Why Be Good?

Why strive to be Just as God Wants when he accepts me Just as I Am?

Larry has the most colorful background of anyone I know. He has a history of sexual liaisons with people of both genders. A recovering drug addict, he attends a 12-step recovery group almost daily, has recently celebrated his tenth anniversary of sobriety, and has become a substance-abuse counselor. He served in the marines but has since become a doctrinaire pacifist.

Along the way, Larry became a Christian. He says he was converted by two hymns, “Just as I Am,” and “Amazing Grace.” As he heard the words of those hymns, it sunk in for the first time that God really did want him to come just as he was. God’s grace was that amazing. In his own way, Larry has been trying to follow God ever since.

“In his own way,” I say: Larry admits he has not experienced the “victorious Christian life.” He overeats, chain-smokes, and sex continues to be a problem. And since he never manages to get up in time for church, he misses out on worship and Christian community.

Once, Larry stated his dilemma this way, “I’m stuck somewhere between ‘Just as I am’ and ‘Just as God wants me to be.’ ”

Exploiting grace

One summer I had to learn German to finish a graduate degree. How I hated that summer! On delightful evenings while my friends were sailing on Lake Michigan, riding bikes, and sipping coffee in patio cafés, I was holed up with a Kapomeister tutor parsing German verbs. Five nights a week, three hours a night I spent memorizing vocabulary I would never again use. I endured such torture for one purpose only: to pass the test and get my degree.

I had flashbacks to that summer of discontent—and to my conversations with Larry—when I recently read through the Book of Romans. As Paul constructs his magnificent summary of Christian faith, the apostle must deal with a theological problem that closely parallels my encounter with German and Larry’s encounter with grace.

What if the school registrar had said, “Philip, we want you to learn German and take the test, but we guarantee that you’ll get a passing grade. Your diploma has already been filled out.”

Do you think I would have spent my summer evenings inside a hot, stuffy apartment? No way.

In a nutshell, that was the theological dilemma Paul wrestled with. Romans 1–3 tolls a bell on the miserable failures of all humanity—pagans, sophisticated Greeks, pious Jews—with the damning conclusion, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (This and all following Scripture citations are taken from the NIV.) Like a trumpet blast introducing a new symphonic movement, the next two chapters tell of a grace that wipes out any penalty: “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”

Grand theology to be sure, but such sweeping declarations introduce one very practical problem, Larry’s problem: Why be good if you know your sins will be forgiven? Why study German if you’ve already received a passing grade? Or, to phrase the question in theological terms, why strive for sanctification when justification has been guaranteed in advance? At one time or another, every pastor of every church in history must have looked out at the people in the pews and wondered how the New Testament’s exalted words about holiness, sanctification, and being united with Christ apply to the people who straggle in on Sunday mornings.

Is God’s grace so amazing that it removes all incentive for obedience? The potential for exploiting grace troubled the apostle Paul, and in chapter 6 of his master treatise, he confronts these very issues. “What shall we say, then?” he asks in verse 1. “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?”

Paul gives a short, explosive answer to both questions, “By no means!” or, as the King James Version has it, “God forbid!” Then, recognizing the potential consequences of his assertions about grace, he proceeds to give four illustrations by way of response.

As a writer, I know that it breaks all rules of communication to layer one story on top of another. If a single, sharp analogy makes the point, then, Zing! you launch it like a well-aimed arrow and move on. An insecure writer might resort to two stories. But four analogies in a row! I tend to read the Bible from a different point of view than those who write commentaries. As a writer, I spend much of my time worrying over style and structure. Is my introduction too long? Do my points wander? Are there doglegs that should be eliminated?

I have learned much from peeking “behind the curtain” at the prose style of Paul, a master writer. Sometimes his sentences got a little out of control, but Paul knew how to balance abstract theology with practical application. He also knew when to insert just the right illustration to seal an argument. For this reason, I find myself wondering why Paul gives four illustrations.

I can think of only one reason. If I am writing about a very complicated issue and must lead my readers by the hand into deep waters, then and only then might I come up with several illustrations, each one progressively more complex and slightly closer to the whole truth.

That, I have concluded, is Paul’s method in Romans 6–7. Each of the analogies has become a classic of Scripture, repeated in other epistles, but here Paul links them all together because his exalted words about grace have raised an issue he simply cannot ignore. Otherwise, knowing human nature, the church in Rome may well slide down the same slippery slope toward decadence as the church in Corinth.

Road-kill religion

Paul’s first illustration speaks directly to the point. If grace increases as sin increases, then why not sin as much as possible in order to give God more opportunity to extend his grace? Although such reasoning sounds perverse, a few people in church history have actually followed such a philosophy. The Russian monk Rasputin, for example, claimed he was doing God a favor by living bawdily: just think how much grace God could bestow on him.

Paul has no time for such notions. He begins with an illustration that starkly contrasts death and life. “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” he asks, incredulous.

To help Paul’s image sink in, I like to picture two dogs. One is a frisky pup from Pet Palace who wags his tail and licks whoever proffers a hand. The other is a dog on the highway that has been flattened by a truck. Which has more appeal, the road-kill dog or the Pet Palace puppy? The answer is obvious, and to Paul the solution to the theological dilemma is equally obvious. Sin has the stench of death about it. Why would anyone choose “wickedness” over “righteousness”?

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus,” Paul concludes, in a word of practical advice. He is giving a dose of reality therapy: Act as if you’re dead to sin, because essentially you are. Sin has lost its controlling power over you; hence, live out your actual state of union with Christ. Become what you are.

Wickedness, of course, does not always have the stench of death about it—at least, not to fallen human beings. Like Indiana pigs, we enjoy a good wallow in the mud. Flip through the ads in any current magazine and you will see temptations toward lust, greed, envy, and pride that make “wickedness” seem downright appealing.

And sin keeps popping back to life. Paul, a realist, recognized this fact, or else he would not have advised us, “Count yourselves dead to sin” and “Do not let sin reign in your mortal body.”

Paul’s first illustration lays out alternatives but does not plumb the deepest theological waters.

Slave religion

Before introducing his second illustration, Paul restates the dilemma in a subtly different way, “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” Even if grace does not provide a motive to sin, does it not offer a license, a sort of free pass through the ethical maze of life?

“I suppose there’s some reason for keeping rules while you’re young, so you’ll have enough energy left to break them all when you get old,” said Mark Twain, who valiantly tried to follow his own advice. And why not, if you know you will be forgiven? Again Paul lets out an incredulous, “God forbid!”

Paul’s second analogy, human slavery, adds a new dimension to the discussion. “You used to be slaves to sin,” he begins. Sin is a slave master that controls us whether we like it or not. Yet Paul proceeds to introduce a startling word of hope, a promise that the chains of slavery have been broken: “But thanks be to God … you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.” In effect, we have changed masters.

As in the first analogy, Paul urges us to live up to our new identity in Christ: “Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.”

The slavery analogy neatly builds on the death analogy because both arrive at the same end. Compulsory slavery, that which we are born with, leads to death; voluntary slavery, that which we choose, leads to life.

Slavery strengthens the emphasis on personal choice and also introduces the new aspect of relationship. Barely. Is slavery really the best way to describe the believer’s relationship with Christ? Paul quickly moves on to illustration number three.

A second marriage

Paul’s third illustration, the most complex, includes some unexpected twists. He is describing his old legalistic approach to law keeping. At one point he was “married” to the law, a shotgun wedding that meant an endless cycle of rules, failure, and guilt. But then he died to the law, which freed him to take on a new spouse: “We have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.”

Paul conveys the marriage analogy in a few dense sentences and leaves it to us to work out all the implications. The basic analogy is not new, of course. From Hosea’s day on, God has presented himself as a lover pursuing a fickle bride. What we feel for the one person we choose to spend our lives with, that is the passion God feels for us. God wants his passion returned in kind.

Far more than death, far more than slavery, the analogy of marriage illuminates the answer to the question Paul started with. Why be good? There is only one sufficient reason to be good, the one expressed in Jesus’ first commandment: Love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.

I think back to the memory that leapt to mind when I began reading Romans: the summer I wasted studying German. Why learn German? There are noble reasons, to be sure—languages broaden the mind and expand the range of communication—but these had never motivated me to study German before. I studied to finish a degree. Yet, I confess, today I remember very little of the German I crammed into my brain. “The old way of the written code” produces short-term results at best.

What would inspire me to learn German? If my wife, the first woman I truly fell in love with, spoke only German, I would have learned the language in record time. I would have stayed up late at night parsing verbs and placing them properly at the ends of my love-letter sentences. I would have learned German unbegrudgingly. The relationship would be my reward.

That reality helps me understand Paul’s “God forbid!” response to the question, “Shall we go on sinning that grace may increase?” Would a groom on his wedding night say to his bride, “Honey, now that we’re married I want to work out a few details. How far can I go with other women? Can I kiss them? Sleep with them? I know a few affairs might hurt you, but just think of all your opportunities to forgive me!” To such a Don Juan the only reasonable response is a slap in the face and a “God forbid!” Obviously, he does not understand the first thing about love.

Similarly, if we approach God with a “What can I get away with?” attitude, it proves we do not grasp what God has in mind for us. God wants something far beyond the relationship I might have with a slave master. God wants something better than the closest relationship on earth, the lifetime bond between a man and a woman. He wants us to serve “in the new way of the Spirit,” with the third person of the Trinity descending to live within us, transforming us from the inside out.

The struggle of a life

The fourth of Paul’s illustrations in Romans 6–8 is different from all the rest. It is Paul’s personal testimony, and nowhere else in the New Testament will you find the apostle in such travail. Paul turns the spotlight on himself, revealing how these truths have worked themselves out in his own life. He becomes the illustration.

I know how scary and even painful it can be when I expose the deepest parts of myself in print. Paul takes the risk of showing us how each of these illustrations applies personally, to him. He knows what it means to emerge from death to life: the first time he met the light of God’s grace it knocked him sightless to the ground. He knows the futility of slavery to sin and the strange fulfillment that comes from slavery to God. And now, in Romans 7 and 8, Paul shows us what it means for a flawed human being to love a holy God.

In Romans 7, Paul pulls out all the stops. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,” he says bluntly. “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

With remarkable candor, the apostle exposes in himself the rationalizations most of us revert to after failure. His contortions of language push the limits of grammar.

Bible scholars differ on exactly what time period Paul is describing (preconversion, midconversion, postconversion), but his personal struggle moves the discussion from the question “Why be good?” to the next level, “How can we be good?” Even if we want to love and follow God and have the purest motives, sometimes it seems utterly impossible.

Reading Romans 7, I hear echoes of the stories I have heard while visiting 12-step groups with my friend Larry. “I mean well, but something just takes over.… I know I made a vow last week, but I just slipped, that’s all.… This thing’s a disease, and it just won’t go away.” Anyone who has struggled with addiction can recognize the raw reality in Paul’s struggle with sin. We are born on an incline slanting away from God. Sin, like gravity, presses down relentlessly.

Alcoholics Anonymous has only one solution to offer a person who “reaches the end of himself”: an appeal to a Higher Power. And that is Paul’s conclusion about sin as well. “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Paul asks in despair. He interrupts with the first glimmer of hope: “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Bright light floods in to chase away the dark. “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” Paul proclaims. He returns to the grand theology that launched this discussion on exploiting grace. Yes, grace really is as amazing as it seems. We have received a passing grade, in advance.

Furthermore, there is a solution to the human condition. The personal pronoun I, ubiquitous in chapter 7, barely makes an appearance in chapter 8. The Spirit takes center stage. The Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead now lives inside us, giving power to overcome temptation, reassuring us of God’s love. Despite his divine credentials, that Spirit never overwhelms but rather helps us in our weakness, even going so far as to pray on our behalf when we know not what to pray.

In Romans 8, Paul moves the camera from a personal close-up to a sweeping panorama of the cosmos. Not just we humans, but all of creation is groaning as in the pains of childbirth, waiting for liberation. Our daily lives express the “now” and “not yet” of the gospel, the two-stage promise of re-creation. We will never fully escape the stranglehold of sin on this earth, but we can live in assurance that God will one day restore us, and the whole universe, to his original, perfect design.

The real reason to be good

Why be good? In his illustrations, Paul has hinted at three motives for ethical behavior, and on reflection, they happen to be the motives the entire world runs by. To discern the first reason to be good, simply consider the alternatives. If everyone does what is right in his or her own mind, society unravels. Americans are beginning to sense what happens when violence and greed and infidelity become epidemic. Yugoslavia, Sudan, Liberia, and Somalia give even starker images to contemplate. A society without goodness has the road-kill stench of death about it. So does an individual life.

Fear of consequences is the second motivator. Like a slave master, governments—and parents, for that matter—encourage obedience by using the threat of punishment and the promise of reward. It can work, to a point.

But both these external motivators affect only outward behavior and do not truly change the person inside. Lasting change must come from inside. The best reason to be good is to want to be good. Internal change requires relationship. It requires love.

I am glad that Paul used four illustrations to describe the Christian life. Each is different, but all share one common feature: a happy ending. Although the Christian life may include times of struggle and temptation, we live our groping lives of faith with assurance that we cannot, no matter how hard we try, fall beyond the reach of God’s love.

The end of Romans 8, in fact, turns downright defiant, in abrupt contrast to the vacillation of chapter 7. “If God is for us, who can be against us?… Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?… Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul concludes majestically, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” An infinite, unchanging God has sworn his allegiance to those he loves. Now, in the Spirit, he holds out the offer of a new life in union with him.

I think again of my friend Larry, the recovering-drug-addict-bisexual-VFW-pacifist. I rejoice that he has tasted of the wonder of God’s grace, an amazing grace that loves me “Just as I Am.” At the same time, I pray that he, and I, will grow in grace, maturing into a relationship with God that brings God delight.

If we grasped the wonder of God’s love, the devious questions that prompted Romans 6–7 would never even occur to us. We would spend our days trying to fathom, not exploit, God’s grace.

Paul Brand is a world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist. Now in semiretirement, he serves as clinical professor emeritus, Department of Orthopedics, at the University of Washington and consults for the World Health Organization. His years of pioneering work among leprosy patients earned him many awards and honors.

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