I try to live decently, I am kind to people, I give to good causes. Why do Christians say that is not enough for God?

“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”

Isaiah is praying on behalf of a people who had just watched their nation collapse. He is not sneering at their good deeds, and he pointedly includes his own in the assessment. The prayer comes from inside the community rather than from a critic standing outside it. What he sees is that even genuine goodness gets tangled up in mixed motives, and so it cannot be the currency that buys a standing with God.

“Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;”

Paul wrote to Titus, who was organizing young churches on Crete among people with a poor regional reputation. He spends much of the short letter urging good works, then makes clear that those works are the result of rescue and never the reason for it. Coming from a man who insisted so hard on decent living, that order is striking. Kindness is real and it matters. It is simply not the entrance fee.