Sincerity and Good Intentions are Not Enough

One of my husband's favorite hobbies is orienteering. It’s a sport in which competitors are given a topographical map, a compass, and a punch card, and they are sent out into the wilderness to find strategically-placed markers as indicated on their map. The first person to cross the finish line with his or her punch card complete, indicating they have found every marker on their course, wins. (As a side note, the fact that I'm married to someone who feels loved when I participate in this torturous activity is a reminder to me both that God is indeed more concerned with my character than with my comfort, and that God absolutely has a sense of humor.)

As you may know, I can't find my way out of a parking lot. I literally use my GPS to help me resume heading in the same direction I was already going before stopping at the gas station. Before the advent of the "Find My Car" app, I lost my car so often that I developed a friendship with the security guy who drove around the mall looking for people to help. He said he always knew it was time to rescue me when my arms went up in the air in exasperation.

In any case, occasionally I have gone orienteering with my husband in order to love and support him in what he enjoys doing (and to eat out on the way home), but we rarely ran the same course. He would compete on the advanced course and I would do a moderate-level course (I belonged on the beginner course with the children, but they were always really short and I wanted a longer hike). 

Every time I went orienteering, I always started out with determination, focus, and the best intentions of running my course well. However, these were never enough. No matter how sincere my belief that I was going the right way, I inevitably took wrong turns and became confused about where I was and where I needed to go. Good intentions and sincerity alone never once led me to the finish line. When I took wrong turns with right sincerity, I still found myself alone in the Rocky Mountains wondering how long it would take a rescue team to find me; pondering whether the cold, dehydration, or a bear would get me first; and speculating as to whether dying from this ridiculous sport for the sake of loving my husband in obedience to Christ would count as martyrdom.

While I have managed to survive our orienteering meets, either because I eventually turned and started going the right way on my own or because someone less directionally-challenged came along and showed me the way, I never would have arrived where I wanted to go had I insisted that I would be fine going any direction with sincerity.

Not only in sports, but in everyday life there are grave consequences for being wrong despite having right intentions. Driving toward a hurricane when one wholeheartedly intends to drive away from it results not in safety, but in immense danger to one’s life (just ask my Aunt Nancy; yes, the entire family is directionally-challenged). Eradicating forests to eliminate tree-dwelling demons who are genuinely believed to be the cause of calamity and affliction does not actually eliminate calamity and affliction; it creates far more. Raping little girls with the sincere belief that having sex with a virgin will cure HIV/AIDS results not in health, but in the rapid spread of HIV and the destruction of an entire generation. Attempting to empower the persistently poor by earnestly giving them food and shelter but not education and skills does not empower them; it reinforces their sense of powerlessness and causes even greater dependence.

Likewise, following your false beliefs about what God wants from you, no matter how sincerely you hold to those beliefs and strive to live by them, will not get you where you want to go, either in this life or the next!

T.S. Eliot famously said, “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.” Whether or not that is true, it has long been evident that good intentions are not sufficient for desirable results. Even in our legal system, breaking the law out of sincere ignorance does not exonerate us from the consequences – legal or natural – of our actions. Further, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a single religion in the world that teaches good intentions as a means of salvation. So why in 21st-century America would we suddenly adopt this belief that God only cares about our sincerity or good intentions?

I suspect the answer is arrogance. We think we know more than all those who came before us, including Jesus, who taught, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6) and, “Unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24).

When Peter was charged as a criminal for preaching the Gospel to Jews, he said, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under Heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:11). And in speaking of the Jews’ rejection of Jesus, the apostle Paul said, “Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:1-4).

Not only are there over 100 verses in the Bible that teach the exclusivity of Christ as the only way to God, but if the disciples had been preaching a message of inclusiveness they would not have been persecuted by Jewish and Gentile authorities alike. Inclusiveness was the persuasion of the day in first-century Rome, and Christians were beaten, tortured, and killed for not being inclusive enough. Referring to themselves as The Way, they were known as atheists to outsiders because they rejected the pantheon of Roman gods as well as every other well-intentioned worldview. This was not a gospel of feel-good acceptance, but of salvation by faith in Christ alone. Why? Because he is the only one who paid the penalty for our sins.

Of course, we are free to reject Jesus’ substitutionary payment for our sins and insist on paying the penalty ourselves; God does not leave us without an option. But salvation through false beliefs motivated by sincerity and good intentions is not one of them. So the only question that remains is, “Is the Gospel true?”