Chapter Seven: Ungodliness
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ungodliness
When I talk about specific areas of acceptable sins, one comment I often hear is that pride is the root cause of all of them. While I agree that pride does play a major role in the development and expression of our subtle sins, I believe there is another sin that is even more basic, more widespread, and more apt to be the root cause of our other sins. That is the sin of ungodliness, of which we are all guilty to some degree.
Does that statement surprise you, or maybe even offend you? We don’t think of ourselves as ungodly. After all, we are Christians; we are not atheists or wicked people. We attend church, avoid scandalous sins, and lead respectable lives. In our minds, the ungodly folks are the ones who live truly wicked lives. How, then, can I say that we believers are all, to some extent, ungodly?
Contrary to what we normally think, ungodliness and wickedness are not the same. A person may be a nice, respectable citizen and still be an ungodly person. The apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:18, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.” Note that Paul distinguishes ungodliness from unrighteousness. Ungodliness describes an attitude toward God, while unrighteousness refers to sinful actions in thought, word, or deed. An atheist or avowed secularist is obviously an ungodly person, but so are a lot of morally decent people, even if they say they believe in God.
Ungodliness may be defined as living one’s everyday life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on God. You can readily see, then, that someone can lead a respectable life and still be ungodly in the sense that God is essentially irrelevant in his or her life. We rub shoulders with such people every day in the course of our ordinary activities. They may be friendly, courteous, and helpful to other people, but God is not at all in their thoughts. They may even attend church for an hour or so each week but then live the remainder of the week as if God doesn’t exist. They are not wicked people, but they are ungodly.
Now, the sad fact is that many of us who are believers tend to live our daily lives with little or no thought of God. We may even read our Bibles and pray for a few minutes at the beginning of each day, but then we go out into the day’s activities and basically live as though God doesn’t exist. We seldom think of our dependence on God or our responsibility to Him. We might go for hours with no thought of God at all. In that sense, we are hardly different from our nice, decent, but unbelieving neighbor. God is not at all in his thoughts and is seldom in ours.
One cannot carefully read the New Testament without recognizing how far short we come in living out a biblical standard of godliness. I referred above to our seldom thinking of our dependence on God. In that regard, consider these words from James:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” (4:13-15)
James does not condemn these people for making plans or even planning to set up a business and make a profit. What he condemns is their planning that does not acknowledge their dependence on God. We make plans all the time. In fact, we couldn’t live or accomplish the most mundane duties of life without some degree of planning. But so often we act like the people James addressed. We, too, make our plans without recognizing our utter dependence on God to carry them out. That is one expression of ungodliness.
In the same way, we seldom think of our accountability to God and our responsibility to live according to His moral will as revealed to us in Scripture. It’s not that we are living obviously sinful lives; it’s just that we seldom think about the will of God and, for the most part, are content to avoid obvious sins. Yet Paul wrote to the Colossian believers,
We have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. (1:9-10)
Notice how God-centered that prayer is. Paul wanted his hearers to be full of the knowledge of God’s will — that is, His moral will. He desired that they live lives worthy of God and fully pleasing to Him, and he prays to that end. That is God-centered praying. Paul wanted the Colossians to be godly people.
Remember, the Colossian believers were not super-Christians; they were ordinary folks like you and me, living ordinary lives in the midst of an ungodly culture far worse than ours today. Yet Paul expected them to live, and prayed that they would live, godly lives.
How does Paul’s prayer for the Colossians compare with our prayers for ourselves, our families, and our friends? Do our prayers reflect a concern for God’s will and God’s glory and a desire that our lives will be pleasing to God? Or are our prayers more of a do-list we present to God, asking Him to intervene in the various health and financial needs of family and friends. Now, it is not wrong to bring these temporal needs to God. In fact, that’s one way we can acknowledge our daily dependence on Him. But if that’s all we pray about, we are merely treating God as a “divine bellhop.” Our prayers are essentially human-centered, not God-centered, and in that sense we are ungodly to some degree.
For Paul, all of life is to be lived out in the presence of God with an eye to pleasing Him. For example, note how he instructed the slaves in the Colossian church (very likely a large part of the congregation) as to how to serve their masters in a godly fashion:
Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. (3:22-24)
His admonition to “work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (verse 23) provides us a principle by which we are to seek to live godly lives in the context of our vocations or professions. Yet how many believers seek to live by this principle in their daily lives? Do we not rather approach our vocations much like our unbelieving and ungodly coworkers who work purely for themselves, their promotions, and their pay raises, with no thought of pleasing God?
Or consider the Corinthian church, which, as we have already noted, was so messed up. Yet Paul wrote to them, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The all of that sentence includes every activity of our days. We are not only to eat to the glory of God, we are to drive to the glory of God, we are to shop to the glory of God, and we are to engage in our social relationships to the glory of God. Everything we do is to be done to the glory of God. That is the mark of a godly person.
What, then, does it mean to do all to the glory of God? It means that I eat and drive and shop and engage in my social relationships with a twofold goal. First, I desire that all that I do be pleasing to God. I want God to be pleased with the way I go about the ordinary activities of my day. So I pray prospectively over the day before me, asking that the Holy Spirit will so direct my thoughts, words, and actions that they will be pleasing to God.
Second, to do all to the glory of God means that I desire that all my activities of an ordinary day will honor God before other people. Jesus said, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). By contrast, Paul wrote to the self-righteous Jews in Rome, “You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law. For, as it is written, ‘The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you’” (Romans 2:23-24). Think of it this way: If everyone you interact with in the course of an ordinary day knows that you trust in Christ as Savior and Lord, would your words and actions glorify God before them? Or would you perhaps be like the father of whom one of his children said, “If God is like my father, I want nothing to do with God”?
Hopefully not many of us would be like the father whose harsh treatment of his children blasphemed God. But how far do we go in a positive direction to seek to glorify God before others? Do we consciously and prayerfully seek His glory in all we say and do in our most ordinary activities of the day? Or do we actually go about those activities with little or no thought of God?
An even more telling indicator of our tendency toward ungodliness is our meager desire to develop an intimate relationship with God. The psalmist wrote, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?” (42:1-2).
This is not an isolated text. In Psalm 63:1, David speaks of thirsting for God and earnestly seeking Him. In Psalm 27:4, he wants to dwell in the presence of the Lord so as to gaze upon His beauty. These are the desires of godly men of old. Yet few of us claim those desires as our own today. A person may be moral and upright, or even busy in Christian service, yet have little or no desire to develop an intimate relationship with God. This is a mark of ungodliness.
For the godly person, God is the center and focal point of his or her life. Every circumstance and every activity of life, whether in the temporal or spiritual realms, is viewed through the lens of this God-centeredness. However, such a God-centeredness can be developed only in the context of an ever-growing intimate relationship with God. No one can genuinely desire to please God or glorify Him apart from such a relationship.
If you have followed my reasoning this far, you can see that no Christian is totally godly, and to the extent we are not, there is still some degree of ungodliness in us. The question we should honestly and humbly ask is, How ungodly am I? How much of my life do I live without any regard for God? How much of my daily activities do I go through without any reference to God?
Total godliness and utter ungodliness are the opposite ends of a continuum. All of us are somewhere between those two extremes. The only person who ever lived a totally godly life was Jesus. And probably no true believer lives a totally ungodly life. But where are we on the spectrum? As you think about your own life, remember that we are not talking about righteous versus wicked behavior. We are talking about living all of life as if God is relevant or irrelevant. Survey after survey continues to inform us that there is little difference between the values and behavior patterns of Christians and non-Christians. Why is this true? Surely it reflects the fact that we live so much of our ordinary lives with little or no thought of God, or of how we might please and glorify Him. It’s not that we consciously or deliberately put God out of our minds. We just ignore Him. He is seldom in our thoughts.
I stated at the beginning of this chapter that I believe ungodliness is our most basic sin, even more basic than pride. Think how it would curb our pride, for example, if we consciously lived every day in the awareness that all we are, all we have, and all we accomplish is by the grace of God. My wife and I were lamenting over two otherwise nice, decent people who are living openly immoral lives and relishing it. And then I reminded my wife and myself that “there but for the grace of God go we.” Self-righteous pride, one of the more common of our acceptable sins, is a direct product of our ungodly thinking.
Sins of the tongue, such as gossip, sarcasm, and other unkind words to or about another person, cannot thrive in an awareness that God hears every word we speak. The reason we do sin with our tongues is due to the fact that we are to some degree ungodly. We don’t think of living every moment of our lives in the presence of an all-seeing, all-hearing God.
I believe that all our other acceptable sins can ultimately be traced to this root sin of ungodliness. To use a tree as an illustration, we can think of all our sins, big and small, growing out of the trunk of pride. But that which sustains the life of the tree is the root system, in this case the root of ungodliness. It is ungodliness that ultimately gives life to our more visible sins.
If ungodly habits of thinking, then, are so commonplace with us, how can we deal with this sin? How can we become more godly in our daily lives? Paul wrote to Timothy, “Train yourself for godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7). The word train comes from the athletic culture of that day and refers to the practice athletes went through daily to prepare themselves to compete in their athletic contests. It implies, among other things, commitment, consistency, and discipline in training.
Paul wanted Timothy, and all believers of every age, to be just as committed to growth in godliness, and just as intentional in pursuing it, as the athletes of that day who were competing for a temporal prize. But I suspect that most Christians seldom, if ever, think about how they can grow in godliness.
I could not help but contrast our anemic desire for godliness with the attitude of young men in our city who recently camped out all night in snow and cold at the entrance to a local electronics store. They wanted to be sure they would be able to buy one of a limited supply of a new video game system. One young man arrived at 9:30 Saturday morning to wait for the doors to open at 8 a.m. Sunday. Would any of us have that kind of zeal for godliness?
Our goal in the pursuit of godliness should be to grow more in our conscious awareness that every moment of our lives is lived in the presence of God; that we are responsible to Him and dependent on Him. This goal would include a growing desire to please Him and glorify Him in the most ordinary activities of life.
Of course, growth in godliness has to begin with the recognition that we need to grow in that most fundamental area of life. I hope I have made the case that all of us are to some degree ungodly, as we live our daily lives with little or no conscious regard for God. Again let me emphasize that you may be living a morally upright life and be a regular attendee at church but still be ungodly if God is seldom in your thoughts.
I realize mere words on a printed page will not convince anyone that he or she is guilty, to some degree, of ungodliness. For one thing, living one’s daily life without regard to God probably doesn’t seem like sin to many people. I can ask only that you prayerfully consider the message of this chapter and honestly ask yourself how much of your life is lived with little or no thought of God. What would you do differently in your various activities of the day if you were seeking to do all to the glory of God?
Because ungodliness is so all-encompassing, it will help to identify specific areas of life where you tend to live without regard to God. These might include your work, your hobbies, your playing or watching sports, and even your driving. Scripture texts that might be helpful to memorize, ponder, and pray over include 1 Timothy 4:7-8; 1 Corinthians 10:31; Colossians 1:9-10 and 3:23; as well as Psalm 42:1-2; 63:1; and 27:4.
Above all, pray that God will make you more conscious of the fact that you live every moment of every day under His all-seeing eye. While you may not be mindful of Him, He is certainly aware of you and sees every deed you do, hears every word you say, and knows every thought you think (see Psalm 139:1-4). Beyond that, He even searches out your motives. Let us then seek to be as mindful of Him as He is of us.