I’ve never met anyone who didn’t think they weren’t a “good person”. The default seems to be comparing oneself to another person who has committed worse offenses: “Well, at least I’m not an ax murderer…”
My observation is that people subconsciously continually convince themselves they are not “bad” by referring to another person who makes them look like a saint, in comparison.
Clearly, people recognize that good and evil exists in the world. So therefore, there must be good and bad people in the world, as well.
But as Michael Jackson profoundly asked back in his 1987 follow-up to Thriller, “Who’s bad?“
Christianity differs in ideology from the “I’m a good person” concept that our culture seems to accept as the norm.
Christianity teaches that we were all born with a sinful nature; or as Metallica put it in the title track from their 2016 album, we are “hardwired to self-destruct“.
In other words, none of us, not one, is a good person. Instead, we are all sinners.
Who’s bad? We all are.
We were all born this way. We all have our own sinful instincts to manage.
As individuals, we all have what I call our own “sin personalities”.
Some people struggle with certain issues that other people never do.
So it becomes easy to notice other people’s sins that are different from our own, as a way to make ourselves feel better about our own “lesser” sins.
And that simply brings us to one of the most obvious sins that the Bible warns against:
Pride.
But in today’s culture, to acknowledge sin is becoming perceived as politically incorrect and/or judgmental.
When we start recognizing what specifically constitutes as sin, it makes people feel uncomfortable.
Even adultery, which is included in the Ten Commandments, is now being excused by our culture:
“Well, they were really unhappy in their marriage so…”
To me, sin is sin. I don’t care which particular sin it is: I don’t believe in discriminating against another person or group of people because their sins are different than mine.
Instead, I recognize my own sins. To focus on other people’s sins instead of my own would be that sin I mentioned earlier: Pride.
We were all born this way. We all have our own sinful instincts to manage.
But to deny that sin exists… what does that do to our perception of God?
If sin doesn’t exist, because we’re all good people anyway, then we have no reason to be saved from our own destructive sinful nature; here in this life or what comes after it.
As for me, I’m not a good person. I’m a sinner.
I’m a sinner who is crazy enough to believe that Jesus was the only perfect person to live on this Earth and that by believing in Him, my soul can be saved from God’s judgment.
Yes, that might sound ridiculous. I’ll go ahead and call myself a fool for believing it.
But to believe that I am a good person, simply because my sins are different from other people’s, is more ridiculous to me.
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