Be Good

Good afternoon, everyone! Happy Sabbath! Looks like summer must be coming to an end, because everyone's here at the same time again. I'm used to seeing everyone, but not everyone at the same time. I guess that includes me and my family as well, as we've been on the go a bit this summer.

So my topic for today is, be good. Simple as that. One of the things, some of you know I lived overseas for a while with my family. We sometimes take for granted little cultural things that go on, one of which is the American tendency to always say, how are you doing? And when you say it, to not really want the answer. Because what's the answer we really want to hear? We ask someone, hey, how's it going?

Good, good, going good. And sometimes you run across people in other cultures, and you ask them how they're doing, and they actually start to tell you. And that conversation can go on for quite a long time, because they grew up in a different culture, in a situation where if you ask someone how they're doing, they actually want to know.

And they're actually going to spend some time telling you. I had some funny encounters when I lived in Poland, and some of the folks there would kind of ask for little cultural lessons and get them. And that was one of the big ones. I can think of one specific guy, and whenever I'd see him, I'd say, how you doing? He'd have this big smile on his face and goes, I am doing good. And that was his joke of saying, I get what it's like to be an American.

You just want to hear a quick, yeah, everything's good, and move on. Have you ever thought about what good really means? You ever run across some scriptures where you see things like that, and you wonder what they really mean? Turn with me to Galatians 5. I've actually wondered for quite a long time about this passage, because the word good, or in this case, goodness, shows up. And it's always kind of caused me pause for a minute to say, what does this mean? Because we use the word, we throw it around so much. I don't know about you, but for me, the idea of something being good feels almost like a bit of a throwaway line.

Galatians 5 is where we'll look. We're aware that the fruit of the Spirit is talked about in Galatians 5, 22 and 23. Starting in verse 22, we read, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, all concrete things that we can really wrap our arms around. Then the next one comes along, goodness. Why is goodness there as a fruit of the Spirit, and what in the world is it? It feels kind of ethereal, doesn't it? And it seems, it kind of feels like a bland word because of the way that we use it in our everyday life.

What is it about goodness that elevates it to be a fruit of the Spirit, and what does it really mean? I sit on the chair in my living room sometimes, and it seems like as soon as I sit down, I've got my black cat that looks like a miniature panther, and it comes sauntering over and it jumps on my lap.

And I say, Phantom, you're a good cat. He's good. Is that what we're supposed to be? If we have children, we tell our children to be good. We might go out to eat and say our meal was good. We might say that we like ice cream because it's really good. Or a long talk with a close friend is good. But what is good? If we simply instruct our children to be good, what do we expect them to do?

If God tells us that we're supposed to have goodness, what is it that he really wants us to do? That's what I'd like to spend a few minutes exploring in the short time that we have here today. We'll go through it in three different parts. First of all, talk about what is the nature of goodness. Let's talk about the nature of goodness in terms of how it's used in the Bible.

Secondly, what's the source of that goodness? And then thirdly, we'll talk briefly about the process of developing goodness once we know what it actually is. So let's start with the nature of goodness. And we'll start in that context in Matthew 7. If you want to turn there, Matthew 7 starting in verse 15.

This passage, of course, the New Testament is written in Greek, and there are different words in Greek that are used for the concept of good. This passage is interesting because it uses two different ones. We'll start in verse 15 of Matthew 7. We read here that Jesus says, So in this passage, Matthew 7.17, where it says every good tree bears good fruit, there are actually two source words being used in Greek for these two concepts that mean slightly different things.

I don't want to go too deep into this and bore everyone with other languages, but the word good when it's describing a good tree is a Greek word, agathos. And this points to the actual quality of the noun, in this case tree, that it's describing. The actual quality of it, whether it's morally good, it's beneficial, it's genuinely valuable.

So in this context of a good tree, a good tree is inherently valuable in this context because of the fruit that it can produce. And so this first word, agathos, it's used for good, has to do with the quality of the item that's producing, what that quality is. The second word here describing good fruit is a different Greek word, kalos, k-a-l-o-s. And this word points to the attributes of the fruit itself, what's being produced.

And it could be something that is fine, that's admirable, that's noble, that's commendable. So it's what becomes evident in what's being produced. So the first concept, agathos, is what is producing, the qualities of the thing that is producing. And the second one is more of an objective description of what's produced.

That's a good apple. How do I know it's a good apple? It's round, it's the right size, it's red, it crunches when I bite into it. That's the second concept of goodness. It has less to do with what the intrinsic value is of something and more that it looks right, it looks good, it's noble.

It has the qualities externally that we're looking for. You know, when I think about this, I go back to my experience growing up.

You know, are there crab apples in Ohio? Yes? Okay. I haven't heard crab apples talked about much in Ohio. I grew up, as most of you know, in Minneapolis and Minnesota. And growing up in Minnesota, it seemed like there were crab apples everywhere. And we had a crab apple tree in our backyard. And for those of you who are crab apple aficionados, there are probably not very many of them. If you are, I'd like to talk with you after church. There's a cure for that. But we had a crab apple tree in our backyard, and in the springtime, it would just bloom. And it would have, as I remember it, it had these sort of lightish purple, I'm not real good describing colors, like a dark rose color, light purple sort of a blossom. And they were just gorgeous. And this tree would just be filled with these blossoms. And I remember people coming over to our house when that would happen. They'd come over after services or something. We'd be sitting outside in the springtime eating, and this big crab apple tree would be there. And they'd look up and they'd say, that is a gorgeous crab apple tree. I'll bet you get the best crab apples off that tree. What do you do with it? Do you make jelly? Do you make jams? Do you bake pies? What do you do with all those fantastic crab apples? Well, a few months later, the blossoms would be gone, and the fruit would begin to grow. And people would still make the same sort of comments as you'd see the crab apples grow. Wait a few more weeks, and what did we do with the crab apples? They were these tiny, tiny little crab apples, maybe a quarter inch in diameter. They had these wormholes in them sometimes. They'd have these brown spots on them. My neighbor friends and I would pick them, and we would throw them at each other. And my dad, being the safety engineer that he was, would come out of the house saying, Stop that! Somebody could put an eye out. Words to live by. But those crab apples, it was not the kind of tree that was going to generate anything other than this tiny, sour fruit that was theoretically edible. But the fact is, if you tried to eat it, if you tried to do anything with it, I suppose you could put it into a pie. You'd have to dump probably, I don't know, a gallon of sugar in there with it to make it taste decent. They just weren't usable. But you wouldn't know that at first from looking at the tree. It was there in the backyard, gorgeous blooms. Early on, as it was producing, the fruit was starting to grow, and you wouldn't really be able to tell the difference of what it was going to produce. And ironically, we would walk over in the summer to some friends two blocks away who had an actual good, fruit-bearing crab apple tree, and we'd go there in the late summer, early fall, and we'd pick crab apples over there. So even though we had a tree in our backyard, it was a flowering crab, nasty fruit, and couldn't really use it. So that's an example of what we're reading here about good fruit and good tree. The quality of the tree, what it is, determines the fruit that it's going to put out. The fruit and what it looks like is a separate thing. You know, Fortune Magazine wrote an interesting article in September of 2025 talking about what happens to all the different produce that we harvest in the U.S. If you had to guess what percentage of fruit and vegetables produced in the U.S., do you think never leave the farm because they don't look right?

20% or less? Okay, between 20 and 50%? More than 50%. All right. The number according to this Fortune article is 30%. They say that 30% of fruit and vegetables grown by hardworking farmers never leave the field, primarily because it does not meet appearance standards like size, shape, or color. More than 36 billion pounds of surplus produce went unharvested or unsold on U.S. farms in 2023. 36 billion pounds, not even harvested, representing an estimated economic loss of about 13 billion dollars. And it says, consider strawberries alone. 400 million pounds of strawberries are plowed under or left behind annually because they don't have the right appearance. They don't look right. And consumers these days, you don't want to go to the store, you buy a basket of strawberries, and they're small. Still taste the same, still the same qualities, but they externally don't look the same. And what has been found about consumers, at least here in the U.S., and I think there are similar results in other parts of the world, probably, too, is that the produce that doesn't look right just doesn't get purchased. So rather than expending all the cost of harvesting it and transporting it and all the rest, they just plow it back under the ground because nobody wants it. It just doesn't quite look right. So let's go back to where we started, Galatians 5, the idea of goodness. Goodness, the word in Greek is agathos, the inner quality or the nature of the thing that's producing. In this analogy of a tree, it's the nature of the tree. For us as Christians with the fruit of the spirit, it's us. What is our inner quality? And that's what goodness is referring to in this passage. It's talking about what's within us. And again, if I liken it to a tree, you consider a tree that's an apple tree.

It's inner quality. What it is, that Greek word agathos, is a tree that produces apples. We can do whatever we want to do to the tree, short of, I know you can you can graft other branches onto it, so we'll ignore that for a moment. Short of that, you can fertilize the tree, you can water the tree, you can prune the tree. What's it going to do? It will continue to produce apples because it's an apple tree. It's simply what it does. It's what's wired into it. It's its inner quality.

And that external fruit is what it's going to produce. Turn with me, if you will, to Matthew 12.

Matthew 12. We'll see a similar kind of a concept that's brought out as Jesus talks with the Pharisees. Again, talking about trees and fruit and good. Matthew 12 verse 33. Here Jesus says, either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for a tree is known by its fruit. And speaking of the Pharisees, he says, brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. A good man, out of the good treasure of his heart, brings forth good things. And an evil man, out of the evil treasure, brings forth evil things. But I say to you that for every idle word that men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned. Now that word good, that's used three different times in verse 35, a good man, out of the good treasure of his heart, brings forth good things, is that same word, agathos, that's used in Galatians 5. Again, talking about that inner quality, what's being displayed in this passage, is the idea, not of what somebody does at one point in time, but when he says in verse 36, every idle word that men speak, they'll give account of it. You think about what are the, what's the nature of idle words? It's things that we say when we're not really thinking about it.

And if you're like me, you've gotten into a situation at some point in time when you're just kind of talking, you're just sort of blabbering, and you're just saying things, you're not really thinking about it, and it gets you in trouble. Whether you're talking about something, you're talking about someone, or you're making a comment that's judgmental about something, and maybe somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, what in the world are you saying?

And it's by those idle words, the ones that we don't think about, that exposes what it is that's actually inside of us and what we really think. Because when we're thinking, we're often careful. We filter things. That's the other thing that we say sometimes, right? Take the filter off, as people get in a different state of mind, they often take off the filter. If they've been drinking, if they've not been sleeping enough, if there are other things going on. Those idle words that come out. So what's being brought out in this verse is that ultimately, the things that we say, and some of the things that we do when we're not always being conscious of it, will eventually show the qualities that are inside of us. Whether those qualities are qualities of goodness or not.

You know, there's a lot of practical applications of this in life. You know, group dynamics work a lot this way. How many of you have ever worked in a group, lived in a dormitory with a group of people, any situation like that, work where you have a group dynamics you have to deal with? Anyone who went to elementary school and a public school? So you think about that process, and I can think, for example, I've gone to a lot of different training programs at work. When I first started work, we had to go to a one-week training program. Everyone stayed at the same hotel, and we were together every day. And I can still remember what the trainer said on day one. Everyone's excited. You're doing team building activities, and you're meeting these people who are kind of interesting and quirky and different in sort of, you know, different kind of ways. And I still remember the team leader getting up on the first day and say, you know, this is the typical rhythm of a team. Get used to it because you're going to deal with this all the time at work. You know, you get really excited the first day or two that you're with a team. The second and third day starts to become more of a drag because the things that you thought were kind of interesting and fun are actually just plain annoying. And then you start to really learn what people are like.

And that's another demonstration of this whole thing. The idea in life, you know, we see that. It takes time for what it is that's within a person to come out and to express itself. Because in the short term, we can put on a good face. We can act the way that we want to act. But over the longer course of time, the things that we say, the way that we act, the way that we treat people comes out and it begins to reveal what it is that's really inside of it. A lot of applicability in marriage as well. That's why always we recommend to people get to know somebody if you're going to marry them. Spend time with them because it's only through spending that time with somebody over the course of days, weeks, months, even years, that you can really understand what they're about, what they are inwardly, and not just something that they might be able to put on or do for short periods of time. So just like that crab apple tree in my backyard, just like people sometimes, things can look promising. If it's a tree, they can look really promising in the springtime. Everything looks great when that tree blooms, when it looks like some great fruit is going to come out. You don't know yet exactly what that fruit is going to be. But over the course of the season, it becomes clear. It becomes plain exactly what it is. So turn with me, if you will, to James 3, verse 12 as we wrap up this first section about, you know, what goodness really is.

And we'll see James here goes right back to the same analogy of a tree. It shows up a lot of different times in the Bible. James 3 and verse 12. James 3 verse 12. Here we read, Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh. And so here he's talking again about the qualities that we need to develop within ourselves. If we want to develop good fruit, if we want to do good things, it starts within ourselves that we have to develop different qualities within ourselves. So Matthew 7, as we compare it to the fruit of goodness that we see in Galatians 5, helps us to understand that the goodness that Paul speaks of is not generally just be a nice person and do good things. There's a lot more meant by that concept of goodness. It's the fruit or the outcome of God's Spirit that makes a change in our very inward nature. It's like taking that flowering crabapple tree that was in my backyard as a kid and actually changing it into a tree that can produce sweet cherries, if you like cherries, or any other sort of fruit. There's a change that happens within us because of the Holy Spirit that enables us to do things that are very different than what we can produce as human beings. So, secondly, what is the source of goodness? What is the source of goodness?

For this, let's turn to the story of the rich young ruler. I'd originally put this in my notes as the parable of the rich young ruler, and I was looking it up. I was corrected online by a search engine that it's not actually a parable. It's an actual story because the rich young ruler was an actual person that came up to Jesus Christ. It wasn't a story that he was telling about a fictitious situation. Mark 10, we'll start in verse 17, the story of the rich young ruler. This one might be familiar to you. Mark 10 verse 17, as Jesus was going out on the road, one came running, knelt before him, and asked him, Good teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? This is someone who recognized Jesus and wanted to know what he should do. So Jesus said to him, Why do you call me good?

No one is good but one, and that is God. You know the commandments. Don't commit adultery. Don't murder. Don't steal. Don't bear false witness. Do not defraud.

Honor your father and your mother. And he answered and said to him, Teacher, all these things I've kept from my youth. And then Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, One thing you lack. Go your way. Sell whatever you have, and give to the poor, and you'll have treasure in heaven. And come, take up the cross, and follow me.

But the young man was sad at this word, and he went away sorrowful, because he had great possessions.

Now there's a lot being said here. We could give a whole sermon just on this short passage, which we're not going to focus on today. But verses 17 and 18 here, again, use that same word for good.

Agathos. Talking about that inner quality, that quality inside.

Good teacher. Why do you call me good? No one is good but one.

So what is it that's being said here? If you actually went through the scriptures and read, you would find that scripture actually does use this word, agathos, to describe Jesus Christ.

It uses that word, agathos, to describe humans. And it uses the word, agathos, even to describe things or actions. So the point of what Jesus Christ was saying was not, there's only one person that you can say or one being that you can say is good, and that's God. He was making a bigger point here in what he was saying. There's a larger thing that's going on here. So a young man comes, and he attributes goodness to Jesus Christ, calling him a good teacher. And Jesus Christ is essentially going back to him and saying, you want to talk about good? You don't even understand.

Let's understand, let's drive home a lesson about what it means to be good, what it means to have that inner quality. He first talks about the fact it's a quality that only God has. And then when he has the exchange with the young man about keeping the commandments, he comes back to him and says, even those things, refraining from those things, not murdering someone, not stealing something, is not of itself goodness. And what is it that he hones in on at the end of this section? He hones in on the fact that, in this case, this young man was unwilling to sacrifice the great goods that he had in order to follow Jesus Christ. That was an inner quality. It went well beyond just the things that he was doing as his actions. And whatever it was that Jesus Christ knew about him or perceived about him, he was able to take him down that road and hone in on that specific item. If we take this back again to this analogy or example of a fruit tree and think about that context, we can't prove what a tree is like by the things it does not grow.

So if I want to prove that something's an apple tree, I can't say, I know that it's an apple tree because it doesn't grow figs. It doesn't work, does it? Because it could grow any number of other things. It could grow grapefruits. And it's still not an apple tree. The only way that we can know for certain what the tree is, what its inner qualities are, is by what it produces. And that takes time. It takes the seasons. And so the goal here that's being talked about, and he goes through these scriptures about how man relates to mankind. And he says, yeah, you could do those things. You can walk in and you say, you know, guess what? I didn't steal anything today. I am a righteous person. Would any of us believe that that's a measure of a righteous person? I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but I would venture that no one here killed anyone today, murdered anyone today. That is, yes, that is a necessary outgrowth of the way that we live our lives, but that by itself doesn't define the fact that we have a righteous heart. There are many people who go through every day without murdering anyone or without stealing from anyone. So the goal here that's being talked about is that we have to take on the heart of God himself.

God is good. We need to be like him. We have to develop his heart within ourselves, and then the expression of that heart is the thing that drives out from us. For the rich, rich young ruler, this had to do with how he dealt with his things, how he trusted in the material possessions that he had. And again, Jesus Christ saw something within him that demonstrated the fact that he trusted in those things and was not going to be willing to give those things up in priority compared to God.

Turn with me, if you will, to 2 Corinthians 3. I think we all know the goal of our lives is to be conformed to the goodness of God, to have his life living within us through his Holy Spirit. And clearly, it's not something we can do perfectly as human beings, but that's something we're to strive for, to continue to focus ourselves on every day as we're moving to be more like him.

2 Corinthians 3, one passage that demonstrates this.

2 Corinthians 3, verse 18, this is from the New Living Translation. So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord, and the Lord, who is a spirit, makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image. That's the piece I want to focus on here, as we are changed into his glorious image. Because that's the goal of our spiritual lives. That's goodness developing within us, as we are changing to his image. God is good. Goodness is a quality of his, and we're to build that quality within ourselves. So as we wrap up this second section, talking about the source of goodness, the source of goodness is God himself.

The only way we can be morally upright people to have goodness is to have God's Spirit living within us so that our nature, over the course of time, increasingly reflects him. It's not forcing ourselves to do good things, but rather allowing our inner selves to be changed to reflect the goodness that's his nature. And that does result in producing good things in our lives. I think of it in that analogy of a tree. We can't take an old tree and just keep fertilizing it and pruning it and trying to make it nice and think it's going to produce something other than what it is. If we want a tree that produces cherries, we can't start with an apple tree and cultivate it the best we can. We actually have to replace it with a cherry tree. And that's what God's doing with us. He calls us as human beings. He gives us his Spirit, and he develops within us something that's different than our human nature. And as we begin to develop his nature, his goodness within us, we then begin to reflect what he is as a God and the things that we do. Not only evidenced by the things we stop doing and that we don't do, but evidenced by the things that we do actively on an everyday basis. So let's talk briefly here before we wrap up about the process of developing goodness. The process of developing goodness. We've seen it's a spiritual attribute. It's reflecting the nature of God himself. It happens through his Spirit, through Jesus Christ living within us. How many of you have heard the term fake it till you make it?

It's one that I heard at work quite a lot. I know of entire companies that are built on that model, which is we know everything. So ask me a question. If I don't know the question, I'll stay up all night. I'll learn everything I can about it, and tomorrow morning I'm going to know more about it than you do. Fake it till you make it. A lot of people go that way. They try to simply put themselves forward as knowing all kinds of different things. Scramble in the background if they need to in order to figure out what it is, and just try to stay one step ahead of everybody else. That might be a good recipe in certain avenues of life. It's not one that I recommend. I think it's probably a pretty stressful way to live to try to stay a step ahead before people figure out you don't really know what you're talking about. Not really the way I want to live my life. And it's certainly not the way that we can live our spiritual lives. We can't fake it till we make it with God. Let's turn to 2 Timothy 3. We read this passage last week, so I'm not going to rehash what Mr. Boucher talked about in his great sermon that he gave. Let's look at this passage again, 2 Timothy 3 verses 1 through 9. Just pull a couple things out in this context of the process of developing goodness. 2 Timothy 3 verse 1. Paul writing in Timothy says, Know this in the last days perilous times will come and men will be lovers of themselves. Lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanders, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God. Not a lot of good things being displayed there. Definitely not goodness. Having a form of godliness, but denying its power. And from such people turn away. For this sort are those who creep into households, make captives of gullible women, loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

And then, as we heard last week, this interesting phrase is thrown in as Janice and Jambres resisted Moses. So do these also resist the truth? Men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith. They will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.

Now, based on context and some of the things written in here, as difficult as it is to talk about it, this was written to people in and associating with the church. These qualities are not fantastic, but this was written at that time about people who were influencing and dealing with people who were in the church. And that's something we have to think about as we examine our own lives, what's inside of us, and what we're doing. It describes people who show signs of recognizing God's way but haven't let it transform them inwardly. Look at a couple of these phrases that are used. Verse 5, handling a form of godliness but denying its power.

Verse 7, always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. It's a bit of that sort of fake-it-till-you-make-it vibe going on here in this passage, and this idea that there would be people, there were at that time as well, who were living their lives in that way.

Now, when it refers to the sorcerers of Egypt, as we heard last week, Janus and Jamboree, is not mentioned in the Bible but understood generally by the audiences being the sorcerers of Egypt at the time of Moses and Aaron. There were three instances, you might remember, where the sorcerers of Egypt were actually able to replicate the miracles that Moses and Aaron did in the name of God. If you want to turn there later, the first one is Exodus 7, 10 through 12, where after Aaron's staff became a serpent, the Egyptian sorcerers were able to imitate that miracle. It's a nice turn of story there where Aaron's snake goes ahead and devours theirs, which I think is a great touch, but they were able to do the same thing that he was in terms of turning the rod into the snake. In Exodus 7, 20 through 22, Aaron's rod is used to turn the Nile to blood, and it tells that the magicians imitate that as well. In Exodus 8 verses 6 and 7, the magicians also imitate the plague of frogs. So this reference of these magicians is not accidental here. It's talking about the fact that, again, if you take the idea of trees and fruit, you can fake it for a while. The sorcerers faked it for a while. They had Pharaoh convinced that what Moses and Aaron were doing wasn't all that special because it was a trick that they could do themselves. And then when they get to Exodus 8 verses 16 through 19, interestingly enough, the plague of gnats was not one that they were able to copy. And they said at the end of that section, Exodus 8 verses 19, this is the finger of God.

So they finally had to throw in the towel after three times being able to replicate, actually, what it was. Now how they did it, I don't know, was it simply slight of hand, was it sorcery, we don't know and we're not told, but it's clearly mentioned here as well by Paul that that's what they did. So when you think about it, the fact is that there's only one way in the long run to generate good fruit, and that is by that quality of goodness within yourself. And that's what's ultimately being talked about. And that's why as Christians we have to continue to commit ourselves to that process of transformation. Turn with me, if you will, to Romans 12. If we wrap up this thought.

Romans 12. We're very familiar, I think, with Romans 12. 1.

Verse 2 is where I really want to focus on in this verse.

Romans 12. 1, Paul tells the Romans, I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And in verse 2, do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you can prove what that good and acceptable and perfect will of God is.

That's what the goal is. When you think about this idea of goodness that's written about in Galatians 5, it comes only and can only come by the renewing of our minds by the Holy Spirit.

The only way that God's viewpoint, his qualities, can live within us is through the Holy Spirit. We have to be constantly focused on taking that into ourselves and transforming from the inside what it is that we are. It's easy sometimes to focus on the things that we need to do. I need to be nicer to this person. I need to, you know, spend more time doing this. I need to make sure I'm doing that. But at the end of the day, what we need to do is we need to make the change within ourselves so that God's Spirit and what he is is living itself out and expressing ourselves in everything we do, whether it's the things that we think about or whether it's the idle words or the things that just kind of happen as we go through life. 2nd Peter 3, we'll look through this as our last scripture because this also has very much to do with the Holy Days that we're coming up to as we think of the manner of people that God wants us to be. 2nd Peter 3, talking here about the day of the Lord. 2nd Peter 3 verse 10, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. Therefore, since all of these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holiness, or holy conduct and godliness? That's the focus. Even as we're thinking about the things that are going to happen in the future, Peter brings us back to this idea that's not just about looking forward to the things that are going to happen, but considering what it is that needs to happen in our lives as we're developing that goodness of God in our lives through connection to Him.

That's what the keeping of these holy days and looking forward to the times to come is supposed to work within us. So the way we develop the spiritual fruit of goodness in our lives is through dedication to the spiritual process of transformation, constantly turning back to God and repentance, in humility, so we can grow to be more like Him through every experience we have in life, whether it's our observance of the Sabbath and Holy Days, whether it's our successes in life, whether it's our trials in life. That all of those things can continue to drive that inner change and transformation within us. So as we conclude, today we explore the topic of goodness.

What is goodness? The nature of goodness. Goodness is what we are. It's what we are. It's the changed heart that results from God's Spirit transforming us, like turning a flowering crabapple tree with sour unusable fruit into a cherry tree that produces sweet and tasty fruit. The source of goodness is God. The ultimate demonstration of our goodness is not in the things that we don't do, but rather in our growth in placing Him and His will first in our lives and how that drives a completely different way of being, which includes things that we do. And lastly, in terms of the process of developing goodness, we have to remain committed to the life of transformation that we started at baptism. As we look towards these upcoming Holy Days and everything that's going to happen, both to put an end to the physical world that we're in and to deliver a reward to God's people and ultimately all of humanity, it should serve as another motivator for us to continue to transform and to seek God's goodness. So, in conclusion, be good!