SPIRITUAL PERMISSION SLIPS

I’ve come to appreciate how much more fun it can be to sin if you can claim it was God’s idea. Now you make wrinkle your brow at that comment, but if there is one thing I have come to appreciate from dealing with fellow Christians it is how easy it is to hate or dealing unfairly with others if you say it was by the Lord’s will in some way. Such as mentioning for example how since God is against a given sinful behavior then if we are against a person guilty of that behavior it is okay.

Personally I’m not the Lord and I can’t read minds so I have no idea what somebody else really thinks. And I have no intentions of trying to excuse my own sinfulness and negative reactions as God’s inspiration.

What got me on this subject was attending this bible study. We were involved in using a pastor’s commentary about a given passage in scripture. The basic gist of the pastor’s thoughts on this passage was how easy it is to get detoured in one’s relationship with the Lord by compromising one’s values. To simply be willing to say that a given behavior that is a violation of scripture is okay instead of resisting it.

In this case, the other members of the group suddenly began to go into this long discussion about how this applied to a given lifestyle that they apparently felt was the most disagreeable form of lifestyle they could imagine. True the scriptures do make it clear that certain behaviors are view by God as a sin.

I didn’t take issue with that reality. I understand that aspect of the bible as well as the next person. But what bother me is the veiled hate that came across with that attitude.

In reality as I pointed out, getting detour in one’s relationship with God happens on many different levels and for a variety of reasons. It can occur any time we get caught up being obsessed with some aspect of life that we decide and define as being part of one it means to be a Christian whether the Lord said so or not.

Any teaching that appeals to our personal desires such as the abundant life advocates to me has at it roots a need to inflame our wish to have our heaven here on earth. Oh it may not be stated that way, but so often it seems that what it attempts to accomplish is to make us want this life more than heaven.

Having needs and desires in this life is necessarily bad, but when the truth of God’s word gets sacrificed I call that the ultimate form of compromise. And I noticed after I mentioned that form of compromise that the others in the bible study became rather silent on the issue of that one lifestyle they had talked about earlier.

Hopefully God’s spirit will always content with those times when we are seduced by those types of teaching that seek to corrupt our sense of what the Lord says is truth. And also grant us the wisdom to listen when we are feeling a need to weaken in our obedience to only what God says is true.