As I sat there and looked at those around me and saw all the tears and brokenness, I prayed. We were supposed to be coming to God with our sins, laying them down at His feet and asking for forgiveness. But I was a good girl. I had not broken God's rules. It appeared to me that all those around me at the retreat were very broken by their sins and so I prayed for them.
For as long as I could remember, I had always been the good girl. Done the right thing. Behaved the right way. Pleased those around me by being or becoming the person they needed me to be.
In psychology, there is always the debate whether someone's personality is due to nature or nurture. For me I believe my "good girlness" was a little of both. Growing up, both my parents and siblings all had very strong and demonstrative personalities. As the quiet child, the way to get noticed for the right reasons and not get noticed for the wrong reasons, was to be the obedient one. The rule follower, the good girl. I discovered that there was a very strong connection between being good and being rewarded. In other words, I could control the outcome of my life by my actions. My behavior and actions were the key to my future.
In my early years of being a Christian, I treated God as I had treated everyone else in my life. I loved God and displayed my love to Him in my good actions. As many young teens are taught in the Church, behavior is what people would look at - what I would be judged by. If I do good and act obediently, then I will be rewarded. I will be blessed by my actions.
Did you catch that subtle fatal flaw in the logic of my actions? In a sense I was blessing myself! I was attempting to earn God's love by being good. That means that I was in control of when, how and if God would love me. My goodness had not only become my identity, it had become my idol. My blessings were directly linked to my own actions. I didn't need Jesus' goodness because I was good on my own.
But God has a way of getting our attention and changing our perspective. Shortly after that retreat where I prayed for others because I couldn't see my own sin, God took me on a journey that allowed me to see the log in my own eye.
All my life I had been good and done the right thing. Then one day, I wasn't. Coming out of that season of disobedience I found grace. True Grace. I began learning that it is in His goodness, not my own, that I can rest eternity on. Wanting to be good to those around me was not the sin. Relying on my good works and good actions to earn me earthly praise and assuming it would earn me heaven was the sin.
In chapter 2 of Galatians, Paul says in verses 20-21, " I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose." In 3:2-3 he asks them,
"Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
We come to Him for salvation, relying on His grace. However, in our daily life of walking with God, it is so easy to revert back to acting as if we live by the Law. The Law of the Old Testament, God's covenant given through Moses directly laid out the rules, the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. This is exactly how the earthly world works. We earn a good life when we follow society’s rules. It makes total sense that God's economy would work the same.
However, as Paul tells us in Romans, the Law was given in order that mankind would have knowledge of their sin. Jesus shows in the Sermon on the Mount that even in keeping the letter of the law, we still fail at actually meeting God's standards of purity and perfection. We can NEVER be good enough on our own. The first part of Isaiah 64:6 says "We are all dirty with sin. Even our good works are not pure. They are like bloodstained rags." That is such a disgusting visual image but a very pointed one. Our good deeds and righteousness are absolute garbage when compared to God's goodness.
Romans 8: 1-5 says: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit."
Living my life in my own goodness was setting my heart, mind and soul on living in the flesh. I no longer sit at the feet of Jesus as I once did with a posture of self-righteousness. But I do still struggle and fight daily with the tendency to be a good girl in the eyes of those around me. It is my daily prayer to lean on, grow in and live out of the goodness of God and not that of my flesh. God's goodness is always pure and always entirely for the benefit of the recipient. His good actions are a result of His good heart. We can trust Him and know that He is always good.
We can also trust that when we submit to the Holy Spirit, He will grow the fruit of true goodness in our hearts as well.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Galatians 5:22-23
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