A Good Christian?

While I was on a bowling team, I tried to follow the cardinal rule of maintaining peace: don’t discuss politics or religion. But these subjects did come up and occasionally I couldn’t help chiming in. One of those times was when my Christian teammate, who smoked, drank and cussed, expressed to me that she wasn’t a good Christian. I told her a Christian is neither good nor bad; one is either a Christian or not. She looked at me as if I were speaking Polish and the conversation ended.  

Along with the idea of good and bad Christians comes the notion that if you’re not good enough, you won’t make it into heaven. These two beliefs seem to permeate Christian thought, even though grace is liberally sprinkled throughout most Christian teaching and writing. But, according to the New Covenant, these can’t coexist. It’s either grace or works. Then why do we find both beliefs side by side in most people’s minds? 

It started with one of Satan’s oldest and best tools: mix truth and lies, which makes the grace-plus belief go down as easy as a dark chocolate truffle. Then you add the amazing ability of human beings to believe two opposing ideas at the same time (cognitive dissonance), and you have the whole world, even non-Christians, believing everyone has to be good enough to please God. Christians, who know from Ephesians 2:8-9 that we are saved by grace, are often convinced of this fallacy too. It’s even taught to children in the guise of a Santa Claus song, which means it’s ingrained almost from birth.  

Part of the confusion may also come when we try to reconcile grace with our misguided, self-righteous concept of justice. How can God pardon everyone of everything? To us, there must be some kind of punishment or at least consequences. Even Christians struggle with complete forgiveness. Perhaps we aren’t capable of it. The Holy Spirit can help us forgive but only God can truly forgive and forget.  

From our perspective, grace doesn’t make sense, because it seems to violate God’s standards of righteousness. Of course it does! But to God, it makes perfect sense and is the only way to deal with sin and death—complete forgiveness, unlimited grace and mercy with no strings attached. That means we don’t have to worry about being good enough. All we have to do is trust God’s goodness.