You Have Always Been Good: Agreement With God’s Perspective
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Somewhere along the way you learned to say “I’ll be good.” Maybe you said it as a kid with a belt coming down, maybe you said it at an altar, maybe you still say it every Monday morning after a weekend you’re ashamed of. And every time you say it, you’re decreeing something you never meant to decree: I’m not good. That one quiet sentence is doing more damage to your walk with God than any sin you’ve been fighting. This episode is about why, and how to get out from under it.
Kingdom humility is agreement with God’s perspective
Religion taught us that humility means thinking low of yourself. Snow-covered dung, a worm, totally depraved, nothing good in you. We thought that posture was holiness. It was actually a low view of the One who made you.
Here is a better definition. Kingdom humility is agreement with God’s perspective. Not your perspective, not your pastor’s, not your father’s. His. And what is His perspective of you? Paul lays it out in Romans 8:28-30: before you were born, God destined you to share in the likeness of His Son. He called you, He transferred His perfect righteousness to you, and He co-glorified you with Jesus. You were born to be glorious. When you were born again, you weren’t being rescued from worthlessness; you were being awakened to a plan that was intact before you were conceived.
So any gospel that needs you to feel like garbage before it can save you isn’t the gospel. The Father does not need you to hate yourself in order to initiate His rescue. He has chosen, through the person of Jesus, to see you exclusively through the righteousness of His Son, and that was true before you ever prayed a prayer. Paul’s ministers of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5 aren’t sent to tell the world how bad it is. They’re sent to tell people the favor of God is aimed at their life and awaken them to what has been true about them the whole time.
What really kept Israel out of rest
Hebrews 3 and 4 invite us into the faith-rest life, and in the same breath warn us not to miss it the way Israel did. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:6 that their story was written as a lesson for us. So it matters what their unbelief actually was.
Go back and read it. The spies came back and said the land was exactly what God promised. They carried the grapes. They didn’t doubt God’s nature, and they didn’t doubt the promise. What they doubted was themselves. “We saw giants, and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in theirs.” Did they talk to a single giant? No. They projected their own insecurity onto the enemy and called it a report. Years later, Rahab told Joshua’s men the truth the ten spies never heard: the whole city had been living in fear from the moment Israel showed up, because they already knew God had given the land away.
That’s what keeps us out of rest too. Not a doubt about whether God is good. A perspective of ourselves that is not in agreement with who Jesus says we are. And if you’re in warfare right now, hear this: don’t read it as proof you’re a problem. Read it as a compliment. The enemy is nervous about something in you that’s about to wake up.
Your heart is deep, not deceitful
Religion loves a verse like Jeremiah 17:9, “the heart is deceitful above all things.” We were handed that verse the day we got saved, along with the warning that we could never trust ourselves and would always need someone with a microphone to tell us what God was saying. But a translation carried through a lens that already assumed the worst about humanity will read the worst into the text. The same lens tacked “who walk not after the flesh” onto the end of Romans 8:1 out of fear that “no condemnation” might be taken at face value. Read it the way it stands: there is now therefore no condemnation. Period. Romans 4 says the same thing from the other side: He will never hold your sins against you.
The older Greek rendering of Jeremiah 17:9 doesn’t say your heart is wicked. It says the heart is deep beyond all things. You are not a cesspool; you are a well. Deep calls to deep. And when Jesus awakens the depths of who you are, you can drop that bucket as far as it goes and never bring up deceit, because the one who is in Christ is a new creation.
That means something practical. You can trust you again. All those whispers religion talked you out of, the Holy Spirit is going to talk you back into. You may be unenlightened in places (Paul prayed in Ephesians 1 that your eyes would be opened for exactly that reason), but you are not depraved. Darkness in the New Testament isn’t evil; it’s ignorance. Your battle isn’t even with the devil. It’s with what you don’t yet know about yourself. And the reason you think you have a good side and a bad side is that you’ve believed that about God too, as if the Son were the kind half and the Father the harsh half. The four living creatures around the throne cry holy even from behind Him. He is good all the way around, and you are made in His image.
Give up trying to please Him
Here is why we keep running back to religion: because of a low view of ourselves, we’re attracted to anything that offers a way to please God with our effort. Effort doesn’t require trust. If I’m loved because I did the thing, I never have to risk resting in how Abba actually feels about me. But Paul is clear that the love of God was aimed at you before you were saved. While we were yet sinners, Christ died.
Look at Jesus at the Jordan. Before a single miracle, before He raised anyone or walked on anything, He gets baptized and the sky opens: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The Father found goodness in who He was, not in what He had done. He does the same with you. He didn’t win you as a turd; He won you as a bride. He looks past the dirt and sees original intent, and at the depths of who you are He sees nothing but good.
So if there is an altar call in this episode, it’s this: stop trying to please God. You’re straining to make something true that is already true. He is already pleased with you. And you don’t need a spiritual father, including me, to approve of that before you believe it. If I affirm you before you’ve received His affirmation, you’ll live and die by my opinion of you, and He’ll withhold that until the order is right. The easiest people in the world to love are the people who already believe they’re loved.
Surrender to what love already says about you. You don’t have to earn a thing. You’re already loved, already accepted, already good. That’s the gospel.
Mark
If you’ve been burned by performance religion and you’re tired of hearing “I’ll be good” come out of your own mouth, you’re welcome here. The Shepherd’s Tent is carried by monthly partners — people who decided the tent should stay open for the next weary person. If that’s ever you, the door is at markcasto.co/donate. No pressure, no timer.