A Sermon on Being Good Without Even Trying

My greatest memory of her, and the tribute I want to give her, is that Mom was good without even trying! She didn’t have to try to be good. She was intrinsically good. Her actions were not controlled by trying to follow any laws. Her actions flowed from what was inside her, not from the outside. My mother was NOT a "Ten-commandments Christian"; she was a "Beatitudes Christian." To put it another way, her faith had become her way of life, and the good that she did simply came forth from that.

That’s what I want to talk about this morning. Reflect on our text for today. Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, a cosmopolitan city in western Turkey: "For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life." In the sentence before this, Paul wrote, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your doing; it is a gift from God."

Some of you know Max Lucado, the Christian writer. He tells a story about grace that he witnessed when he took his family to Disney World. He and his family were inside Cinderella’s castle. It was packed with kids and parents. Suddenly all the children rushed to one side. Had it been a boat, the castle would have tipped over. Cinderella had entered. Cinderella! The beautiful, immaculate, pure princess. Lucado said she was perfectly typecast. A gorgeous young girl with each hair in place, flawless skin, and a beaming smile. She stood waist-deep in a garden of kids, each wanting to touch and be touched.

For some reason Lucado turned and looked toward the other side of the castle. It was now vacant except for a boy maybe seven or eight years old. His age was hard to determine because of the disfigurement of his body. Dwarfed in height, face deformed, he stood watching quietly and wistfully, holding the hand of an other brother. "Don’t you know what he wanted?" Lucado asks. "He wanted to be with the children. He longed to be in the middle of the kids reaching for Cinderella, calling her name. But can’t you feel his fear, fear of yet another rejection? Fear of being taunted again, mocked again?

Don’t you wish Cinderella would go to him?

Guess what? She did!

She noticed the little boy. She immediately began walking in his direction. Politely, but firmly inching through the crowd of children, she finally broke free. She walked quickly across the floor, knelt at eye level with the stunned little boy, and placed a kiss on his face."

If there ever was a modern parable of the grace of God, this is it! The point is, there is nothing that you and I have done to merit God’s grace, God’s love, God’s salvation. Remember what Paul wrote? "For by grace you have been saved, and this is not your doing; it is the gift of God -- not the result of works, so that no one may boast."

Art Linkletter used to have a segment of his TV show called, "Kids say the darnedest things." He once interviewed a little girl of about 6 or 7. He asked her, "What does love look like?" The little girl answered, "It’s when I let Johnny get in front of me at the drinking fountain line." Art Linkletter smiled and said, "Well, you most love Johnny very much." But the little girl responded. "No, I don’t even like him."

That is what love looks like, isn’t it? God loves us even when we weren’t even likeable. We are saved by grace -- and grace is unmerited, undeserved love of God.

But the point of this story and the point of our text and the point of my sermon is this: The reason we have been saved is so that we might live rich and full lives filled with the same kind of grace. This is the Gospel in its fullness. We do not do good works in the hope they will save us! That is what most of the secular world and many Christian people believe. We have already been saved by the unmerited love of God -- the grace of God. Good works are our response to that salvation.

Do you see what I mean? Not only does God’s grace save us -- it also causes us to do good works. It makes new creatures of us. It transforms us.

Let me tell you another story. Phillip Haille, an investigative reporter, went to a small town in France which hid Jewish people from the Nazis during World War II. He went to this town to see what kind of people would risk everything to do such an extraordinary good thing. He interviewed people in the town and was overwhelmed by how ordinary the people were. They weren’t the heroic type, nor were they especially intellectual or politically enlightened.

He did learn one thing from his interviews: the people of this town regularly attended the Church on Sunday. Week after week, their pastor proclaimed the Word of God. They prayed and read the Bible together. Over time, by habit, they knew what was right and sought to do it. When the time came for them to be courageous, the day when the Nazis came to town hunting for Jews, they quietly did what was right.

One elderly woman faked a heart attack when the Nazis came to search her house where she had a family of Jews hiding in her basement. She said later, "The pastor always taught us that there comes a time in every life when a person is asked to do something for Jesus. And when our time came, we knew what to do."

Earlier in the sermon I used a word you may not be familiar with, the word "intrinsic." The dictionary says this word means "the essential nature of a thing." Back in college I learned the word in a course in social psychology and the work of Gordon Allport, a renowned psychologist at Harvard. Allport studied the nature of religious behavior and its relationship to bigotry and prejudice. He studied a large group of religious people. Let me tell you part of what he discovered.

He said that the intrinsically religious people were a much smaller group in the sample he studied. According to Allport, these people have a deeply interiorized religious faith and are totally committed to it. Their love of God is essential and inclusive. Intrinsic religious faith is a hunger for and commitment to oneness with God and all others. The intrinsically religious have little prejudice or bigotry. They practice what they preach and they have a striking humility.

Now here is the reason I have given you that long explanation: Good works are the intrinsically religious person’s way of life. They are the ones who are good without even trying.

This is the kind of religious experience to which Paul is calling us. He calls us to be so conscious of what he calls "the rich mercy of God" that in all we do we seek to live out our gratitude in service to humankind.

Often that means beginning with those closest to us. We are saved by grace. We are saved to good works as a way of life. And we are to begin with those about us. A lot of people stumble over this point. They think that Christian service starts overseas or in a service project of some kind. But more often Christian service is as close as our own family.

Leo Tolstoy was a great philosopher and novelist. You have probably been inspired by some of his writings. Tolstoy was a Christian of strong principles. He freed his serfs so they would no longer live in grinding poverty. But Tolstoy overlooked the person right next to him. After he died, his wife, Sonja, wrote this: "There is so little genuine warmth about him..." His biographers will tell of how he helped the laborers to carry buckets of water, but no one will ever know that he never gave his wife a rest and never -- in all these thirty-two years -- gave his child a drink of water or spent five minutes by his bedside to give his wife a chance to rest a little from all her labors. Tolstoy, a great Christian in so many ways, was blind to the needs of those closest to him.

How tragic it is when Christians divorce their Christian life from their daily life. Daily life is what the gospel is all about. It is serving Christ in the little things. It is how we treat the people in our own family. It is how we treat the people we work with. It is the kind word, the encouraging pat on the back, the willingness to listen to a friend pour out his heart. These small acts of service are of far more weight than the envelope we put in the offering plate or the prayer for a missionary overseas. This is the kind of Christianity that flows out of a heart that is given to Jesus out of gratitude for God’s grace.

I have told you many times about the marvelous stories from the sermons of that great Disciple preacher, Fred Craddock. One of his stories makes the point we are trying to make. He said that so often in the demonstration of our religious faith we want to make the grand gesture. We want to give our life to Christ in one great act of self-giving dedication. We want to lay down our treasure at his feet and say "O God, I give my whole life to Thee. I give Thee my treasure, and will lay down my life for Thee." "But," says Craddock, "for most of us, that is not how our Christian faith is lived out. What is required of us in not the one grand offering, but the giving of our treasure a quarter at a time, day after day."

You and I are saved by grace. For what purpose? For good works. Big works? Some times perhaps, but generally for small loving acts to those around us and those closest to us.

You are saved so that you may be intrinsically good. That your faith may be internalized. That you may be good without even trying.