by Jacob Ninan
What is godliness? The Greek word used in the New Testament refers to piety or reverence towards God. People in the days of Jesus considered the Pharisees to be the godliest people around because of the detailed attention they seemed to give to keeping the Law. But the opinion Jesus had about them was that they did everything in order to be noticed and recognised by people (Matt.23:5). In other words, their 'godliness' focussed on what could be seen outside – their external behaviour. Jesus knew that 'inside' they were full of hypocrisy and lawlessness (v.28). He tells us that unless our righteousness exceeded that of the Pharisees we could not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt.5:20). Theologically speaking, we know that we can never be sufficiently righteous that God can accept us, but we need the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. But could it be that in this verse Jesus is telling us to focus on being righteous inside our heart in contrast to the Pharisees?
We see around us that people who read the Bible, pray and attend church regularly are generally considered to be godly. But when we see things more clearly we know that this may be just a religious form, trying to get merit before God or trying to impress people. A truly godly man is distinguished by his inner values and attitudes which can then be seen by the choices he makes, and the way he speaks and behaves in different situations. Using the example of a religious Jew who took pride in his circumcision, Paul points out that spirituality is an inner reality rather than any external behaviour (Rom.2:28,29). In simple words, a godly man is one who focusses on becoming like God in everything he does.
The most precious thing that God has graciously offered to His children is that we can become 'partakers of the divine nature' (2Pet.1:3,4). This 'divine nature' does not refer to God's essential nature as God, because we are only created beings and will never become God. What it means is that we can partake of His moral character as demonstrated in His Son, Jesus (Rom.8:28,29). Some people, when they see that God has promised this to us, sit back and expect that God will some day and somehow make them like that. But if we continue to read on from the passage from Peter quoted above, that the apostle tells us to keep adding different aspects of the divine nature to ourselves. This is how we have to respond to this promise. Paul exhorts us saying that since God is working inside us, giving us a desire and an ability to do His will, we from our side need to work them out outwardly (Php.2:12,13).
There are two attitudes we need to have, which will propel us towards godliness. If we focus just on one of them instead of balancing them both in our practical life, we will have a distorted view of life.
"For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose on their behalf" (2Cor.5:14,15). When we have seen the love of God towards us, what we actually deserve, how God's grace has reached us, and what all He has promised and planned for us, our heart will get filled with love and gratitude towards Him. This attitude will then begin to control us, motivate us, drive us and energise us!
But a lot of the preaching today is to promise people that God is going to give them many earthly blessings and solve all their problems. As a result, even many who have been born again are not going in the direction of wanting to please God in everything and to give up their own desires and plans. Even if we first came to Christ because we wanted to escape hell and go to heaven, we should be progressing from there and going towards wanting not to live for ourselves any more but for Him who gave Himself for us. If this desire is growing inside us, it will confirm that we have been truly saved and we are going in the direction of sanctification.
The 'old-time' Gospel used to cause people to mourn and weep when they heard of what God has done for them on Calvary. Simultaneously they would have seen themselves as vile sinners in the eyes of the holy God. But then the Gospel of grace becomes precious in their eyes because however deep in sin they have been, now there is restoration and acceptance offered to them (1Cor.6:9-11). Once they have come to Jesus in repentance and received free forgiveness and acceptance, they begin to see the great privileges God has also given them including having godly brothers and sisters as their new family, and their special function as members of the body of Christ. When we see that all this has been given from God as an unmerited favour from God and there is nothing we have earned, our heart gets filled with a desire to give up our own life and to serve God in everything.
But, many do not seem to have seen any of this. They are simply banking on God's forgiveness being available to them and continue their old life more or less. About such it cannot be said that they have chosen no longer to live for themselves but for Him who died and rose from the dead.
The other attitude that should be driving our life is that of the fear of God. This is not essentially the fear of punishment as we continue to do whatever we like, but a fear lest we should sin against this God who has loved us even though we don't deserve it. There is a challenging example for us from Joseph in the Old Testament. Nothing much is written in the Bible about his personal life with God. We know that God gave him a couple of dreams when he was around 17 years old. After that we know his brothers wanted to kill him, they sold him as a slave, he did his work as a slave in the house of his master Potiphar, how he was falsely accused and put in jail, how he behaved as a responsible man there and how the jailer put him in charge of other prisoners, how God gave a gift for interpreting dreams, and how he finally ended up in Pharaoh's court. We can imagine how Joseph had led a life of faithfulness before God from Psa.105:17-19 where it says that the word of the Lord was testing him. He had no Bible with him, so, somehow, he was directly in touch with God through this time. From this life of faithfulness before God in all circumstances comes the explanation for his response to temptation.
When Potiphar's wife tempted him day after day to sleep with her, his response was, "How can I sin against God?" (Gen.39:9). This was the attitude that helped him through all the troubles he went through. This is the same attitude we need to have constantly in our mind that will drive us towards godliness in the different circumstances that we will go through in our life.
After all that God has done for us, in the way of unmerited favour, how can we sin against God? Sadly this is not generally taught by many preachers, because 'sin' is considered to be a wrong word to be mentioned in the light of grace. Determining not to sin against God is considered as a life under the Law, and those who mention it are labelled as going back under the Law.
As a result, many people think that now that grace is here, God has taken care of our sin in every way so that we need not be concerned about it any more. They wrongly quote that it says in the Bible that where sin abounds grace will abound much more. It does not actually mean that, but only that grace is more than sufficient to deal with any sin.
The bottom line of the Gospel is that Jesus came to save us from our sins (Matt.1:21). If we don't fear to sin, it implies that we may not even be on the way of salvation. But if we are pursuing after godliness, one of the attitudes we need to have is to stop sinning. We need to cultivate this attitude especially in the atmosphere of false grace or hyper grace that is all around us.
With these two attitudes of wanting to please God who has given Himself us and of fearing Him lest we should sin against Him, let us move towards His nature of godliness that He has promised for us.