We Are Not Called to be Goodie-Goodies

We aren't called to be 'goody-goodies'!

The problem is, we never could be good enough. Being 'good enough' isn't the purpose of our salvation. The whole concept of being 'good' is, to a large extent, a miss-understanding of what the Kingdom of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.

In Mark 10: 17-23, a wealthy young business ruler approaches Jesus, saying; "Good teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

As you would expect, Jesus' answer was very informative. Firstly he challenged him on the concept of being 'good'. "Why do you call me 'good'? No one is good except God alone." That's a first-century 'mic drop' moment right there! The very premise of the question, 'what must I do to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven' was wrong.

Jesus went on to place the morality bar so high that he knew the rich young ruler could not achieve it. "Go, sell everything you have and follow me."

I'm inclined to believe that if the rich your ruler had sold everything he had and came back asking the same question, Jesus would have sent him away with another task, even harder than the first.

That's because the rich young ruler came at Jesus from the perspective of self-righteousness. So, Jesus, acting as the last Old Testament prophet, responded with a law based answer. The Old Testament Law was to frustrate people so that they became aware of their inability to be 'good' in a self-righteous sense. The apostle Paul wrote, 'through the Law, I died to the Law'.

More than just frustrating our attempts at self-righteousness, 'the Law has become a tutor to lead us to Christ'. Jesus told the rich young ruler to 'follow me'. His command was essentially this: lay down any thought of self-righteousness and to come into a right relationship with Him. As Paul wrote, 'I have counted all things loss,… that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection' - Phil 3: 7-10.

We're not called to be 'goody-goodies'; we're called to know Christ!

Written by Pastor Grant Peterson