God Makes Christians Good

Are you evil?

The point of this post is that you cannot call a genuine Christian evil in an unqualified sense.

Variations on the question "are you evil" have repeatedly come up over the years of my ministry. I was reminded of it again as a I read a post by Ben Edwards at the DBTS blog.

Consider the following interchange between two born again believers in Jesus Christ:

Bill asks John, "How are you doing today?" John replies, "I'm good." Bill retorts, "John, there is none good, no not one!"

Ouch! John is not good? He may be feeling fine, but Bill has pulled the rug out by changing the context of the question in the middle of the conversation.

Certainly none of us measures up to God's standard of perfection (Matthew 5:48). Certainly Jesus called fathers evil in Matthew 7:11 and Luke 11:13, although He may have been speaking to a mixed audience of believers and unbelievers, or mostly unbelievers. Certainly there is none good like God (Mark 10:18).

But does that mean that we have to see ourselves as just plain-old evil people, even if we have repented of sin and are making good progress on the narrow way?

Not at all. Consider Barnabas. "He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith" (Acts 11:24). Other texts that refer to people as good are Proverbs 12:2, 13:22, 14:14; Matthew 12:35; and Luke 6:45.

Barnabas was a good man. If you are a Christian, you should be a good man or woman too. You should be more like your Heavenly Father instead of like the evil earthly fathers Jesus mentioned. You should be good and getting better. You must NOT be evil. You must stop any evil that you are doing.

God is in the business of taking the raw material of evil people and making them into good people. Where are you on God's assembly line?