Ken Whitten says the words “good” and “goodness” get thrown around a lot.
People will ask, “Are we good?” They’ll say about something, “Wasn’t that good?” Or they’ll say, “Oh my goodness,” when in truth they don’t have any goodness at all, said Whitten, national director of pastoral leadership at the North American Mission Board.
“We work to be good. We want to be good. We will to be good, but we’re not worthy to be good,” he said during his pastoral talk on the topic of goodness during the Southern Baptist Convention Pastors Conference on June 12. “There is no one good, no not one … only God is good.”
If you take “God” out of “good,” all you’re left with is a zero, Whitten said. Any goodness in Christians’ life comes from Him.
Goodness as God defines it, he said, is in Micah 6:8 — “to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.”
To view more photos from Whitten’s talk, click here.
