good people or bad people?

At our church picnic yesterday afternoon, I was talking with a couple friends about how we interact with people who profess to be Christians but do not live in step with the gospel. What could be worse than being lost but thinking you are safe?

Tonight, I read the following in Mere Christianity:

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.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

You must have the bad news before the good; you will not want a Savior if you do not see what you need to be saved from - the wrath of God against sinners. Saved from What? by R.C. Sproul is a book that also addresses this.

photo: Cinque Terre, Italy 2007