Are You a Really Good Person?

In my last post I described the downfall of the "really good man" that either you may know or are trying to be like.  If you didn't read that post, I would encourage you to read it first to give proper context.

As it turns out, being a really good man (or woman) isn't good at all.  In fact, you can embody all of those things and not know God at all.

Matthew 7:21-23 “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter. 22On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ 23But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’

Even Jesus said that it is possible to be a really good person and be shut out of the coming Kingdom.  This should make us more than a little bit nervous. 

I think if you even suspect that you fall into this category, you need to do some soul-searching with the Lord's help.  Here are some questions you can ask of yourself:

• What are my motivations for doing the good things I am doing?
• Did God tell me to do those things, or did I initiate them on my own?
• Would I continue to do these things even if nobody knew I was doing them?
• If God allows something bad in my life, even though I do all of these good things, will I be mad at him?  
• Do I feel God owes me something for the work that I do?
• If all of those things went away and I couldn't do them anymore, is just having Jesus enough for me?

Your honest answers to these questions will tell you a lot about where you are with the Lord.

Jesus told a beloved parable about a man striving to be a good person, although you may not have recognized it.  That parable is generally referred to as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and many who study the passage tend to focus on the younger son who took his inheritance before his father died, blew it all on wild living including prostitutes, and then came crawling back to his dad just so he could get a decent meal.  His father, as we know, ran to him, welcomed him, wouldn't listen to his apology, and clothed him in the finest clothing in the house.  This son was unconditionally accepted back into the family he had rejected, and there was a big celebration.  The first part of the parable tells us about God's tremedous love for people, and about how he will unconditionally accept us as his very own son or daughter when we come to him and turn from our sin.

The often forgotten person in the story is the older brother.  He was the one who was slaving in his father's fields and working all day, and he was astonished by the noise and celebration at home when he came home filthy and sweaty from a full day's work.  He was even more surprised when his father told him that the celebration was for his younger brother who took everything and ran away, and he was absolutely indignant that there was any celebration for this man, much less that he was even invited back to the family!  Have a look at his words to his father to see the older brother's spiritual condition.

Luke 15:28-30:  “The older brother was angry and wouldn’t go in. His father came out and begged him, but he replied, ‘All these years I’ve slaved for you and never once refused to do a single thing you told me to. And in all that time you never gave me even one young goat for a feast with my friends. Yet when this son of yours comes back after squandering your money on prostitutes, you celebrate by killing the fattened calf!’

I want you to notice 4 things from the older brother.  

1. He wouldn't enter his father's house, even after his father came out to invite him in.  
2. He reminded the father about how much he had worked for him and never asked for a thing in return.  
3. He said the father never gave him anything.
4. He expresses dismay that his lost brother has come back and is accepted in the family again.

Since Jesus's parables always were symbolic of our relationship with God, we have to look at it that way.

Since the older brother refused to enter his father's house, he is showing that he is lost.  He doesn't know his father at all and goes so far as to reject something that is in his father's heart and really important to him. His father even came to him to invite him in to the feasting and the banquet, and he still wouldn't come in!  To refuse to enter the banquet is to refuse to come in on the father's terms, which would have been an insult and ultimately shows how far the older son is from the heart of his father.  And what were the father's terms in this story?  Grace.  Grace for the one who has wronged him and joy at restored relationship.

In spiritual terms, you may want to come in to Heaven, but on your own terms and in your own way.  For the older brother, that would have meant he wanted recognition for his years of toil, and his brother would be rejected and cast out.  In our lives that would look like a person who wants God to bless them for doing "Kingdom" work.  They are still trying to earn their way in, but it doesn't work that way.  You and I can never do enough good things to earn our way in.  So the older brother stood outside the home tapping his foot in indignation, and perhaps you are doing the same thing because God doesn't work the way you do.

A hidden gem of this story is the grace the father extended to both of his sons.  The grace extended to the younger son is obvious:  the father celebrates and hugs his younger son and runs to him when he returns.  That same grace is also extended to the older brother, but it looks different.  The father goes outside to where the older brother is so he caninvite him in.  This shows us an important thing about God.  His methods in dealing with us versus another person may be different, but the motivation is the same.  He wants us in his Kingdom with Him forever.  He waited on the younger son to come back to his senses and come back to Him, but he didn't close access or write him off.  He didn't move away or shut the gate.  He ran to his lost son when he came back, and God does that to many lost sons and daughters when they come to their senses.  

And for those of us who are more like the older brother, God doesn't just stay where He is, detached and aloof.  He comes to us personally.  He reaches into our lives to draw us back in.  In this we don't see a picture of a God who is on some mountain somewhere, or who is a long way away with his thoughts elsewhere.  We instead get a picture of a God who never stops thinking about us and never stops loving us.  We see a God who, "before the foundation of the world loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes (Ephesians 1:4).  That was a decision God made a long time ago.  He had a plan and a path to restoration, and even if we don't come to Him, He comes to us to offer that path.

Even in that, we see that this father came to his older son, literally came to where he was, to extend his personal invitation into his banquet.  In society at the time, this act would have been an act of shame to the father, but he did it anyway.  He genuinely wanted his older son to come inside but the invitation was refused.  This shows how God reaches out even to those who are very religious, and yet some refuse to follow.  The God they thought they were following is very different than the actual God, face to face with them, who is inviting them into his feast free of charge and without conditions.  And because they can't reconcile their wrong feelings of God with the God who is in front of their face and extending grace, they refuse entry into his Kingdom.

The older brother represents today what we might call "churchy" people.  In Jesus's day they were called by another name:  Pharisees.  The older brother lists all of the ways in which he had served his father over all of the years.  He mentions he didn't even complain!  People with older brother thinking, when asked about their relationship with God, will first point to all of the things they are doing for him as an example of their great love for him.  With them it is all about their deeds, and in examining the list there would be a lot of really good things there!  They serve on committees, they feed the hungry, they go on mission trips, they are Sunday School or Bible study teachers, and they are known to be good people  Yet they have substituted deeds for a relationship.  They have substituted work for love.  They have exchanged grace for a job to do.  In doing so have excluded themselves from the Kingdom.  They refuse to go into the house.  They will not go to Heaven.

This older brother complained to his dad that he never gave him anything, revealing the true condition of his heart.  He was using his father to get something from him.  This is like a "churchy" person who serves God in any way possible, but secretly expects God to bless them in return.  They would never admit this publicly but internally this belief dominates their thinking.  In their mind they believe "because I do (fill in the blank), God owes me this." 

You can tell if you have this attitude when things go wrong in your life.  Let's say you have been believing that God is going to do a specific thing in your life and that a great blessing will come from it for you personally.  Perhaps that thing never happens, or it initially seems to fall apart, or God takes you in a very different direction than the one you thought He was leading you in.  If your response to that is to be angry at God, then you were doing that thing so you could get something from God.  You are essentially saying "God, I will work for you in this way, but I expect in return for you to give me a good life."  What if you obey God and things in your life do not go well?  If you obey Him and in turn things get even more difficult for you, what will you do?  Are you willing to let God be God?  Are you willing to trust that He knows best and leave it there?  Or in your indignation will you become angry with Him and refuse to come to Him?  Do you want God Himself or do you want to try to pay him in exchange for something you want?  The reason you are angry is because you feel he owes you something better than you are getting.

And finally, the older brother was dismayed that his younger brother was allowed back in the family.  The older brother mindset thinks that people need to get what they deserve.  There is no room for forgiveness because the person has gone to far.  There is no room for redemption because the sins are too great.  There is no room for reconciliation because the wall is too high.  Such people may immediately point to the very holiness of God and believe that the sinning person has trampled on God's holiness.  The trouble with that kind of thinking is that it completely ignores where each of us stand, on our own, before God.  It doesn't matter how much good you have done in this world.  It will never be enough to pay for the separation from God caused by your own sin.  If that were possible, Jesus would not have had to go to the cross.  But Jesus did go to the cross because the old way of following a bunch of rules couldn't do it!  Their purpose was simply to show us how badly we sin and need help from God.

Are you like the older brother?  If so, it is entirely possible you do not know the Lord at all.

What, then, are we to do about it if we recognize those tendencies in ourselves?  Fortunately, the Lord provided the way out.  We will look at that in the next post.