I once knew a man who would end every conversation with the words “Be good.” At first, I found this odd. After all, “Be good” is what a mother might say to her child as she sends that child off the first day of school or to summer camp; it’s not usually what friends and coworkers say to each other at the end of a phone call or after a visit in the aisle of a grocery store. For him, though, it filled the place that “Aloha” would in Hawaii or “Come see us” would in my hometown—a kind way to signal well wishes at the end of a talk. Most of us don’t say “Be good” to acquaintances in any context, though, in some sense, that’s exactly what we expect and hope. We want the people around us to be faithful, responsible, and honest. When you think of your own flaws, you may well find a way to justify them or to contextualize them or even ignore them. But I would almost guarantee that none of you ever started down a wrong path in life by saying to yourself, “I am setting out on a journey to vice.” In some sense, we all want to pursue goodness, but often we have no idea how to do so. And sometimes, we are confused about what “good” even means.
That’s not just a problem for us with our behavior. For those of us who are Christians, it’s also often an internal skirmish when it comes to what some people call the “spiritual disciplines.” For lots of us, prayer and contemplation and Bible reading are hard. We find our attention distracted or the clocks whirling by with activities, and we wonder, “How do other people do this with such ease? What’s wrong with me?” We add to that our lives together in churches. Some people wonder, “Am I really a good church member since I just don’t know how to get to know people, much less what gifts I would have with which to serve?”
This book by Alex Sosler is not a guilt-inducing to-do list from a guru or a “life coach.” Instead, this book helps us to think through just what’s in the way of our pursuit of virtue—or, better, of Christlikeness. The book doesn’t hit us with abstractions but with specific, concrete counsel on how to recognize and to pursue truth, goodness, beauty, and community. You will not leave this short book burdened down with a sense of all the things you can’t ever seem to do. You’ll instead start to see the possibility of how you, in your own life, can seek holiness and formation. The book neither leaves us with an exhausting and counter-gospel legalism nor with an exhausting and counter-gospel sloth. The author knows that we don’t ascend the ladder to God by performing better with our prayers or our works. God has come to us, and the Ladder has a name, Jesus of Nazareth. The sort of obedience we seek starts with freedom, not with indebtedness.
Be good.
Russell Moore