Why Is It So Hard to Be Good?

Growing up in the church, I encountered an interesting version of a saint. The saint was an elderly woman in my church, apparently revered by the adults in the congregation but, frankly, terrifying to most of us kids. Occasionally, when she took issue with something the pastor said, she would practically shout, “That’s a bunch of bull!”, stand up from her pew and stomp out of the sanctuary. I was never quite sure what to make of this. Here was a “saint” of the church who was not only in disagreement with our dear Pastor, but was willing to make a scene over it.

I can think of other examples of “saints” of the church - those held up as “Pillars of the Church” that abused their children, gossiped incessantly and were downright mean to others in the congregation. I remember marriages of the “faithful” that ended in infidelity and divorce. It may be tempting to say these individuals were never truly saved, but this is just an easy out. These were good people who loved Christ but didn’t always do the “good”. For me the moral of the story was “It must be hard to be consistently good” because everywhere I looked, folks were struggling.

The point is that, for many believers, being good and growing in grace is an ongoing and difficult process. We may attend church and engage in daily spiritual disciplines but we resonate with the Apostle Paul’s lament “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing” (Romans 7: 19, TNIV). Paul continues in verse 20, “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” But why is this sin still living in me? I have been forgiven but I am not yet free from the power of sin to continue to impact me and lead me in ways I do not want to go.

As a professional clinical psychologist, I came face-to-face with amazing breakthroughs in brain research and developmental psychology that helped me understand why it was so hard to be consistently good. Brain research presents two primary modes of memory. The first called “declarative” is the memory that we are most familiar with. If I ask you what your phone number is or to describe your childhood home, that is declarative memory. It is a kind of “what” memory. The second kind of memory is “procedural memory” which is the “how to” of memory. Take riding a bike for example. Teaching someone to ride a bike by explaining (declaring) it to them in words pales in comparison to running alongside them while they wobble along and begin to record that experience in their procedural memory. The bicyclist can feel it in their body, in their muscles and their bones even if they can’t really declare how it all works together. (Try to describe balance to someone sometime!) It becomes automatic to the point that we don’t even have to think about it while doing it.

It turns out that much of our daily experience is lived out via procedural memory. We not only have “how-to” memories of riding a bike but also how to be in relationships with one another. We learn these patterns early through thousands of interactions as children about how to treat others and how to expect to be treated. Because we grow up in a fallen world, many of these interactions are sinful in some way. We literally record and file away sinful ways of being in the world and being in relationships. We learn selfish ways of being, we learn self-protective ways of being, and we learn all manner of ways of being that may indeed be sinful as they hurt God, others, and ourselves. And here is the tricky thing: even though we confess our sins, and even though Christ indeed does pardon us from the penalty of those sins, their power to influence us may continue in large part because we are not fully aware of them. Remember the old saying “You never forget. It’s just like riding a bike”? This holds true for our relational procedural memories.

Let’s be perfectly clear: it’s not that these confessed sins are unforgiven - praise God they are! But these sins can still “reappear” like uninvited guests, and subsequently we continue to act in the same sinful ways. In addition, because some of these “sins” are a kind of procedural memory that we engage in automatically, we may not even understand them as sins. I believe this is why it’s so difficult to consistently be good. We’ve been forgiven, but the power of these sins continues to linger.

So what’s the answer? If our procedural memories are shaped by experiences we have with others, and if some of these memories are shaped in such a way that they are catalysts to sin in our lives - then to shape new holy procedural memories we need to have new experiences with holy others. This was the genius behind John Wesley’s small groups. In these small groups, individuals were not only expected to share about the specific sins that they were struggling with but also to be told about the sins others were witnessing in them. Finally, they had the chance to engage in new behaviors of love with others in (and outside) their groups. New procedural memories of love began to overrule old procedural memories of sin. Wesley referred to this process as “holy dispositions of love ruling” and in several places this is how he in fact defined sanctification.

So what does this have to do with us? Randy Maddox, Wesleyan scholar at Duke Divinity School, has persuasively argued that many holiness traditions for a variety of reasons (too lengthy to discuss here), have emphasized means of grace that appeal to the intellect (e.g., preaching and Bible study; declarative procedure and memory). This emphasis has moved these groups away from Wesley’s relational means of grace such as class meetings, bands, select societies, etc. which would naturally aim not at declarative memory but procedural memory. And although many churches utilize small group ministries, many of these small groups omit important elements found in Wesley’s groups that could change procedural memory and slowly but surely help eradicate sinful procedures from our lives.

We need groups and relationships where we can confess the areas we struggle with in our lives. We need groups and relationships that can speak into our lives about sin that we don’t even see. This can be very difficult and anxiety-provoking work, but it’s the real work of discipleship. And it is the good news of the Gospel. For it is in and through the work of the Church, evidenced by relationships in the church, that we can truly become saints.

Brad D. Strawn is dean of the chapel and Vice President for Spiritual Development at Southern Nazarene University in Bethany Oklahoma.