How Good is Good Enough?

Strong and Courageous

March 9, 2018

How Good is Good Enough?

This is the question of the ages. Am I good enough to make it into heaven when I die?

If you were to survey the average person on the street and ask this question, a large majority of the responses would be yes, I am a pretty good person. Well at least I am as good or better than so and so. In other words, they often attempt to forge their worldview on some form of a ranking system based on relative criteria of their own making. I am quite astonished at how prevalent this mindset has become.

Lee Strobel in the book titled the Case for Faith tells a joke about two brothers who lived scandalous lives, and when one of them suddenly died, the surviving brother went to a minister and asked if he would preach at his brother’s funeral. He said, “I have just one request that you refer to my brother as a saint”. The pastor said that he “would do his best to accommodate him.” The funeral came and the minister was eulogizing the deceased man. As he spoke, he said, “I want you to know that this man was a swindler, a cheater, and a thief, but compared to his brother…he was a saint.” A funny story, but it all relates to the idea that Strobel follows with “we tend to do the kind of comparisons by which we always emerge better than someone else.”

Most people are aware that there is a form of moral obligation rooted in the soul of humanity. This is observable pretty much universally cross-culturally as well. Many different religions are formed by a works-based premise. You labor at being a good person in order to climb the stairway to heaven. 

Christianity is so much different from any other religion in that the level of the bar of righteousness is too high for anyone to be able to make it on his or her own strength of action. Christian’s readily acknowledge this to be true.

The substitution of Jesus Christ providing righteousness on our behalf is a core belief to a Christian world-view.  Life in heaven is not based on how good a person I am, it is acknowledgment that the God of the universe wrote himself into the screenplay of human history, lived a sinless life and provided a way of escape from eternal separation from God.

This is the good news available to all of humanity.

We all are in need of a hero, a savior, no matter what our condition or station in life is.

There is an old hymn that is theologically so simple yet profound.It goes like this, Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it white as snow.