Good vs. God: Why Being "Nice" Is Not The Goal

8th in the Wide Witness, Deep Roots Series

I’m circling back to values and the Beatitude roots again because we still underestimate how much they matter in Kingdom ministry. A plane can be one degree off and look fine at takeoff, but given enough distance, that tiny error becomes a major miss. The same is true in the church. When we try to do God’s work with the world’s value system, we may look sincere, productive, and successful while drifting farther from the Kingdom the whole time. Think Constantine trying to “Christianize” the empire by the sword. Sincere? Likely. Faithful? That is another question. That is the power of values.

The church has a dangerous habit of mistaking results for righteousness. If attendance is up, giving is strong, the brand looks polished, and the room feels inspired, we are tempted to call it “good” and move on. But the Kingdom of God is not dazzled by polished optics, inflated metrics, or ministry success powered by worldly instincts. Something can look fruitful, feel strategic, and still be rotten at the root. You can build a ministry that helps some people, flatters many more, and quietly trains everyone to love the wrong kingdom.

That is the problem with “good” done without God. It is not neutral. It is not harmless. It is not even truly good. It is often rebellion with better branding. Scripture does not let us grade righteousness on a curve. Jesus warns that religious acts can be done to be seen. Paul says even costly sacrifice can amount to nothing without love. The world asks, “Did it work?” The Kingdom asks, “Was it true? Was it faithful? Was it from faith? Did it honor God?” That is why the Ring in The Lord of the Rings is such a useful picture: evil power does not become holy because a good man picks it up. It just becomes evil with a sermon outline.

The Ring Always Comes with a Reason

If you want to understand the modern, respectable church person, you would not start with Judas. You might start with Boromir. Boromir is one of the most useful men in Middle-earth for diagnosing respectable church folk.

He is not a cartoon villain. He is brave, loyal, patriotic, and he genuinely loves his people. In our setting, Boromir is the guy who serves on the stewardship committee, never misses Wednesday night, and volunteers to drive the youth van to D-Now. He sees darkness gathering in the culture and wants to stop it.

His problem is not that he wants a bad thing. His problem is more frightening, and much more common: he wants a good thing in a godless way. He looks at the Ring of Power and thinks, Why shouldn’t we use this for something noble?¹ That is exactly what makes him dangerous.

The Ring is evil not merely because it does bad things, but because it teaches a false doctrine of goodness. It whispers that you may seize power, bend wills, manipulate outcomes, and still call the result righteous. That is why it ruins good people first. Not by making them love evil in the abstract, but by teaching them to pursue good as little gods.

Miss this, and you will misunderstand how temptation usually works. The worst temptations rarely arrive with horns and a pitchfork. If Satan showed up offering open heresy and obvious depravity, most church people would run him out of the sanctuary. Usually temptation shows up with a Bible under its arm, a printed bulletin in hand, and a very reasonable explanation.

That is why one of the deepest battles in the Christian life is not good versus evil in the obvious, comic-book sense. If it were, sanctification would mostly be a matter of not robbing banks and not setting things on fire. No, the real battle is more subtle than that. It is my definition of “good” versus God’s definition of the good. It is the daily clash between what seems right, useful, efficient, protective, impressive, or compassionate to me, and what is actually holy, fitting, and obedient before God.

And that battle is closer to home than most of us want to admit. We are masters at spiritualizing fleshly desires. We say we want peace, but often we mean comfort. We say we want justice, but often we mean our side finally getting the microphone. We say we want love, but often we mean affirmation without repentance. We say we want strength, but often we mean control with a Bible verse taped to it. We say we want a healthy church, but often we mean a church that is polished, efficient, conflict-averse, numerically reassuring, and unlikely to embarrass us at associational or convention meetings.

In other words, the human soul is not usually seduced by obvious evil first. It is seduced by a rival good. Boom.

Nice Is Not the New Birth

Jesus walks straight into this problem in Matthew 5:17–20. He says He did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill them, and then He drops the line that should make every polished, well-mannered religious person sit up straighter in the pew: “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20, ESV).

That is not Jesus handing out gold stars for respectable morality. That is Jesus detonating the illusion that niceness, religious habit, and moral presentation are enough.

We read the Pharisees as the obvious bad guys because we know the ending. In their own day, they were the serious people, the careful people, the Bible-quoting people, the tradition-guarding people, the policy people. Their problem was not that they cared too much about righteousness. Their problem was that they had learned how to keep righteousness at the surface. They had mastered the art of managed behavior without surrendered affections. They had the look without the life. The finish without the joinery. Fruit stapled on, but no sap in the tree.

Southern hospitality is a fine thing, but it is not a fruit of the Spirit. You can smile, say “bless your heart,” bring a casserole to the sick, and still harbor bitterness, pride, greed, and envy. Jesus is after something much deeper than improved optics. He is after the renovation of the whole person.

That is why the Beatitudes do not read like a strategy session from a modern church leadership conference. That is why they are the roots in my Christian Character Tree. If we wrote the Beatitudes today, they would sound very different. But Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the impressive, the efficient, the platformed, and the impossible to criticize.” He says blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted.

That is not how the world defines winning. Frankly, it is not how many churches define it either. Tell me I’m wrong.

Jesus Redefines the Good

The Beatitudes do not merely tell us how to behave. They tell us what kind of life God actually calls blessed.

Take meekness. D. A. Carson points out that meekness is not weakness or servility. It is not being a doormat. It is a God-centered posture that yields one’s rights and future into God’s hands rather than grasping, retaliating, and insisting on self-assertion.²

That matters because the world’s vision of the good is built on self-protection. The secular gospel preaches this liturgy all day long: protect your image, protect your comfort, protect your tribe, protect your options, protect your leverage, protect your brand, protect your right to be left alone.

Jesus, by contrast, calls blessed the person who has stopped making self-protection the center of the moral universe.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5, ESV).

The world hears that and thinks, “That’s adorable. Meanwhile, the ruthless bought all the prime real estate.” But Jesus is not confused about how reality works. He is telling us that the Kingdom of God is not inherited by the grabby, the brash, the perpetually offended, or the power-addicted. It is inherited by those who trust the Father enough to stop reaching for the Ring.

John Piper describes meekness as trusting God, committing our way to Him, waiting patiently for Him, and therefore not giving way to quick and fretful anger.³ That is strong medicine in an age where perpetual outrage is treated like discernment and wrath is confused with courage. Spend five minutes on social media and you will find believers shredding each other while imagining they are defending the faith. Some of us are not nearly as principled as we think. We are just baptizedly irritated.

When Good Things Start Asking for Worship

Peter Kreeft is helpful here because he insists that truth, goodness, and beauty are not decorative ideas floating in the air. They are realities grounded in God Himself.⁴ Thomas Aquinas, in the great Christian tradition, treated them as bound together in being: what is truly true and truly good is not finally severed from what is beautiful.⁵

That means “good” is not a toy we get to rename every election cycle or every time the culture updates its playlist. The good is not whatever works. The good is not whatever sells. The good is not whatever keeps me comfortable, admired, and unbothered. The good is what corresponds to God’s reality, God’s character, and God’s purposes.

And here is where things get uncomfortable for conservative, well-meaning Christians: a lesser good can become a functional god in about ten minutes. Maybe faster.

Family is good. Safety is good. Competence is good. Influence is good. Ministry growth is good. Being thought of as balanced and reasonable is good.

But when any created good begins demanding the trust, fear, sacrifice, and obedience that belong to God alone, it has stopped acting like a gift and started acting like an idol.⁶ That is why the difference between “good” and “god” is only one letter on the page and a whole universe in the soul.

Tim Keller often said that idols are not usually bad things, but good things turned into ultimate things. That is exactly the danger. We do not usually wake up, pour our coffee, and say, “Today feels like a great day to deny Christ and worship Baal.” We say things that sound spiritual. I just want stability for my family. I just want influence for the gospel. I just want success so I can do more good. I just want peace in the church.

Then the lesser good climbs onto the throne. And once that happens, compromise starts getting renamed. We call fear “prudence.” We call cowardice “unity.” We call self-protection “discernment.” We call worldliness “strategy.” We shade the truth to protect the ministry. We flatter people to protect access. We avoid necessary conflict to protect the church’s brand.

That is not holiness. That is interior public relations.

Justice, Love, and the Right Order of the Soul

This is why justice and love must stay tightly joined.

Justice, as a cardinal virtue, means giving God and neighbor their due. It begins by giving God His proper place as the One who defines reality, goodness, and moral order. If God does not define the good in my life, someone else will. Usually that someone is me. And let’s be honest: I am a deeply unreliable deity.

Love, as a theological virtue, keeps justice from becoming cold, mechanical, and self-congratulatory. Love refuses to use truth as a club or people as props in our own spiritual success story. Love remembers that the goal of obedience is not merely to be correct, but to be rightly ordered toward God and toward those made in His image.

Justice without love becomes a hammer in the hands of proud people. Love without justice becomes pudding—sweet, shapeless, and unable to bear weight. The Kingdom needs both.

This also helps explain why “good vs. God” is not really a contest between two equal options. God is not competing with the good. God is the source, measure, and fulfillment of the good. John Piper is right: the greatest gift of the gospel is God Himself.⁷ Forgiveness is glorious because it brings us to God. Justification is glorious because it brings us to God. Eternal life is glorious not because the streets are gold, but because it is life with God.

So the real conflict in the human heart is not finally between God and goodness. It is between God and all the lesser goods that try to replace Him. Christian maturity is not merely learning to reject bad things. Plenty of pagans reject bad things. Christian maturity is learning to keep good things in second place.

We Live in Two Kingdoms, Not Two Planets

Dallas Willard kept reminding the church that the gospel is not merely an evacuation plan for the afterlife. It is the invitation to live now in the kingdom of God, which he defined as the range of God’s effective will.⁸ That means this struggle over values is not theoretical, abstract, or confined to seminary debates.

It is right here. Right now. It is painfully ordinary.

This battle shows up in board rooms and browser histories. In church budgets and group texts. In how we staff churches and how we speak to our spouses when we are tired. In what we reward, platform, excuse, fear, and celebrate.

You can affirm the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, pass an ordination council, and still run your life on worldly fuel: speed, image, leverage, comfort, outrage, and control. You can say you are against “the world” while borrowing its methods, metrics, and cravings almost by reflex. Just mention the Guidepost Report on the SBC Executive Committee or the public failures at Truett McConnell University and the point lands with a thud. Ouch.

C. S. Lewis warned about “men without chests”⁹—people with sharp minds and strong appetites but no formed moral center. That diagnosis lands hard in our moment. We have information everywhere. We have opinions stacked to the ceiling. We have instincts, takes, reactions, and rhetoric. But too often we do not have a chest: a trained heart with rightly ordered loves.

That is why Willard’s old warning about “vampire Christians” still stings.¹⁰ Plenty of people want the benefits of Jesus’ blood but not the burden of His life. We want rescue without apprenticeship. Forgiveness without formation. Salvation without surrender. Heaven without holiness.

But the Kingdom of God is not in the business of recruiting nicer consumers. It is in the business of forming an entirely new kind of person.

The Two-Column Kingdom Test

So let’s move from polemic to practice.

Take one significant decision you are facing right now—family, church, money, schedule, conflict, calling, whatever—and draw a line down the middle of a page.

On the left side write: What the World Calls Good.

On the right side write: What Jesus Calls Good.

Then be honest enough to make yourself uncomfortable.

Does the world call this option good because it is efficient, safe, admired, lucrative, impressive, validating, fast, or powerful? Does Jesus call it good because it is true, meek, just, merciful, pure, faithful, and obedient?

Then ask the harder questions. What outcome am I most desperate to protect? What fear is driving me? Which Beatitude am I resisting because it feels weak? What fruit of the Spirit would obedience require here? And if Christ’s way costs me status, speed, comfort, or applause, do I still have the faith to call it good?

That little sheet of paper may expose more about your functional theology than a month of vague religious self-talk.

Choose Your Good Carefully

In the end, the question facing the modern church is not whether we value the good. Everybody does.

The real question is: who gets to define it?

The kingdom of this world keeps preaching the same sermon: the good life is found in autonomy, appetite, image management, comfort, and appearances. It is a slick sales pitch. It is also spiritually hollow.

The kingdom of God tells a very different story. The good life is found in surrender, holiness, truth, mercy, meekness, quiet faithfulness, and sacrificial love under the lordship of Christ.

That path looks foolish until the storm comes. Then suddenly roots matter a great deal.

So no, the goal of the Christian life is not to become a “nice person.” Let’s retire that pathetic ambition. Nice people can still be cowards. Nice people can still worship comfort. Nice people can still dodge truth to keep the peace. Nice people can still protect idols with impeccable Southern manners. And nice people, just like Boromir, can still reach for the Ring.

Jesus did not bleed and die to make us nicer Pharisees. He came to make us new creatures.

So yes—be kind. Be patient. Be gracious.

But do not confuse pleasant with holy. Do not confuse cultural respectability with biblical righteousness. Do not confuse good intentions with godliness. And do not confuse a lesser good with God.

Because sooner or later every disciple has to face the question underneath all the others:

Do I want what seems good to me? Or do I want God enough to let Him redefine the good?

That is where surrender begins.

And that is where deep roots begin.

Endnotes

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Illustrated ed. (New York: William Morrow, 2020), “The Breaking of the Fellowship,” 398-99.

2. D. A. Carson, “Kingdom of Heaven: Its Norms and Witness,” sermon on Matthew 5:1-16, April 26, 1975, The Gospel Coalition. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/sermon/kingdom-of-heaven-its-norms-and-witness-matthew-5-1-16/

3. John Piper, “What Is Meekness?” Desiring God, May 15, 2012. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-meekness

4. Peter Kreeft, “Lewis’s Philosophy of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,” in C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, ed. David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas, and Jerry L. Walls (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 16-17.

5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 16, a. 3; cf. I, q. 5, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.

6. Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters (New York: Dutton, 2009), xvii-xix.

7. John Piper, God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God’s Love as the Gift of Himself (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005).

8. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 25.

9. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 16.

10. Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 14.