Heartless?

This is a question that someone wrote to the KC star news paper. The questions are usually posted in the faith section on Saturdays and I thought I would take a shot at answering it.

Question: Is it true that some people are just heartless and can’t be changed?

Answer:
This is actually two questions. First is it true that some people are just heartless? Webster’s gives us the definition of heartless as: To be cruel or lacking feeling, and cruel is disposed to inflict pain. So the answer to the question is no, some people are not heartless, all are. All of us at one time or another has inflicted pain whether intentionally or unintentionally. We know that the opposite of cruelty is goodness as the Bible says in Romans 3:12 “All have turned away, together they have become useless; there is no one who does good, there is not even one.” This is not to say that humans can not do good, at least from a human perspective, but that apart from God our goodness is lacking.
This brings me to the second question, is it true that people can’t be changed? The answer to this question is also no, because people change all the time. They change their diets to become healthy, and they even change their behavior to bring about more favorable conditions in their public and private lives. However I think another question must be asked. That question is what kind of change can people accomplish?
This question gets to the heart of the matter. As humans we can accomplish only so much. When the Bible speaks of goodness or righteousness it has in mind the ultimate standard of righteousness. God is the ultimate rule of goodness and it is to this level that we must attain to be truly good. However there is a problem. Romans 3:23 says “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We sin when we do not live up to God’s standard of righteousness. So if we all have sinned and fall short of his glory which is righteousness then how are we ever expected to do good? The answer is with Jesus. God has given us the gift of his son that we may be “…justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24). This is the gospel, the good news of the Bible and the bulk of the Christian message. We have been redeemed by the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross. It is “…by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift…” (Eph. 2:8) Only through Christ can we be considered a new creation, that is a creation that is righteous and good, and be reconciled to God (2Cor. 5:17). And only through the process that Christians call sanctification can we hope to be changed into Christ likeness. So while people can change the only change that matters is the change in our standing before him that can only be achieved by Christ’s work on the cross.