How Can I Ever be Good Enough for God?

God wants you as you are, he really does. And no, you’ll never be “good enough,” but read on. This thing called the Church and its Christianity has been around for about two thousand years.  Its founder, Jesus Christ, is the only one who had it all together.

When he started his teaching “career” in the hillsides of Jerusalem, Jesus asked for volunteers.  The first few were uneducated, unshowered fisherman. Next was a hard working, law abiding, yet detested, tax-collector (men in this profession didn’t live like the church thought they ought to).  The list went on to include men who were short-tempered, slow-witted, doubtful, and one was so messed up he committed suicide (Herbert Lockyer, All the Apostles of the Bible, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972).  Notice, there were no doctors, lawyers, or great philosophers amongst the bunch. 

Jesus and his volunteers, or disciples, hung out with the “no-goods” of his day. He hung out with people who needed what he offered—salvation from their infirmities through physical, spiritual, and emotional healing.  “When the teachers of the law who were [the church leaders] saw him eating with the ‘sinners’ and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ On hearing this, Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners’” (Mark 2:16-17). Jesus accepted people as they were—sinners. None of them were “good enough” and neither are we, not without Christ.

It is only after we understand that we can never be “good enough” apart from a Savior, that we are ready to receive righteousness through what Jesus Christ did for us.  Only after accepting Christ’s sacrifice for one’s sins, can one be “good enough” for God.  Jesus’ perfect-ness is what makes it work. We come as we are.  Only Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection can make us “good enough” for God (Romans 3:10, 19-20).