You were never good enough

You were never good enough.

A common refrain about how one gets to heaven (or whatever word someone uses for going to the good place when we die, as opposed to the bad one) is that they, or someone they love, deserve heaven because they are a “good” person.

But here’s the problem: good according to whose standard? Typically, we think we are good enough because we know our intentions, and even when we do something bad, we can often find a reason to justify it. But the problem with the idea that doing more good than bad makes us deserving of heaven isn't simply the arbitrary standard we often give ourselves. It's that being good enough isn't our biggest problem.

Scripture is a unified story that leads to Jesus. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament law, so that if you are in Christ, you are forgiven, pure, and clean. This is important because a big problem with sin is not just that it is bad (and it is), but also that it makes you impure. And neither sin nor impurity can enter the presence of a holy, pure, and perfect God.

So when you read Old Testament books like Leviticus, where Israel is given many of its laws and told how God will graciously forgive and deal with its sins, you see that impurity is a really big issue. The sacrifices and offerings Israel performed (and again, these are fulfilled in Jesus, which is why we no longer have to perform them) granted them both forgiveness and purification. The sacrifices and offerings both made atonement for their sins and made them clean.

There are numerous passages that speak to this idea that sin makes us unclean; here are just a few:

What you see repeatedly in the Scriptures is that our impurity must be dealt with. We must be made clean from the impurity that comes from our sin.

This means that it is not (nor was it ever) about being “good enough” for God to accept you. It is not about trying to balance some imaginary scale in your favor. The problem is that sin makes us impure; it makes us unclean. And good works do not make us clean. Good works honor God, but they don’t erase our guilt. If your impurity is not dealt with, the amount of good works you do is irrelevant when it comes to your salvation. You can be a really good person overall, but you will still carry impurity from your sin.

And so, with the coming of Jesus, we see that not only is forgiveness found in his atoning sacrifice for us, but he also makes us clean.

Forgiven and cleansed. This is what Jesus does for us. This is what you need.

Imagine you’re going to a wedding tomorrow evening. You get up tomorrow morning and do a little exercise. Say you go on a walk or a run on a nature trail, and it is hot out, so you sweat. At one point, you trip on a tree root sticking out of the ground. You don’t get injured, so it’s not a big deal, but you get a little dirty from the fall. You are now unclean.

You get home, and because you have a wedding to go to tonight, you decide not to do anything else that would make you any dirtier or unkempt. You stay inside for the rest of the day until it is time to leave; you don’t do anything that gets your heart rate up or makes you perspire. In this example, you don’t do anything else that will make you any more unclean than you already are. So you only do “clean” things for the rest of the day; that is, you decide to stop doing anything else that would make you unclean.

That’s great and all, but if nothing is done to clean you up from your morning hike, you’re still unclean. You’re not as unclean as you could have been if you had done other unclean activities, but on the whole, you’re unclean. If you don’t take a shower and get properly dressed, you’ll show up to the wedding in an inappropriate state.

This is why being “good enough” isn’t our biggest problem, because there is no “good enough” that makes you clean. You might not be as unclean as you could have been due to all the times you made a good decision instead of a bad one, but there is still uncleanness that must be dealt with.

Again, the whole sacrificial system for Israel was about both forgiveness and cleanness. Jesus came to forgive us and make us clean. The apostle Paul puts it this way:

“But now [Jesus] has reconciled you by his physical body through his death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him.” (Colossians 1:22)

No one can be good enough to take away their sin. We can reduce the amount of sin we commit through the choices we make, but we cannot erase what we have done in the past and will do in the future.

You were never good enough. But Jesus is. He was (and is) the perfect sacrifice who takes away our sins. And no one is better at sinning than Jesus is at saving. There is nothing Christ can’t make clean for those who place their trust in him.

No amount of good deeds can clean you. And impurity cannot stand in the presence of God. But God, in his grace, sent Jesus to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. You can (and should!) do good things.

But you must be clean.