Aug 11
7
Why Christians Do Good
Christianity is different from every other religion. Christians don’t do good works to earn favor with God or to earn salvation. We don’t have to serve God. We want to.
Such a thought is foreign to every other non-Christian religion out there, no matter how “religious” they are. It all comes down to one word: love.
If you think you have to slavishly do good to impress your god, I can’t stop you. Just don’t call such forced obedience “love.” That word is excluded. Nor can you call things you do for fear of being condemned “love.”
Yes, God talks about judgment and condemnation and hell in his Word, but not to force you into obedience. He does it to help you realize how serious all this “religious talk” is. He wants you to be with him forever. In heaven. He tells you out of love for your eternal salvation. There’s that word again, love.
The apostle John sums it up like this: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10) … “We love because he first loved us” (John 4:19).
You see, even though I “surrender my body to the flames,” or “give all I possess to the poor,” (1 Corinthians 13:3), my love for God hasn’t even begun until I have found out how free, how willing, how costly, how complete is the way he loved me first. Only when I am secure in his grace and forgiveness in Christ does the possibility even exist that I can at long last begin to respond to God freely, willingly, without guilt, without fear.
If you are still trying to earn God’s love, trying your hardest but still wracked with guilt, listen carefully to the words of Jesus the night before his death: “Where I go you cannot follow” (John 13:36). He was telling his disciples – and us – that only he could go to the cross. On that cross he paid for all your sins. He took away your guilt. You can’t do anything to take away your sin or make yourself acceptable to God. Jesus already did that. He freed you to serve him out of love, not guilt … out of gratitude, not compulsion.
That’s why Christians do good. We love God, because he first loved us.
