Nobody knows how bad he is until has tried to be good.
There is a silly idea that good people do not know what temptation means. This is a lie.
Indeed only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all you find the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. If you give in to temptation after five minutes, you cannot know how it would have been an hour later. That is why bad people do not know much about badness. They live a sheltered life by always giving in.
You will hear people saying that many Christians are worse people than many un - believers. That is true. It is also the wrong way to compare Christians with the world, let alone to judge Christianity.
The way to judge is to consider; if the Christians were better people when they were non-Christians, than they are today. I assure you that you will find that, all of us were much worse people than we are today.
It follows that even the best atheist of the world will become an even better person, if and when he becomes a Christian. You see, when someone accepts Jesus as his Lord and Saviour the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in him.
Now the Christian has a free will to stop or to allow the Holy Spirit, in working in him but if the Christian allows the Spirit to work in him, he will find out that the Holy Spirit never stops short of perfection and He will not stop cleaning and making better, even the smallest part of the character of that person.
Maybe the job will not finish in this life, but He intends to go as far as possible before death.
The Christian will also find out that the Lord is - as CS Lewis wrote - like dentists. Like a dentist, if you go to Him having a bad tooth, He will fix your bad tooth alright, but then unlike anyother dentist, He will start examining and probing every other tooth, even the ones that according to you, look and feel great.
It is no use to go to Him and to ask Him to fix a particular sin you maybe are ashamed of ( like cowardice or smoking or alcoholism or whatever) and to expect Him after he fixes it to stop there, for that He won't do.
After He fixes what you asked Him to, He will go ahead and He will give you the whole treatment, continuing fixing everything else.
It is no good to turn all humble and to claim that you "never wanted to be a saint but just an ordinary decent chap."
You see the point with Jesus is not what we want ourselves to be but what He intended us to be when He created us.
