What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done

by Matt Perman

But, second, notice that we are to do all the good we can. Very often we seem to settle for a reduced view of the good that God has for us to do. But when we look around at the world, we see that there are far more opportunities to do good than we can imagine. If we aren’t abounding in good works, the problem is likely not a lack of opportunity but a lack of desire. I love what the great evangelical social reformer William Wilberforce said: “No man has a right to be idle. . . . [W]here is it in such a world as this that health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?”1 That’s the biblical ethic. We are not to be scant and scarce in our good works, or even nominal and mediocre, but abundant and liberal in doing good. We are not simply to do good for some people here and there; we are to do good for all people as often as we can and as much as we can.