To be good, do good. It's that simple

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems our faith should be way more than a walk down memory lane. We study, we celebrate what happened thousands of years ago for what it says about how we live today. I don’t think many would disagree.
So it was that during a Bible study in the early spring of 2004, less than a year after we first went into Iraq, we found ourselves debating what God would have us think about this war. Group members were already beginning to be polarized—just like the country. My co-leader, a Vietnam vet, said that his greatest fear was that we would “cease to believe that America is good.”
I knew what he meant but it seemed an antiquated concept to me, a remnant from an earlier time when people believed in constant absolutes and unquestioned obedience to authority. Wasn’t it obvious? America is good when it does good. For those who believed the Iraq mission a mistake, America was (and is) not doing good. We sympathize with our troops and pray for their safety, but we can’t say America is doing good in one instance because it did good in another. Actions have consequences. We were good when we wrote “all men are created equal” into the Declaration of Independence; not good when we made slavery legal in America. It’s really pretty simple.
Some Christians like to emphasize the concept of obedience to authority. I too believe in obedience—to the law as Jesus summarized it: Love God and God’s creation, and your neighbor as yourself. Those who love obedience to earthly authority can pull out a passage here and there—mostly misunderstood and misinterpreted. They themselves often have an interest in that authority structure, much like the religious leaders who challenged Jesus to explain by what authority he spoke. They couldn’t see it but the answer was obvious: God’s.