Preached 7 August 2023 at 14:00 at Christ Church, Billericay
Matthew 25:31-46; Luke 18:18-19
Title: ‘Goodness’
Purpose: Pensioners Praise look at the fruit ‘goodness’
Reading Matthew 25:31-46; Luke 18:18-19
Young Boy
A young boy had been sent to his room for bad behaviour. After a while, he emerged and told his mother he had thought it over and prayed about it.
"That's wonderful", said the mother. "If you ask God, He will help you to be good."
The boy responded, "But I didn't ask God to help me be good, I asked Him to help you put up with me."
The boy had discovered the path of least resistance. He realized life would be easier if others would just change in relation to him. Let's face it, life would be easier for all of us if people would just tolerate our weaknesses, and put up with our shortcomings. In other words, if everybody else had the fruit of the Spirit, we would not have to bother being good. We could continue being a pain, to give others an opportunity to exercise their fruits.
Fantasy
But that's not going to happen, is it? It’s just a fantasy, a dream, perhaps. The reality is that we all need to be able to be good, to show goodness.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is an enormous amount about ‘good’ in the Bible. It’s impossible for me to cover it all in just one sermon, so today will just be an overview.
The start of Good and Evil
Let’s start at the beginning, before human beings were aware of good and evil. In those days God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree at the centre of the garden.
Genesis 2:9b In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
2:17b you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil
But the serpent deceived them, and persuaded them that the fruit was good for them, and would make them like God. So, they ate, in direct dis-obedience and their eyes were opened, and their lives were ended (that is an end was put on their lives).
The fall as a good deed
I can hear this story spun as a good deed. Would you follow a God who kept His creation in ignorance, unable to make important decisions for themselves. Surely the serpent did the right thing in taking the action He took, and giving human beings the ability to manage their own lives.
Relationship with God
The only reason that there is still the possibility of a relationship with God, is because God is good. We are all stained with evil.
Psalm 25:7 Remember not the
sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love
remember me, for you are good, O LORD.
The sins of my youth are a long time ago now, I can barely remember them, but God could, if He chose to. It’s God’s goodness that makes Him care for us, He wants us to know Him and His truth. While we are evil, we cannot see God’s goodness, that’s why we need Jesus as our saviour.
Taste and see
Psalm 34:8 says, "Taste and see that the Lord is good." Here’s an extract from a book called “The Christian's Secret Of A Happy Life”, by Hannah Whitall Smith.
"I shall never forget
the hour when I first discovered that God was really good. I had, of
course, always known that the Bible said He was good, but I had
thought it only meant He was religiously good; and it had never
dawned on me that it meant He was actually and practically good, with
the same kind of goodness He has commanded us to have.
I came in my reading of the
Bible across the words, "O taste and see that the Lord is good,
" and suddenly they meant something. The Lord is good, I
repeated to myself. What does it mean to be good? What but this, the
living up to the best and highest that one knows. To be good is
exactly the opposite of being bad. To be bad is to know the right and
not to do it, but to be good is to do the best we know. And I saw
that, since God is omniscient, He must know what is the best and
highest good of all, and that therefore His goodness must necessarily
be beyond question.
I have been brought up short
by the words, ‘The Lord is good’; and I have seen that it was
simply unthinkable that a God who was good could have done the bad
things I had imagined.”
Luke 18
Ad Jesus said in our reading from Luke, only God is good, and here we see from Hannah that God is only good. All and any good that we do or experience comes from God.
Bad things
Even so, bad things still happen to good people. That is NOT because it is the will of God, In fact, God forbids anyone doing bad things to their neighbour.
Pharisees (Saul-->Paul)
The Pharisees were highly religious and carefully followed their hundreds of rules, but you could hardly call them good. Paul, before he met Jesus, is a perfect example. He was cruel, hard-hearted and extremely violent, promoting stonings of those he didn’t approve of, in his promotion of the Jewish faith and it’s ways. After he met Jesus, however, there is no record of any coercive activity, no threats, instead, just simple, but serious argument and debate. Indeed, he became the one who was suffering for his faith. Paul had converted to follow Christ and also to goodness.
Evil Christians
It is not like that for everyone, conversion, accepting Jesus into your life, does not automatically mean you become good.
The greatest failure in Christendom, is believers who do not show the fruits of the spirit, particularly love and goodness. Our lack of goodness had led to factions and splits, which in turn have led to wars, with one Christian killing another in the name of Christ.
It has been so since the earliest days, and from what we can see in our world today, it shows no sign of changing in the immediate future.
However, we should always try to follow God, and do the Good that He intends. The best we know as Hannah put it.
Effect of doing Good
That does not guarantee that we will make converts. Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, and did many good things for all sorts of people. It did not mean that they followed him or believed the rest of his message. If we are trying to convert people, goodness is not any guarantee of success. The social gospel that we see today, with things like foodbanks, and debt relief, seek to do good for people, but they do not necessarily bring in converts. Our social action (our doing good) is not an alternative to speaking God’s word, but a necessary addition to it.
The best we know
All we can do is the best we know. Do you know the saying, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish …”. Do you know how it ends?
The root of the saying comes from a novel called “Mrs Dymond” by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie. The idea, though, is much older and can be found in the writings of the 12th-century philosopher Maimonides. It can be summed up as "The most meritorious act of charity is to anticipate poverty and prevent it, this can be done by teaching a trade, or putting a person in business."
Many organisations take this approach, and I remember one birthday receiving a certificate for a goat, that had been purchased for someone in need in my name. So, today you not only hear about goodness, but get some great gift ideas too.
Wider concerns
There are wider concerns, today, and I hear the ‘give a man a fish’ saying expressed differently.
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you deplete the oceans.”
That comes directly out of what we know, and, if I’m being charitable, a genuine concern for the environment.
It can also be seen as putting a negative spin on a positive idea, just as I tried earlier to put a positive spin on the serpents work in the garden of Eden earlier.
I mention it, to emphasise the idea that we can only do the good that we know, it is impossible for us to know some things that later may mean that the good we try to do is flawed. That will always be the case, living in a fallen world, and should not stop us in our efforts to do good.
Sheep and Goats
The story of the sheep and the goats, reminds us that it is God’s assumption that real faith leads to good works. Just as James says, faith without works is dead, because the lack of works, which we could call doing good, shows that the professed faith means nothing.
Our Judgement
We cannot judge people, but we can learn to distinguish good from evil, as Hebrews 5:14 tells us.
Solid food is for the
mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish
good from evil.
In this way we will be able to see quite clearly that the boy I talked about at the start had not made a good choice in his prayer, it was him that needed to change, not his mother.
Conclusion
There is much more to say, but, now I must finish, so in conclusion let me read Hebrews 13:20-21
May the God of peace, who
through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead
our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with
everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is
pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and
ever. Amen.
Or, perhaps put more simply, this is apparently engraved on a tombstone in Shrewsbury, England:
For the Lord Jesus Christ's sake
Do all the good you can
To all the people you can
In all the ways you can
As long as ever you can.
Amen.
References
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/give-a-man-a-fish.html
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/28/fish/
