The "Good" Man's Great Need of Grace
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”
When I first became a Christian I knew almost nothing. I could not quote a single Bible verse, I probably could not have even named as many books of the Bible as I have fingers on my hands. My understanding of theology was as shallow as a mud puddle—and just as messy. Thank God that he saves us because of his own graciousness and not because of our effort or merit, because I had neither. I was foolishly, rebelliously, and passionately running in the opposite direction when God took hold of my heart and gave me the gift of new life. I was 16 years old at that time.
Over the years that followed I slowly started to be discipled and grow in my faith. I was not an immediate Bible reader, studier, or memorizer. I was zealous for God, but I had no real understanding of Christian truth. One of the things I struggled with most was what the Bible says about the sinful condition of man. The Bible says that because all men inherited their nature from their father Adam, we are born sinful. It is our natural state from the womb. The Bible also teaches that being sinful does not merely mean that we make a few mistakes but are mostly pretty good. Much to the contrary, the Bible teaches that we are wholly inclined to evil, we are enslaved to our sinful desires, we are hostile to the one true God, and incapable of doing anything that is truly good or righteous in his eyes outside of Christ, (Gen. 6:5; Matthew 7:11; Rom. 3:10-18; Eph. 2:1-3).
In Reformed Theology, we sometimes call these truths the Doctrine of Total Depravity. By “total” we do not mean that people have reached the total limit of their potential for sinfulness or that they are as sinful as they possibly could be. Instead, “total” refers to the comprehensiveness of sin’s effects upon each and every man. It means that every part of our being is effected by sin; sin has poisoned every part of us, (Eph. 4:17-19).
If we are willing to be honest with ourselves, we can all see this reality in the track record of our lives: Our hearts are full of sinful desires, our minds are full of sinful thoughts, our bodies are full of sinful cravings. We often try to suppress these things but our efforts do not prevail. Every part of us is governed by our sin and enchained to that corrupt government. Worse still, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it; it is our in-born nature, (Ps. 51:5; Rom. 5:12).
Our passage today touches on an important aspect of this difficult truth (Matt. 6:1-4). As I said, it was hard for me to understand and accept these things when I was younger in my faith. I wanted to believe something else, something that offered a more affirming view of man’s self-sufficiency, ability, and inherent goodness. I didn’t want to accept that man was truly as corrupt as God said. But then God helped me see something through His Word. Isaiah 64:6 says,
“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”
Did you hear the shocking truth of this verse? It teaches that “all men are sinful”; likewise it says that as leaves are carried by the blowing wind, so men are carried along by their sinful nature. But even more than these important truths, it says that even the “righteous” things that men do (outside of Christ) are “filthy”…they are polluted and stained, corrupted by our sinful nature. Even the good things!
It was when I realized that sinful men were not merely guilty before God because of the bad things they do, but that we are so deeply corrupted by our sin that even the “good” things we do are full of evil intentions that I began to realize that the Bible’s diagnosis of my heart—and of the hearts of all men—is absolutely true. In my sin, it is not only that I do bad things, but that even the “good” things I do, I do with selfish motivations and desires in my heart. Even the good things I am called to do in obedience to God and for love of neighbor, I somehow twist and contort to be used to serve myself.
When God helped me to realize that this is true, it had a profound impact on my heart because it helped me understand more fully how desperately all men need Christ—even those who seem very ‘good’ and ‘religious’. There is a way of being very religious and even doing many “good” and “righteous” things, that is still corrupted, selfish, manipulative, and altogether evil in the sight of God. It is for this reason that this next major section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount begins with a warning for us to “beware” not only of patently evil things, but even of the way we go about doing that which is good.