Good or Whole

There's a mistake that many Christians continue to make, and that is that we are still trying to be Good. Believe it or not, it is not the Will of God that we try to be Good. I know that sounds "un-Christian", but it's the truth and it is biblical. The scripture says that God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2). Jesus told the rich, young ruler, when he called Jesus good, that none is Good but God (Luke 18). Therefore, if your aspiration as a believer in Christ is to be Good, then your spiritual focus may be off. The goal as a believer in Christ is not to be good but to be Whole.

The Bible makes it clear that all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God (Romans 3). The scripture also lets us know that we were born in sin and shapen in iniquity (Psalm 51). What this means is that at the core, we're no good. All of us have a sinful nature that inclines us to go against God's Divine Will for our lives (Romans 7). No matter how "good" you try to be, there's always going to be something in you to make you do wrong, even when you want to do what's right (Romans 7). That's why the objective of the believer should not be to be good. Jesus died not for us to be good but that we may be justified and made acceptable in the sight of God by His Blood (Romans 5, Ephesians 1). Therefore, our goal as believers in Christ should not be to be good.

Also remember that everything that's good is not necessarily of God. One of the things that's going to be revealed in the near future is that you have a lot of people, even in the church, that do a lot of good things; but the good things that they do have nothing to do with God. Therefore, a lot of times, the good we do is not of God. A good example of this was King Saul. God gave him a specific order: "go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not" (1Samuel 15). But what did Saul do? He spared the best of the sheep, oxen and lambs in the name of "making a sacrifice to God". That sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? The only problem is that, that's not what God told him to do. So even though it might've been good, it wasn't of God. That's why the scripture says to obey is better than sacrifice (1Samuel 15).

The goal is not to be good, but to be Whole. God wants us to be Whole (Holy) in our body, soul and spirit (1Thessalonians 5). I can guarantee you that any "sin issue" that you're dealing with in your life is related to a lack of wholeness in either your body, your soul or your spirit; guarantee it. Some of the sins we commit are because of physical restlessness and anxiety. Some of the sins we commit grow out of emotional insecurity and low self-esteem. And then other sins we commit grow out of a lack of spiritual discipline and a lack of faith in not building up sufficiently our spirit man. Instead of trying to be "good enough", I would suggest we examine our Wholeness or the lack thereof, that we may grow in the Grace and Knowledge of Christ and be all that He has called us to be.