A “Good” Question

I have to admit, some British quirks are just going to stick with me.  I mean, hopefully I won’t die while crossing an American road because I look the wrong way; that new habit will have to be broken rather quickly, I think.  But there are a few phrases that I’d sincerely like to take home with me from this place, I just can’t be bothered to mention them.  I’ll get it sorted later.    Some traditions, too, like pegging and Pancake Day (provided I can remember when Shrove Tuesday should be).  There are quite a few songs that I had never heard until I came here that I really think are great and would love to introduce back in the States–from people like Stuart Townend, Tim Hughes, and Matt Redman–and I even have a few new recipes under my belt–like roasted parsnips.  And pancakes. 

But it probably goes without saying that, really, it’s the things I’ve learned this semestre that are really the most important things I could ever take back home–and, unfortunately, they’re also the things that are most easily forgotten. 

I have a friend who has asked me, a couple of times, what’s been the biggest thing I’ve learned since I’ve been here.  I never quite knew how to answer the question, really; did he mean the biggest thing I’ve learned about culture, or my studies, or myself?  In fact, I’m still not sure, but I’m going to try to answer it as well as I can.  So, you ready? 

The biggest thing I’ve learned this entire semestre hasn’t been that twenty quid is really twenty pounds or that the wars and civil wars in France during the French Revolution helped bring about the Reign of Terror; instead, my biggest lesson is this: 

I am no good.  At least, not on my own. 

But I don’t say all this to beat myself up about it; it’s just the truth. 

See, I used to think that, even before I became a Christian, I was a good person.  I lived like a Christian, to be sure, because I was raised by Christian parents in a sound Christian church, thank God.  Then I became a Christian, acknowledging that I could never really be good enough to earn a place in heaven, and tried even harder to do “good” things (yes, even for good reasons), and sometimes I got to feeling pretty good about myself. 

Then I got here, and sometime at a girls’ Bible study we looked at the account of Noah.  Check this out:  Before He sent the flood, God noticed that, for all of mankind, “every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5 NIV, emphases mine).  And it’s easy to read that and think that the people of Noah’s time were just especially wicked, worse than we are now–which is precisely what I thought, until we came to another verse after the flood, when only Noah and his family is left on the whole earth: in Genesis 8:21, God is accepting Noah’s offering when He says “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood” (NIV, emphasis again mine). 

That’s when I realised that maybe I haven’t always been as “good” as I thought I had.  Suddenly, instead of Noah’s generation being far wickeder than I was, I was just like them–before grace.   

Since that revolutionary moment of time, I’ve been running across verses in the New Testament that pretty much say the same thing, like 2 Timothy 1:9 and Titus 3:5.  God has never been impressed with what I’ve been trying to do all along–because, whoa, all those good deeds that I thought I had been doing are what God would politely call “filthy rags”.  God is holy.  That means that He is completely set apart from everything, and it also means that He has never done anything wrong.  In light of that fact, my ”goodness” simply does not measure up.  The ONLY reason that I’m worthy of living forever in heaven is because I have been covered by the blood of Jesus Christ by believing that He is who He said He was, He died for everything that I’ve ever done wrong, and He rose again so that death was defeated.

I’ve never believed that doing good things would ever get me into heaven; my church has always done a fine job of making that clear.  And six years ago, on November 13, 2002, I died to myself and accepted my need for a Saviour in Jesus Christ.  What I didn’t realise until this semestre was just how bad off I really was.  I probably still don’t know the full extent of it, but I see it a lot more clearly.  Now that I have a better idea of my former plight, how much greater the grace appears that chose me “before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight”!  (Ephesians 1:4 NIV)  What truly amazing grace!   

This may sound elementary to many of you, but it hit me like a load of bricks and changed my perspective.  It humbled me.  In a good way.  And I can praise God with an even more grateful heart because of it!

So please, don’t ever tell me I’m good.  Instead, give your compliments to God.