What Defines Good or Bad Values?

Some people want to believe that a belief in God is not necessary in order to have good morals. They believe their morals are correct because they want to believe them regardless of whether these morals are based on something more solid than just their feeling. Thinking God is necessary to help us construct good morals is different than thinking that God exists. Remember, Satan believes God exists but he and the other fallen angles don’t live or exist with any morality other than to steal, kill and destroy. (John 10:10)

Over the last 50+ years as a Christian, I have had countless discussions with people that claim they don’t need God or the Bible to have a moral compass or a standard to live by.  Yet, when you question them why their idea of morals are any better than someone else who disagrees with them, they usually have no response other than to become angry. As you dig deeper into this fallacy of morals based on personal perspective, you can see most of the anti God and bible crowd do so because they don’t want any standard that limits their freedom in thinking or acting as they please. At the heart of defining such morality is: who is worthy to establish such standards?

Recently I read an article about a surgical hospital in Australia that tried a unique experiment to try and persuade doctors and nurses to have better standards and behavior, especially in the operating room.  The person on the operating table was being ridiculed and made fun of while being put to sleep by the staff and doctors alike..

Surgical operating theaters in Australia  are renowned for poor behavior due to high stress levels. Australian researchers have successfully trialed a novel experiment to address offensive and rude comments in operating theaters by placing a large poster of an “EYE” in surgical rooms. They published their finding in PLOS Jan 4, 2024.

What they found out was just having a symbol of a watching eye persuaded many to modify their behavior. Just having that simple reminder that people are going to be accountable persuaded better morals by the doctors and nurses. People act better when they think that someone like God is watching them and their behavior will be judged some time in the future. Now, if we believe that God exists and he watches us, we behave differently. Accountability for our actions in the future gives us a greater incentive to behave better in the present.

Jesus said it well when he taught on how people were judging others with wrong motive. His teaching was not against judging wrong behavior but against judging with wrong motives that cloud people’s judgment.

Matthew 7:2

“For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

The apostle Paul spoke about self assessment and how we can avoid being judged by God if we judged ourselves instead before judging others. Believing that God judges all of us should persuade us to modify our morals and our behavior. Unfortunately, we lose sight of that truth and thus act badly.

1 Corinthians 11:31

But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged.

The prophet Ezekiel prophesied what God was ready to do with Israel because they were ignoring the fact that God will judge each of us according to our deeds, whether good or bad. The whole of chapter 18 sets up how God views our actions and how people view them.

Ezekiel 18:30

“Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, each according to his conduct,” declares the Lord GOD. “Repent and turn away from all your transgressions, so that iniquity may not become a stumbling block to you.

Somehow, most in the body of Christ have lost the sense of fairness in evaluating conduct and have forgotten that the same God of the Old Testament and the New Testament evaluates our conduct to this day. He will judge all of us regardless of whether we call ourselves Christian or not. In fact, many unbelievers refuse to embrace Christ because of professing Christians who act as if God is blind to Christian behavior and thus see God as being an unjust judge. Christ may be our savior but we will be evaluated by how we lived when we go to meet the Lord yet many professing Christians think God “whitewashes” our conduct because of what Christ did on the cross, which he does not.

2 Corinthians 5:10

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. The apostle Peter warned believer about the fact that God still will judge each of us as to what we did in this life and thus we should be concerned enough to adjust any bad behavior before we die and meet the Lord face to face.

1 Peter 1:17

If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth;

We all in our souls, whether Christian or not, know we should have a standard which we believe is moral and right. So, the question is: who creates that moral standard? Is it based on God’s standards who created us or is it based on our own feelings? If morals are based on feelings and one person believes it’s ok to steal and another feels we should not steal, who decides?  Many governments of the world have good laws but most do not follow them because we somehow believe these laws of morality don’t or shouldn’t apply to us.

If we choose the Bible as our standard of morality, do we pick and choose what part of that book to follow or do we embrace the whole as our standard? Truthfully, many professing Christians today pick and choose what they want to embrace. For example, some want to live with someone else before marriage in order to test things out.  Then, if we change our mind, we could just move on to the next person and “TRY” them on for size.  Some discount what the Bible says about sex before marriage because we have never reconciled that is God is the author of our morality and our feelings.

Real love for God comes when we “Surrender” to Christ completely and that includes following his word as we understand it. To do otherwise is merely to pretend to love God.  Jesus made it plain and simple when it comes to defining who we love and what we love. He said “IF” we love him we will follow his commands.

John 14:15

“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.

The world can claim to have a solid foundation for morality but in reality it is just feelings, which are not always solid and reliable. As believers, we have God and his word to base our morality on, unless we are just feeling our way through life pretending to have a moral compass.

Questions:

1) Would you say, without a doubt, that God and his word are the basis for your morality or are your feelings more in charge of your standards? ( Ps 119:105 )

2) Has your moral compass gotten out of alignment lately? ( Pr 3:5-7)

Never be afraid of talking about your moral compass when you have the reliability of God’s word to stand on.

Pastor Dale