Who Is This Man?Sample

For Goodness’ Sake

Two brothers led a miserable life. They were self-centered, money-grubbing, mean-spirited, intolerant scoundrels. Then one of them died. His brother paid a minister a lot of money to do the funeral on the condition that the minister must call his dead brother a saint. Ministers sometimes do a lot of gymnastics at funerals. So the minister did the eulogy: “I have to tell you the truth: this man who died was a liar, a bully, a cheat, and a thief. But compared to his brother, he was a saint.”

Dallas Willard said that we see how fundamental this question of who is a good person is in obituaries. Obituaries rarely say things like “‘She had a fine figure, and a thick head of hair, and wonderfully white teeth.’ ‘He drove fast cars and dated fast women.’ ‘He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in his spare time at home.’”

But our advertisements are filled with promises to give you the very things you wouldn’t want listed in your obituary: great looks, great money, great pleasure, great food, great widescreen TVs. We don’t want to miss out on the good life, but we want to be thought of as good people.

Much of Jesus’ teaching addressed these two human pursuits. He made it clear that appearing good wasn’t enough — we must get to the root problem, our sinful nature. He revealed, as C. S. Lewis Wrote, “the Christian way is different: harder and easier. Christ says, ‘Give Me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. . . . Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked — the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: My own will shall become yours.’”

Goodness does not begin with right behavior. It begins with openness to the truth about the mess in my inner being.

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Adapted from Who Is This Man? The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus. Learn More