Do Good and Repent of Your Pride

There is a popular sin among Christians lately that needs to be addressed. The sin is Christians excusing themselves from doing the right thing.

As Christians we are called to do what is right. We are commanded certain things throughout the Bible and God expects us to respond in obedience. God's expectation is not that we be perfect but that we be obedient. It is always better to fail trying than to not try out of fear of failure.

However, humans are infinitely resourceful and inventive when it comes to figuring out ways to excuse our sins. Trust me, I know from experience. We tend to take the trendy and acceptable sins of the day and use them to excuse our less so trendy sins. The problem with this is that no sin is trendy in God's kingdom.

Today's trendy sin is the sin of being a "pharisee" or being self-righteous. Getting a group of Christians together to talk about self-righteousness will cause a brain surgeon to shutter with all the head nodding.

Now, in no way is this post supposed to serve as a defense of being self-righteous. In fact, self-righteousness is almost a given to our post-Enlightenment world. We all feel the guilt of our Godless society weighing on us and we attempt to assuage our guilt by passing little spiritual tests.

All that said, too often modern Christians use the excuse of possible self-righteousness to cover their sin of disobedience. The Bible commands us to do good. Paul tells the Ephesian church that they were predestined to do good works (Ephesians 2:10). Yet many Christians claim that if they do these good works then they will be tempted to be self-righteous about them. Conveniently enough this excuses them from doing anything but sitting on their hands and feeling smug.

God commands His people to do what is good and true and beautiful. He also commands us not to be prideful or self-righteous about the good, true and beautiful things we accomplish. The solution is not to decide between doing good and being self-righteous or not doing good and not being self-righteous. Instead, Christians are called to do what is good and learn to not be prideful in their good works through repentance.

Food for thought.

Michael