Let me preface what I want to say here: Please don’t hear me wrong, the world is not full of gray. There is good and evil, and right and wrong. You are either in Christ and destined for heaven, or you are a child of Satan headed to hell.

However, sometimes black and white thinking can hinder us. I recently heard someone say they “want to put all the good people on one side, and bad people on the other”, meaning they want to split the world into those who are “all good” or “all bad”. I do realize that we are either saved or lost, and that’s pretty black and white. And we should also strive to be around a “good company” of believers. But even when you’re saved, if you believe that some people are “all good” because they are saved and can’t possibly do anything wrong, you will be easily let down when they fail you. So if we see people as either “all good” or “all bad”, we will inevitably become jaded when the people we think are supposed to be good commit a sin. Then we throw them away into our ever growing pile of “all bad” people who can’t possibly do anything good. Eventually you will get disillusioned when no one seems to meet your expectation of being “all good”. The truth is that all of us are sinners which is bad even though we’ve been created in God’s image which is good. So we have this good and bad dichotomy that we must resolve. In Christ, you may be positionally “good” in God’s standing, but you still retain your sin nature (bad). On the other hand if you don’t know Christ, you are not righteous in God’s eyes (bad) even though you are created in God’s image (good). No matter who you are, you must face this dichotomy of good and bad in every single person.

So get over it, there are no flawless people. By the way, this isn’t my own thinking. I have the author of Hiding From Love, John Townsend to thank for all the things I’ve learned about myself in relation to God and others.