The Problem With Being Too Liberal

Once in a while, when my oldest daughter wants to really irritate one of her younger sisters she stands as close as she possibly can to one of them without actually touching them (Yes, 13 year olds STILL behave this way!). When her sister says “Don’t touch me”, she can truthfully say, “I’m not touching you’, all the while knowing that she is violating her sister’s privacy, personal space, and comfort level. Technically, she’s not touching her, but she may as well be.

I think we Christians play that game more often than we’d care to admit. We know that God requires that we live differently than the culture around us. However, so often we allow our personal ambitions and need for the worldly trappings of success to propel us in a different direction. So we compensate for our tacit disobedience to God’s way of being and doing. We simply call it being “led by the Spirit” or exercising our “freedom in Christ.”

Deep inside, our spirit man is uncomfortable, but because we can’t pick out a verse of Scripture that says, “You shall not watch TV program XYZ”, or “You shall not watch movie ABC”, we keep going on the path we started. . We stand as close as we can to the world and its ways while holding back just enough to be able to say, “I’m not touching it”. And then we go to church, and read our Bibles everyday as our religious duty to ease our battered consciences of the reality that we are in fact, not leading a spirit led life at all.

Despite the fact that the scriptures say that a virtuous wife is busy at home, watches well over the ways of her household, and trains her children well, we substitute “quality time” for the truth of God’s word and adherence to Scriptural doctrine while we go about fulfilling our own dreams and goals. We persist in this folly even as we see our children’s hearts slipping away and the closeness eroding from our marriages. Because after all, we are “free” in Christ to fulfill our potential. This is why He gave us our talents to begin with, right? It never occurs to us to use our talents in a way not connected to receiving a paycheck. It never occurs to us to give our gifts for something that may not bring us immediate recognition and validation from our peers. To pour our knowledge and capabilities into the family that God has so graciously given us seems to us to be “living beneath” our full potential.

This is not an indictment of working mothers. I am not comfortable saying that all mothers who work are committing a sin. I know some feel that way, but seeing as I’m not God and cannot read hearts, I refuse to parrot that line of thinking. I was just citing one example based on the reality that at this point in my life I can identify with the line of thinking. I believe that our God is gracious and that he examines the motives and intents of our hearts. However, I do think that it ought not to be so normal for children to be cared for by third parties while mom (and dad) runs the rat race. Of course, because there is no Scripture that reads, “You shall not leave Suzy in daycare for 10 hours a day”, many do it so they can fulfill their “God-given potential.” We take our own dreams, thoughts, and plans, attach the Spirit to them and run off headlong on a path that careful examination of the Scripture (or even not so careful examination) will reveal is not God’s will for His children. I also wonder how many of us have re-examined our choices in light of the statistics I cited concerning young girls and sex in this recent post.

This is the problem with being too liberal in our interpretation of Scripture. As a matter of fact, I’m of the mind that we should spend far more time obeying the plain, written Word, rather than spending large amounts of mental energy trying to interpret what God said, what he meant, and how we can twist and turn the Scripture to fit the life we have already determined to live. It has been my experience that if my heart is prepared to obey what I do understand, no matter the personal sacrifice, the Lord will show me what He means and if there is an area where I have moved into legalism and away from grace. But in most cases, we want to do what we want and still be able to call ourselves Christians, despite the fact that service to God explicitly requires that we deny ourselves in order to follow Him.

So the real question is this: Is our Christian life requiring any hard thing from us? Are we still pretty much the same person that we were before we encountered Christ? Do we still watch the same shows, go to the same places, and spend our money in the same ways? Do we still respond to our acquaintances, friends, and loved ones in the same way we always have when we don’t get our way? Are our dreams and ambitions unchanged? If so, it’s entirely possible that we have taken too liberal a view in our interpretation of Scripture, and that the spirit leading us is not the Holy Spirit after all. Our spirit led lives and freedom in Christ are not intended to be a substitute for obedience to the doctrines for daily living laid forth in Scripture. If our faith isn’t causing constant upheaval in our flesh as we are being pruned by the Holy Spirit, we are missing out on the opportunity to grow and change into the people God created us to be. And though it’s not always easy, it’s a blessed life, and an exciting one, too.