[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]We too easily[.small-caps] take for granted that becoming a Christian will answer the question, “What is the good life?” Intuitively, we know that it should speak to such an ultimate question of what gives our life meaning and purpose. And if asked, we would probably give a good answer. We would probably say something like, “Walking by faith and grace is the good life.” Or “Obeying God is the good life.” Or “Eternal life is the good life.” And while none of these are wrong, they would most likely be betrayed by our daily habits.[.article__paragraph--cap]

What are the things that we orient our lives toward? What are the practices that give us a sense of meaning and purpose? To what do we direct our attention and intentionality? How do we conceive of our good life in our secret heart? For many Christians, the real answer will sound something more like, “A balanced life, a sense of belonging and being known, making a positive difference in the world, and having interesting and exciting experiences.”

We desire to be mentally and physically healthy and well adjusted. We want to work but have plenty of time to play as well. We don’t want to be controlled by our emotions, but we want to feel them. We want intimate relationships that last. Maybe we want to get married and have kids, if that fits our sense of balance. But mostly we want friendships. We want to choose jobs that are meaningful, or at least we want to recycle and learn to be kind people. Whatever trauma we’ve experienced, we want to make sure not to pass it down to others. And we want to make sure that our lives are rich and memorable, that we have things to post on Instagram or at least remember. That’s how we envision the good life.

In other words, we know that Christianity should directly affect our vision of the good life, but in practice our vision doesn’t look altogether different from our secular peers. Maybe this describes you, maybe it doesn’t. But I can assure you it describes many Christians. And if you are a new believer, I should warn you that it is not uncommon to begin your spiritual journey convinced that the good life is only to be found in Christ, only to drift away over time as work and the market chip away at your moral imagination.

Why is that? Why is there a disconnect between Christianity as the source of the good life and Christianity in practice?

The problem is that many Christians are sucked into the logic that they are their own and belong to themselves. They have often unknowingly, in their practices, accepted that they are sovereign individuals who need to make their lives interesting and meaningful and exciting on their own. And most importantly, their telos, the end for their striving, is inside themselves. When you start from the belief that you belong to yourself, then you are your own source of meaning, value, purpose, identity, and belonging. You are your own judge. The standard you are striving toward is yourself.

And isn’t that the story we so often hear in the media? The hero’s journey is the story of self-discovery, of throwing off the shackles of family, tradition, and society and becoming himself.

But our telos is not inside of us like a hidden egg waiting to be cracked open and revealed so that we can become who we always were. Our telos is to be in Christ, is Christlikeness. This is what we were created for, saved for. God calls us as Christians to “let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel” (Phil. 1:27). The gospel is an external standard we internalize in our lives by conforming ourselves to it through the work of the Holy Spirit.

In Ephesians 2:10, Paul writes, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” We are his workmanship. This is our design. We were intentionally made. And we were created for good works. This is our telos. That’s what we were created for.

When you understand that you are not your own but belong to God, then you can see that your telos is in living out what you were created for: glorifying God and enjoying him forever, as the Westminster Catechisms put it. And part of glorifying God is walking in the good works he created for you beforehand.

Specifically, I think that virtues are among these “good works” that we can practice that God created beforehand for us to walk in. What are virtues? Virtues are cultivated habits that point you toward who you were created to be in Christ. They are important to living a good life in Christ because they allow you to live as who you were designed. You were created to live prudently, to act justly, to practice fortitude, to be temperate, to have faith, to hope, and to love. In developing these habits through the help of the Holy Spirit, we move toward the good life, one which points us toward Christ, not ourselves.

Let’s consider how practicing a few of these virtutes might help us move toward the good life.

Temperance

Temperance is an often-neglected virtue. While we commonly think about temperance in terms of moderation, the virtue is more than about finding the “perfect balance” between two extremes. Many activities and desires have no place in our lives, so there is no “balanced” amount to achieve. For example, there is no balanced use of pornography, gambling, illegal drugs, prostitution, murder, abuse, or sin in general. Instead of thinking about temperance as an appropriate balance of everything in life, it’s better to think about it as an inner order of our loves. Thomas Aquinas scholar Josef Pieper defines temperance as the act “to dispose various parts into one unified and ordered whole.”[.footnote-link]1[.footnote-link] And that’s the goal: to unite your mind, your body, your emotions, toward God’s will. A question to ask ourselves to test our temperance is: Are my habits and thoughts ordered to glorify God and bless my neighbor?

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will answer “no” to this question and begin the slow work, with the Holy Spirit, of examining ourselves and discerning how to mortify our flesh.

In our defense, this is a difficult question to answer because we live in an affirmation and addiction nation. We have been taught to say “Yes!” to every desire since our childhood. Every commercial teaches us that we deserve a product or service. And we have had addictions cultivated into us by major corporations. Our economy runs on intemperance! There are people out there who have gone to school and who make their living figuring out how to addict us to their app or device or chemical.

Living the good life as a Christian involves, among other things, the practice of living temperately, of saying “no” to desires that dishonor God, to ordering our loves and our time and our resources so that they please the Lord. Practically, for many of us this will look like changing our use of smartphones and social media so that we have more time to love others in person. For others, this will look like a focus on living sexually chaste lives regardless of marriage status. Because once you accept that you are not your own but belong to God, then you don’t just belong to yourself, you belong to God and to others around you. And that is a beautiful thing. But it means there are reasonable and healthy demands placed upon you, demands that limit what you can and should do with your time and energy. And cultivating habits of reflection on those limits will help you live the good life, even in a time of uncertainty and excess. You’ll have to put to death desires that are sinful, which is hard, but what you will discover is that when you start to live temperately, you have more room to breathe.

Love

Next, let’s consider the virtue of love, which sounds self-explanatory but is actually a very confused term in our culture. We know that love is a key to whatever vision of the good life there might be, but what does it mean to love? Is love a deep feeling inside of us, a deep resonance no one can judge or condemn? Or is it an action that we choose? How do we rightly love and how does this relate to our faith, to who we were created to be in Christ?

To begin, it’s worth noting that our culture has made this conversation particularly vexing. Because the wider culture believes that we are our own and belong to ourselves, it has taught us that love is overwhelmingly an intimate, private experience of resonance which one is helpless to resist and toward which the individual even has some kind of moral obligation to obey. In other words, at some point or another, each of us feels some kind of deep inward experience of love toward someone, and to be authentic and honest with ourselves we must act on that love. If our telos is ourselves, this makes sense. But it leaves us trapped. The false vision of the good life we pursue ends up putting us in bondage to our passions. There’s no way to discern if an inward experience of love is good, true, or beautiful. There’s only the passion and the obligation to follow it. As a result, we can harm family, friends, and ourselves.

What’s a better way to understand love? How can we see love as a virtue we cultivate to grow in Christlikeness? My favorite scholar on the virtues, Josef Pieper, defines love as the claim: “It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!”[.footnote-link]2[.footnote-link] It is a fundamental statement about the existence of someone, a claim that it is good that God created them and sustains them, and that you delight in their being.

It’s not a claim that you must drop everything and possess them. It’s not a claim that you must consume them or be with them. It’s not a claim that you are owed their intimacy. It’s a claim that it’s wonderful that they exist. And as Christians we can articulate this claim to anyone because God first loved us: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Love understood this way is rich. Of course it resonates with us deeply, of course we still feel it emotionally, but we also practice it with our actions. We choose to affirm the wonder of other human beings by treating them with dignity and respect, by smiling at them, by greeting them, by giving them attention.

You may not recognize this, but your attention is one of the most in-demand commodities in the world. Everyone is vying for your attention, especially for commercial purposes. And they are largely successful. Our attention is spread out over our lives like a cloud, hardly focusing on anything and rarely focusing on anything we truly ought to love. When we choose to bend our wills and look someone in the eye and listen to them, that is a deep act of love. That communicates to them that out of everything else in the world we could be doing, we are choosing to be with them. We are literally sacrificing bits of our life to be with them. That is love.

And notice that it is a love that is not found primarily deep within ourselves, in a telos inside us. Instead, because God first loved us, we look to him, to Christ’s example on the cross, and that inspires us to love others sacrificially, dying to ourselves to affirm to them that they are fearfully and wonderfully made. And by walking that out daily, by loving others through the help of the Holy Spirit, we become more and more Christlike, more and more what we were created to be. And that is actually what the Christian good life looks like.

Magnanimity

The final virtue I want to introduce may seem a bit controversial because I’m modifying the term somewhat to fit my purposes. And that is the virtue, or rather sub-virtue, of magnanimity.

The classical understanding of magnanimity is “largeness of spirit.” That’s what it literally means. And it was used to describe great men, almost exclusively men, who sought out greatness and used their position to be generous or merciful. But I’d argue that the term can be put to distinctly Christian uses, a kind of Christian magnanimity. And it looks like this: the practice of pursuing your God-given gifts with excellence, humility, and grace for God’s glory and your neighbor’s good. If that seems vague, maybe a helpful way to understand Christian magnanimity is to look at its opposite, another word we don’t use very often, pusillanimity.

The pusillanimous person is someone who recognizes they are gifted, that they have opportunities and abilities, and they become afraid of failure, they become afraid to try, they become afraid of their own created good-ness. In Psalm 139:14, the psalmist praises God, for he says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Well, the pusillanimous person is terrified that they are wonderfully made, and they hide from their own responsibility to act on that wonder.

I’ve come to believe that a lot of us suffer from pusillanimity. God has gifted us with great things and we’re afraid to use those gifts. Like the Parable of the Talents, we’re the servant who hides his resources in the sand out of fear of disappointing his Master (Matthew 25:14–30). French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg has argued that inhibition and inadequacy are two defining features of contemporary depression, and I have come to believe that they are defining features of the contemporary world in general.[.footnote-link]3[.footnote-link] We’re inhibited and we feel inadequate. We’re afraid of failing, getting cancelled, being exposed, of our imposter syndrome coming out, and so on.

I mentioned that magnanimity is a “sub-virtue,” and I (along with Thomas Aquinas) place it under courage or fortitude. I do that because it takes courage to act with magnanimity. It takes courage to say, “God has given me a gift. I will choose to use it the best I can with excellence for his glory and the benefit of my neighbor!” Because you will fail sometimes. You will make mistakes. And you will have to endure those setbacks and get up and try again. That requires magnanimity to endure, to be capable of doing great things for God – not because you are selfishly or egotistically ambitious, but because you love God and desire to be a good steward over the gifts he has given you.

If you are your own and belong to yourself, instead of magnanimity, you will be driven by an internal telos: your own gain, your own personal ambition, your own pleasure, your own achievement. And that will be your vision of the good life, and you will forever feel unsatisfied and frustrated and empty. That hole inside of you will never be filled up.

But when you accept that you are not your own but belong to God, then you are free to work with excellence, to use the gifts he has given you magnanimously in freedom and joy because there is grace for your mistakes. And, most importantly, because your performance doesn’t save or define you. You are already loved and accepted by God. Your pursuit of excellence in your work or art or whatever isn’t meant to make you pleasing to God or other people. It’s a gratuitous act of love – it’s an act of gratitude given back to God. This is part of what the Christian good life looks like.

The pursuit of the good life for the Christian is really the pursuit of being who God designed you to be. But that doesn’t mean looking inward and digging around to discover your design, because when we look inward, if you’ve ever tried that, you’ll notice you are a mess of conflicting passions, memories, and impressions from the world. It means looking out toward Christ and becoming more like him every day.

But the good life is even more foundational than that. Although the virtues help us walk in a manner worthy of the gospel, and therefore live the good life, there is a deeper sense in which the good life comes to us through grace and we merely react to it.

The good life involves living under grace. It involves knowing that Christ died for your sins and you have been forgiven and stand before him loved and redeemed and accepted. As Christ said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). We walk in the good life when we accept that we cannot build it ourselves, we cannot earn it ourselves, we cannot cobble it together ourselves – not even through the virtues. But we can, in joy and gratitude and love and wonder at the grace God has given us, turn and practice these and other virtues and become who we were meant to be.

And I believe what we will discover is that we truly have life abundantly. And it is a good life.

[.smalltext]This article is based on a talk given by Alan Noble at Plough’s Sustaining Revival Conference, July 2026.[.smalltext]