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The Good News Is … Jesus Can Help You Stop Cussin’

Most of my experience growing up in Christianity revolved around a particular expression which had at its core the tenant of behavior modification.

Its central core was the belief that our calling is to be in a constant process of exerting effort to eliminate a certain set of behaviors from our lives.

I was recently at a youth event and—to my surprise—discovered that this behavior-modification brand of Christianity is still alive and well in the world.

After we sang some songs together, the speaker got up on stage and began telling stories from his own life. At points, he would include lists of “here are bad things I did 20 years ago” and conclude with “now I don’t do them anymore.”

As he drew to a close, he brought the message to a point of application. “When’s the last time you cussed? When’s the last time you looked at pornography? When’s the last time you said something bad about someone? Well, if you’ve done these things, you need to stop, and Jesus is the way you stop.”

I initially considered this an isolated event. However, the following day, someone posted a link online to a 2012 article from a popular blog titled “What Is the Gospel.” It covers the concepts of sin; Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection; and even the phrase, “The beauty of the gospel is that once you truly understand what Jesus has done for you, you desire to do what he calls you to do.”

It gets one step closer to something deeper and different, but it still has behavior modification as its end goal.

An alternative.

The whole gospel doesn’t begin with sin or the idea that you and I are bad people or that we are doing bad things. The good news doesn’t even begin with Jesus and the cross.

The good news begins with this—Genesis 1:27, 31:

“So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.”

The good news begins with God’s creative work.

It pleased him to make something, and the things he made bring him pleasure. The good news starts with the fact that God not only loves us, he likes us. It starts with his heart for us, his kindness toward us.

You and I and the universe around us are the fruit of God’s creativity. He looks at us with the passion and satisfaction of an accomplished artist looking back over a lifetime’s worth of masterful paintings. He feels the pleasure of a composer hearing an orchestra bringing his symphony to life for the first time.

The good news is that for millennia, the spinning of the planets, the tides of the oceans, the song of nature, the breath of humanity, you and I have been the object of God’s affection and pursuit.

And while we sit and grovel before God, saying, “I’ll do better, I promise,” God is responding with an eternal, “I just want to be with you. Sit with me. Know me. That’s enough.”

The end goal of Christianity is not to behave differently. The end goal is greater intimacy with God, birthed not from our effort, but God’s great pursuit of us.