People are "good" until it starts to cost them.

I was talking to someone the other day who is involved in a weekly Bible study. She was complaining that the Bible study leader was always talking about how everyone is a sinner. In an exasperated tone of voice  she said to me, "I'm tired of hearing how 'everyone's a sinner' all the time. I don't think everyone's a sinner. I think there are good people in the world. And even if everyone is a sinner, they don't always sin!"

That's a tough one for us Christians. We do believe that we're all sinners. The Bible clearly states it. But are we always sinners? And even if we are, don't people do good things? Aren't there times when people don't sin? And if that's the case, maybe we aren't so bad after all. So how do we answer this?

First, let's define what we mean by "sin" and "sinner". The word "sin" is a translation of a word that means to "miss the mark" or to "fall short". What mark? The mark would be God's original design for us. We are told that we were originally designed to be a creature created "in the image of God." Our character, moral attributes, and psychological/emotional make-up were like God's. We were loving by nature, like God is. And we were centered on God rather than on ourselves. But something happened that caused a profound change in human nature. Due to our taking part in the rebellion of the first man, Adam, we lost our centeredness on God and others and became self-centered. So the mark that we miss and fall short of  is God Himself. He's the mark!

The Bible says that this condition is shared by all mankind. It says that "there are none righteous". The Bible compares us to trees. It says that bad trees do not produce good fruit. Well, since we're all sinners, how can people ever do good things? Bad trees don't ever produce good fruit do they?

The Bible tells us that God is going to judge the whole world at some point in the future. It tells us that when He does, that He's going to judge the thoughts and intentions of our hearts. He isn't just going to be considering actions when he judges, but also the motives behind those actions. I think we might be surprised if He were to reveal to us our own motives, even for the "good" things we do.

The Bible says that (our) "hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked, who can understand them?" Because of our fallen condition, even our ability to clearly perceive our own motives is messed up. The remedy for this, by the way, is to have God do it for us. He can perceive our motives, and He will reveal those to us if we'll turn to Him for understanding. Sometimes He even does it before we turn to Him, and then we turn to Him as a result.

This was the case in my own life, and He did it at least in part through a psychology teacher at the junior college I was attending. One day, for reasons unknown to me (even to this day), the teacher stood up and made the blunt statement that all of the students in the room were selfish. An argument ensued with some students naming different people in history as examples of altruism like Gandhi and Mother Theresa. The teacher replied, "all selfish! Everything they did was out of their own self interest. Maybe they were avoiding a guilty conscience, or maybe they wanted to elevate themselves in the eyes of others, or maybe they were attempting to justify themselves before their God(s), or maybe they were trying to earn good Karma, or just wanted to win arguments." I don't think everyone in the room was buying it but, as I said above, God was doing something in my heart. He was revealing to me my own motives, that everything I did was, ultimately, for me and no one else. I was at the center of my world. It's a long story that I'll tell in another post, but the effect was profound and I became desperate for a remedy.

One thing that I think helps reveal the real person behind an action (at least to some extent) is when being "good' starts to cost something. When the doing of good results in a cost for those who do it, especially when that cost is of something that's greatly valued, you will often see a change in the demeanor of the one performing the action. Is this always the case? No. In fact there are people who have sacrificed their lives for others. Think of the man who throws himself on a grenade for his buddies. The cost for that is obviously something that he highly values. The apostle Paul brings that up when he says "for the good man someone may even dare to die". We'll leave those cases up to God's judgment, but it's obvious that there are examples of sacrificial love that we can refer to.

Nevertheless, when we see others doing "good" things, and we wonder "how could God judge him or her?", It's important to remember that He is perfectly able to see into the depths of the heart. It's something that we are not able to do, even with regard to our own hearts.