Being good

There is a massive misconception amongst many, that I once believed as well, that Christianity is all about being good.

It's not.

Christianity is not about obeying rules, being a nice person or even just having good motivations. You can't earn eternal life. You can't earn a relationship with God. For the Bible says in Romans 3:23, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God", meaning everyone has done something wrong and so no one can make themselves good enough for God.

Nor is the Bible about being forgiven and then trying harder next time in order to earn eternal life. Because we just can't do it by ourselves, we just end up sinning again, and we start an endless cycle with ever increasing frustration and guilt because no matter how many chances we get we always mess it up. That's the situation I was in just before I became a Christian.

BUT the beauty of the Bible is that it is NOT about us, it's about Jesus. The next bit of Romans 3 goes on to say, "and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." What this is saying is that God gives us forgiveness, freedom from our self-loathing and a relationship with Him, for FREE, not because of anything we could ever do but by Jesus' death on the cross in our place, which paid for all of our sins.

This means that we don't have to earn eternal life. It means that we don't have to be constantly trying to be good enough for God.

It's all about grace. It's all about Jesus.

Does that mean we can then go around living as sinfully as we like? No, Romans 6 addresses that. We're to put sin behind and live for God not so that we can be saved, but because we have been saved by God by grace through Christ. And we mess up, again and again and again and again and again, but this way we're not crushed by that, because it's not how we gain a relationship with God, we're free to try again and again, not by our strength, but by God's. I'll do a post on it at some point.

I've posted it before, and it is slightly cheesy, but I think this is a really helpful video that explains things a lot better than I have:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ-WuFAlQlY