The Goodness of God

  This weekend Pastor Fred preached on Mark 10:17-27 and the goodness of God. The essence of the story is where the rich young ruler who came up to Jesus and asked Him what he needed to do to be saved and I love Jesus response to the rich young ruler. His response when the ruler called Him good was that the only person who is good is God. With this definition of good, do we need to change our definition of what good means. We often throw this word around when we are talking about what we just ate, to the style of music we prefer to how we view people. In essence our view and definition of good can be very subjective and it almost has a different meaning to when we are either talking about food or people. Gods definition of good is essential to His character and Who He is. His goodness comes out because God is holy and righteous. His goodness comes out because He is not only love, but His love is perfect. If Gods love came out of anger, it would make Him scary and a thug. As people we often call things that are a holy good bad and things that aren’t holy, but somehow serve our self interest good. So here is my question, do we redefine what or who we call good and do we need to use Gods standard of what good is? The only way we can do this is if we are transformed by Gods goodness and His grace.

  The other thing that caught my eye is the ruler asked what he needed to do to be saved. Jesus question was that of, have you kept the law? The rulers response was an overwhelming yes and Jesus answer back to the rulers response was piercing because He told him to go and sell off everything he owned and to follow Him. The rulers response walked away depressed because he held those valuables higher than his relationship with God. A couple of things struck me in this passage and the first one is how as people we like list. This pertains more to guys, because we like to know what is expected and just give us that list so we can cross things off. I know when I do this I get a sense of accomplishment, but here is the thing, when we do this, we often care more about doing and not the relationship. Also, often we do it on our own strength and not Gods. This plays into my second thought which is that we think we can earn our salvation. If we do the right tor say the right things and not do certain things and speak a certain way, God will have to love us and let us into heaven. In essence we embrace the worldly philosophy of karma of doing more good than bad and we don’t rely on the grace of God. According do the church reformer Martin Luther, we can only be saved by grace and faith alone. Our actions do matter, bit without faith in God and His grace they are pointless. In Matthew 7 people come to God promoting all of their good works, but God turns them away because they did those things on their terms and we’re trying to earn salvation in hopes of pleasing God.

   My final thought is this. Are we more concerned with doing or being? Doing is more about earning our salvation and what I can do for God. When we do this, we tend to spin our wheels and are never completely satisfied. When we are more concerned about being, we live in Gods grace and our faith leads us to what to do. When we know we are in God and live in Gods grace, we tend to live in peace. What we do is based on who we are in God and that we don’t need to earn our salvation and we know what our mission is. When we live this way, we are not defined by our possessions or what we do, because we are defined by God and His Goodness. God doesn’t say that possessions are bad, but are we are we letting those things have more importance in our life than they should. In essence, are we worshipping the created instead of the Creator? So here is my question, are we like the rich young ruler who is defined by what he does and have? Also, how do we make the transition of going from doing to being?  My final question is this. How does the goodness of God and His grace transform our lives to the point of what we do and how we interact with others?