“I’m a pretty good person.”
I hear some version of that sentence a lot. It usually comes up when the conversation turns toward God. It’s not said with arrogance. Most of the time it’s said with a kind of hopeful shrug: I’m not perfect, but I’m not a bad guy. I pay my bills. I love my kids. I’m better than a lot of people.
And maybe that’s true. So let’s take the question seriously. Am I a good person? Christianity gives an answer most people don’t expect, and it hinges on a single question: good compared to what?
Good compared to whom?
When we call ourselves good, we’re almost always grading on a curve. We picture someone worse than us: the guy who cheats on his wife, the coworker who steals, the person on the news. Next to them, we look fine.
But you can always find someone worse. You can also find someone better. The curve moves depending on who you stand next to. That’s not a standard. It’s a comparison.
In the book I put it this way:
“The standard isn’t other people. The standard is the original design.”
A mechanic doesn’t judge your car by comparing it to the rusted-out one in the next bay. He judges it by what the car was built to do. Does the engine run the way it was designed to? Do the brakes stop the way they’re supposed to? If not, it’s got a problem, no matter how much worse the car next to it looks.
What the real standard looks like
God’s design for people isn’t mysterious. Jesus summed it up: love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–39).
Try measuring yourself against that. Not against your neighbor, but against the design. Have you loved God with all your heart, all the time? Have you loved the people around you as much as you love yourself? The ones who annoy you? The ones who hurt you?
When you ask it that way, “pretty good” starts to feel thin. The Bible says it plainly: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Everyone. Even Jesus, when someone called him “Good Teacher,” answered, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18).
Other fault codes we like to clear
“I’m a pretty good person” is one of several sentences people use to clear the warning light without fixing anything. You might recognize a few:
- “At least I’m not as bad as…” That’s the curve again.
- “My good outweighs my bad.” This treats life like a scale. But a car with brand-new tires and failed brakes still isn’t safe to drive. Good parts don’t cancel out a broken one.
- “I never hurt anybody.” Most of us have hurt more people than we know, often the ones closest to us. And the first half of the standard, loving God, doesn’t even come into it.
- “God knows my heart.” He does. That’s exactly the problem. The Bible calls the human heart “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9).
None of these are evil things to say. They’re just ways of looking away from the readout.
Why this is actually good news
This is the part people miss. If Christianity just said, “You’re not good enough, try harder,” that would be crushing. Nobody could live with that.
But that’s not what it says. It says: you’re not good enough, and you were never going to be. So God did something about it.
When we pull up a vehicle’s history at The Garage and see problem after problem, we don’t throw the car away. We go to work. A long list of fault codes isn’t a reason to give up. It’s the reason for the repair.
Jesus told a story about two men praying (Luke 18:9–14). One was religious and proud of it. He thanked God he wasn’t like other people. The other was a tax collector, a man everyone knew had done wrong. He wouldn’t even look up. He just said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Jesus said the second man went home right with God. Not the first.
The man who thought he was pretty good left with nothing. The man who admitted he wasn’t left forgiven.
That’s the surprising logic of the Christian faith. The people who get help are the ones who stop pretending they don’t need it.
A different question to ask
So instead of “Am I a good person?”, try asking something more honest:
- What standard have I been using? Write down who you usually compare yourself to.
- What happens when I use the original design instead? Read Matthew 22:37–39 and hold your last week up to it.
- What would it mean to say the tax collector’s prayer and mean it? Seven words. You can pray them today.
You don’t have to clean yourself up first. That’s the whole point. Grace comes to people who have fault codes a mile long.
If this is the first time you’ve thought about any of this, Under the Hood was written for you. It’s short, it assumes no church background, and it explains the whole story in plain language, starting with the problem and ending with what God has done about it. And if you’d like a simple next step for talking to God, Living the Lord’s Prayer walks through the prayer Jesus taught his friends.