Why Should We Be Good?

1 Corinthians 6:9-11

Why should we be good? How would you answer this important question? Let me direct this question to children living at home. Why should you obey your parents? Many of you would answer, “Because the Bible says so.” That’s a good answer, but it’s not your only reason for obeying your parents, is it? What happens if you disobey your parents? Disobedience leads to punishment, so a fear of punishment is a strong reason for being good. Even adults do good from a fear of punishment. Why do you get up and go to work every day? You go to work because you fear the punishment of being fired if you don’t. Fear of punishment is a valid reason for being good, but it’s not the whole answer.

While we take down our Christmas trees this week we are reminded that Christmas is a good reason for being good. The song, Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town, says it plainly.

He knows when you've been sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!

Even if we believed that Santa Claus possessed the God-like attribute of omniscience, this is still a motivation based on a fear, because if I am not good, all I will get for Christmas is a lump of coal. That’s not going to carry me very far when I am faced with endless temptations every day of my life.

Studies have shown that religious people actually are ‘more good’ than secular people, that is, their behavior is better than non-religious people.  According to one published research project, the author discovered that for every ten dollars that a nonreligious liberal person gives to charity, a religious conservative person gave one thousand dollars.[1] Religious conservatives give one hundred times more money to charity than secular liberals. This is an unbelievably huge difference. Did you see the news report this past week where researchers demonstrated a 30% decrease in breast cancer by women who regularly do housework? It’s true. I actually read about this! Now the husbands are going to go home and say, “See honey, I knew all that house cleaning was good for you.” Whatever the reason, a cancer researcher is going to be very excited about that 30% difference, but a 100 times difference in giving habits is actually a 10,000% difference!! That same study also demonstrated that religious people donate more of their time and even more of their blood!

You have probably heard the common statistic that there are just as many divorces and abortions among Christians as there are in the rest of society. This is not true at all if you define a Christian as one who has a Biblical worldview. Christians with Biblical worldviews have much better behavior than Christians who don’t have a Biblical worldview. Christian pollster George Barna discovered that Christians with a Biblical worldview “were 31 times less likely to accept cohabitation; 18 times less likely to endorse drunkenness; 12 times less likely to accept profanity” and were almost 100 times less likely to think that abortion or adultery were morally acceptable.[2]

So far all I have shown is that in terms of defined moral behaviors, some Christians are better than others, but we haven’t defined why we should be good. Some would say that we should be good because we will go to heaven and if we are bad we will go to hell. Is that why we should be good, to avoid the punishment of hell and gain the reward of heaven? Listen to what Paul had to say about this in 1 Cor. 6. ^9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders ^10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. If you ripped this passage from its context you could make a strong case that bad people go to hell and good people go to heaven. But that is most certainly not what Paul meant. If I ever say that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell, you need to brand me as a heretic and run me out of town. And when I say brand, I really man you should take a hot iron and burn the word heretic into my chest!

Another way to ask this question about being good is to distinguish between the believer and the unbeliever. Many non Christians have moral standards that are equal to our standards, at least according to the standards of the average Christian—some are even better than ours. Every person who lives a good or moral life will have their own reasons for being good, but how is the Christian reason different from the rest of the world? Christians do not have a corner on the market of morality and every time we think we do, a moral failure the size of Ted Haggard splashes across the national news to remind us that we are fallen people. So if unbelievers can be good without Christ, why should we be good? Do we need Jesus to be good?

The answer as to why we should be good comes in verse 11. ^11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

The Corinthians had been quite a bunch of sinners. Paul said, “and that is what some of you were;” that is, before they became Christians these folks living in Corinth were involved in all kinds of sins and immorality. Please understand that when Paul gives a list of sins like this one, he doesn’t intend for it to be an exhaustive list. If he were to describe all of the former sins of the Corinthian believers, he would have to write page after page of sins. This list of sins, like his other lists, is meant to be representative. When he said “some of you were” these things in the past, he did not mean that some of them had been sinners and the rest were good people. All of them were sinners and some of them had practiced these specific sins that he listed. So how did they move beyond their former practice of these sins? In other words, how did they begin to be good? Paul said that you used to do these things “but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” When we think of our salvation we usually only think about it in the simplest of ways. We say, “Praise the Lord, my brother got saved last week!” But salvation is not just one simple thing, it is a mutli-faceted miracle. In verse eleven Paul listed three different aspects of our salvation. There are more than three but we will focus on these three this morning.

Before we look at these three, tell me what part we play in our salvation. Our response to God’s offer of salvation is to repentance and faith. We turn from our sins and we turn to God for salvation. Paul does not mention either repentance or faith in this passage, but they are certainly assumed. Instead this list of three aspects pf salvation all have to do with what God did for us.

But you were washed. Paul is referring here to what is normally called regeneration or new birth. The clearest verse is Titus 3:5. “He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal of the Holy Spirit.” Regeneration is our spiritual rebirth. This spiritual rebirth is the same thing as being born again. Can an unbeliever understand salvation? In 1 Cor 2, Paul wrote, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” The cross is foolish to the unbeliever. The facts of salvation can be understood by anyone but the truth of salvation requires that a person be born again. When Lydia was converted in Acts 16, Luke described it this way. “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.” Unless the Lord had opened her heart Lydia could not have grasped the truth of Paul’s message. Unless we were regenerated, unless we were washed by the blood of Christ we could never have responded to the Lord in repentance and faith. You could say that regeneration is being washed by royal blood.

I don’t follow the lives of the British royal family, but if you keep up with the news you can’t help but read about the wild exploits of Prince Harry, the youngest of Princess Diana’s two sons. Reports of his drinking and partying have been plastered all over the global news. At his Christmas party he engaged in a 14-hour drinking binge. Last year he outdrank an entire rugby team! I wonder if his father Prince Charles has ever taken him aside for a little talk. I am not sure if Charles possesses the moral authority to give advice to his son, but let’s assume he did so. He might put his arm around Harry and say, “Son, remember, we are born of privilege into a royal birth and sons of the king must not behave like you have been lately.” In a similar way we can picture Paul putting his arm around the believers in Corinth and saying, “Friends, remember we have been reborn into a royal birth and children of the King must not act the way you have.” This is the first miracle of salvation—the miracle of rebirth.

The second reason to walk in obedience is because we have been sanctified. Sanctification is usually a word we use to express continued spiritual growth. My justification happens at conversion but sanctification happens throughout my Christian life. It’s true that sanctification is an ongoing process. We participate with the Holy Spirit in growing in Christ-likeness, but sanctification is also a miracle that happens as part of our salvation. To be sanctified means to be made holy, to be set apart in holiness. That is why the Paul often addresses the recipients of his letters as “saints”. The letter to the Ephesians begins “to the saints in Ephesus” and Philippians begins “to the saints in Philippi”. Christian, did you know that you are a saint? You may not feel like one, but all Christians have been set apart as holy. To become a saint in the Catholic church you have to pass through three difficult requirements. The first step is to become “venerable”.  This requires that you have lived an extremely virtuous life. The second requirement is fulfilled if you die a martyr’s death or if you have a miracle associated with you.  When that happens you move from ‘venerable’ to “blessed”. Finally, in order to become a full saint you need a second miracle.

Do you see the difference between a Catholic saint and a N.T. saint? To be canonized as a Catholic saint you need to do a lot of special things like perform miracles and be extremely virtuous, but a N.T saint cannot do anything to earn the title. Sanctification is completely a miraculous work of God which cannot be earned by any amount of good works. In the O.T. certain items were sanctified such as the altar and lampstands. A gold-plated altar is not holy in the sense of being good, right? But God sanctified the altar. God set the altar apart as a holy object. If you were standing next to the golden altar incense in the tabernacle, would you consider spitting on the altar? Of course not! Even the thought of it is repulsive and disgusting. We would never treat a sanctified object in that way. But is it any different when we sin using our sanctified bodies? God has set us apart as holy, so how can we defile this holiness by our disobedience? It doesn’t mean we will suddenly become free of all sin, but it is good motivation, don’t you think? This is the second miracle of salvation—the miracle of sanctification.

The third miracle that happens at salvation is our justification. Justification is the act of God declaring us to be righteous. It is like a judge making a declaration of innocence upon a guilty person. A good illustration would be the execution of Saddam Hussein. What if the judge considered all of the evidence and then declared Hussein innocent? Would you be appalled at this act of injustice? We share this feeling in part because we believe that we are more worthy of forgiveness than him. Are we any better than Saddam Hussein? If God were to consider our rebellion and rejection of him, in his justice he would have to declare us just as guilty as a mass murderer. This is one of the reasons that the cross is so offensive, because it requires that we understand ourselves as hopelessly sinful. But through the blood atonement of Christ, God can be just and the one who justifies. He is just in that he does not let sin go unpunished but he also justifies us. He declares us justified and innocent in his sight.

The sum of these three miracles of salvation is that we are not the same person as we were prior to our salvation. We have been reborn and washed by royal blood. We have been set apart as holy saints for his service. We have been declared innocent before a righteous judge. We are not the same person. We are a new creation. We have passed from darkness to light. We have crossed over from death to life. God has removed our heart of stone and replaced it with a heart of flesh. Therefore, we should want to be good because we are good. We should want to be different because we are different. We should want to walk in holiness because we are holy. This is why Paul said it was so heinous for a man to be sleeping with his father’s wife. This is why Paul was so upset that believers were bringing lawsuits against other believers. These things, as well as any act of disobedience, shows that we do not understand the miracles of salvation. The reality is that right doctrine leads to right behavior.

Everyone of us is faced with endless temptations on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter if you are nine or ninety, temptations assault us at every turn. But when I read this passage about the miracles of salvation, I see the apostle Paul reaching through two centuries and putting his arm around us and saying, “Friends, remember we have been reborn into a royal birth, no live like a child of the King!”

Rich Maurer

December 31, 2006