"‘Niceness’ - wholesome, integrated personality - is an excellent thing. ...But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world - and might even be more difficult to save."
~ C.S. Lewis
We tried some food from a little hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant near our house not too long ago, and it was amazingly good for a really decent price. I immediately came home and liked their Facebook page, sent out texts to my friends to tell them they needed to check it out, and then followed up with those friends on other occasions to ask if they had had a chance to try it yet. This was my response to something that I thought was worth sharing. I had a great experience, and I wanted other people to know about it and be able to experience it for themselves.
This (only on a slightly larger and more important scale) is what motivates me to share the gospel with people. I have had an amazing experience with the Creator of the universe that has changed my life from the inside out, and I want others to know about this and see it for themselves. Not because I want to convert everyone to my perspective or beliefs, but because I would love for everyone to have the opportunity to know the joy, peace, purpose, satisfaction, fulfillment, love, and forgiveness that I have known and continue to experience.
But here's the problem. Almost everyone here in the South falls into two categories: They are "Christians" or they are decidedly not Christians, and more and more I'm finding that I have an easier time talking to the people who are opposed to Christianity than I do the "Christians" because a lot of the "Christians" don't really understand what Christianity is.
As C.S. Lewis puts it in his book Mere Christianity:
...Atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right - leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are [children's] philosophies.
I can't really say anything about the first group (those who think they are already saved) because that's a heart issue between them and God (although He does tell us that we will be known by the fruit we bear and that our works ought to be salt and light to the world). But to the second group, those good people who haven't done anything wrong, I can say you are most definitely mistaken. And this is why:
We measure our goodness by comparing ourselves to others. We say that as long as we haven't done too much bad, then we're pretty decent people. As long as we can look around every now and then and point to a few good things we've done, and as long as there are at least a handful of people that we know are much worse than us, or even as long as we know we aren't as bad as we could be, then we're safe. We're saved. We have no need of Jesus.
But Jesus has a different measuring system. He is the 8-inch ruler (in this illustration at least), and we are the lines all trying to measure up to his standard. But no matter how hard we try, we fail. Because maybe every good deed moves us up a centimeter or so, but every bad deed moves us right back down. So we will constantly be working to meet the 8-inch requirement that we really never, ever will be able to meet (probably a million miles would be a more accurate portrayal of the difficulty, but I couldn't fit a million-mile long ruler on this page for illustration purposes).
And that's why we need a Savior. That's why we need to be saved. Because it doesn't matter how good you are, how much good you do. Even if you are a saint in the eyes of man, you are not a good person when it comes to the standard of measurement that is set before us by the holy, creator God. He is the measure of goodness that we will never be able to attain on our own, and yet, in his incomprehensible goodness, he made a way for us to attain it, by the sacrifice of his perfect Son. So through him, and only through him, we are made good. We are given the opportunity to stand before that perfect God instead of being separated from him.
So talk to me about your lack of belief in the existence of God. Talk to me about how you have no desire to know this God. Talk to me about any of the questions you have about God. But as far as being good enough on your own to get to God, that's just not really possible. And I don't know about you, but that takes a lot of pressure off.