It seems to me to be a pretty basic principle: you don’t get to call yourself a good person if you do bad things. If you use nasty language or even decent language to say nasty things. If you push other people down as you climb up. If you leave other people behind as you move ahead. It doesn’t matter how justified you feel, or if you think they’re worse than you are. If your motives, methods, or end results are bad, you can’t say you’re good.
Here’s how Jesus put it, in Luke 6:45: “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”
That’s what it comes down to, the fact that our hearts will always betray us. Good-hearted people do good things. Any other kind of heart doesn’t produce good.
In truth, though, there are no good-hearted people, not by ourselves. Left on our own, we’re all self-centered. We’re all mean-spirited to people who wrong us. We’re all stingy. We’re all rule-breakers. That’s human nature.
But then we meet Jesus, and the first thing he does is spiritual heart surgery. Our bad hearts become good, and our mouths begin to speak the good that’s in our hearts. Our hands do the things our mouths say. And we become good people.
We don’t get to say, “I know I do bad things, but basically I’m a good person.” The only good people are Jesus people, because they’re the only people with changed hearts.
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