be that God has a different identification or description from the one that you and I are most familiar with.
But God is not boxed into or limited by Christianity. His Spirit works on the heart of each person whether a churchgoer or not, whether a professed Christian or not, and whether an adherent to some other belief system or not. As John 1:9 says, “The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.”
That light is Jesus Christ, and that light is the work of the Holy Spirit. “Every man” means every human life ever born. Thus, God’s Spirit is at work in each human soul, wooing each person to the desire to become spiritually alive by responding to the Spirit’s prompting.
It is not just a matter of being good and exhibiting good ethics and morals. Mere outward conformity to the best social standards or religious laws is not what good behavior is about. An external action to attain certain rewards is not the motive God wants us to aspire to. Rather, He desires for us to act from a relational, other-centered love that comes from our very hearts or cores.
Having said that, I think that kind of love would certainly affect a person’s ethics and morals, but such love does not come from the natural man who is spiritually dead. That may have been the problem with the rich young ruler when he said,
He seemed to lack the spiritual enlivening from within by God’s Spirit. He lacked the other-centered spirit of love. He thought it was all about external behaviors.
Keeping that in mind makes it easy to see why we can find what can be described as good people both inside and outside the church. Behavior alone is not the determination of goodness that Jesus talked about, and it is also not at the core of God’s rescue and healing.
His Spirit is one of other-centered love that operates at a deeper level than labels of faith and conformity to rules of law, religious or otherwise. That Spirit can be active in a person who attends church as well as in someone who does not.
But that does not lessen the value or rewards of attending church with its fellowship, instruction, and aid to faith spoken of earlier.
However, the danger of thinking that salvation is linked to a specific church’s beliefs and creeds is very real. If specific beliefs and creeds were vital to God’s ability to rescue and heal us, then conforming to a particular church’s body of beliefs and creeds would be very important.
Out of that importance would raise efforts at conformity and unity of action within the body of believers. But that can lead to religious totalitarianism, and history is replete with the consequences of that misguided structure.
For example, some sects of Islam today require conformity to particular sharia law. During the Middle Ages and the Crusades, Christianity did much the same.
Then there are the smaller totalitarian belief systems found within cults, such as those espoused by Jim Jones or David Koresh, with disastrous results.
From my understanding, whether we go to church, claim to be Christian, or demonstrate good ethics or morals is not the most important thing. The most important realization is this: By the work of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ works on each person’s heart for salvation.
It is one’s response that is most important judged by God alone. God doesn’t stop His work for and within those who are outside the Christian community. However, He does use the church as a collective body of individuals to advance His efforts.
Building designs, forms of worship, and methods of study and outreach may vary a great deal from church to church. Within that variance are the personal successes, struggles, and failures of each churchgoer.
I am not sure it is useful to judge any particular churchgoer by how he or she performs in relation to a particular church’s standards. None of us knows the damages, hurts, and struggles of any other person.
We can’t judge what we don’t know. Only God knows the true heart of a person. Some people may be good play actors, performing well to a church’s social ideals while remaining spiritually very sick.
Others may constantly fight inner demons and life damage that are obvious to those around them, yet they are spiritually alive and on the road to healing.
Finally, some people in churches are spiritually alive and have come a long way in the healing process, and they exhibit other-centered love representative of Jesus Christ.
So good behavior is a matter of externals, whether performed inside or outside a church, inside or outside other belief systems. It is not the core of human spirituality—being enlivened by the Spirit of God is. That is a free gift! And yes, that free gift is because of and through Jesus Christ, whether identified or not. The evidence is other-centered love.
Your friend,
Matt