Right is right, wrong is wrong, the world is black and white, and the Bible is the ultimate determination of these things.
“Michael, you speak in very black and white terms”. That was feedback id gotten from four teammates and mentors. Personally, I took that as a compliment. I was raised that the world was black and white. If there was a gray issue, it was my job as a Christian to make it black and white. To use the sword of the spirit to slice down the middle and turn the gray muck into absolute truth of right and wrong. I’ve gone about that my whole life. However, their feedback was not a compliment, it was intended to challenge me into more growth.
How could this be right? I mean, four unrelated people have given me the same feedback. People who have nothing to gain by leading me wrong and have shown nothing but desire for my spiritual growth; but this conflict with my entire life’s modus operandi??
I had a couple conversations with my mentors about this, and they shared stories about how the spirit convicted them of something as being wrong, but another person did not feel the same conviction so to one person it was right and the other it was wrong.
“Ohhhh stop right there! That is moral relativism” I though and dismissed them without a single thought. Moral relativism was a dangerous thing I’d been taught. When morals were determined by the individual and not the black and white absolutes of scripture, then things like homosexuality could be justified. AIM was just flat out wrong on this.
This months ministry is quite unique. Our ministry host intends it as a month of rest, “ask the Lord”, and spiritual growth after four months of hard work and an addition 6 remaining. Every morning, he shows up and shares with us a bit of his very colorful testimony and then goes though Romans, Corinthians, or Galatians, with the intent of leading us into more “freedom from the law”.
“The point of the law was to lead you to the end of yourself, to cause you to burnout, to show you that you couldn’t do it.”
That clicked. That word- burnout.
That word was thrown around in my life, “oh, so and so has burnt out”, “don’t do that, you’ll get burnt out”. I accepted it as a thing, not a sign that the work was being done out of duty or obligation instead of Christ-like love.
I sat in a dark room for an hour or two last night, my mind racing. I had prayed for God to lead me into more freedom, but all of this was certainly deception, not freedom.
I decided to dive into it, study what this meant. Many things like slavery, Old Testament genocide, and women in the pulpit have been made clear to me though studying the word, so that’s what I did. I chose homosexuality, one of the many things that “moral relativism” would justify, and dived in using my Bible and the now-available internet.
My search led me to the passage Galatians 3:10-29 which says how the law was a curse, how it’s no longer a curse for us to bear.
The law is what determined right and wrong….yet it’s a curse. So, for me to place myself under “what’s right and wrong” is to place myself under that curse? Later on, Paul rebukes those of us who willingly choose to do so. Also, what about others? Non believers? Jesus came to give us all the new covenant so none of us have to be under the law, and for me to pronounce someone’s actions as right or wrong places them under the “curse of the law”…..
So that’s where I’m at….God is digging deep, as the ramifications of this affect so many things I’ve held tightly my entire life. I’ve seen His work enough to trust this as His hand, but I’m treading carefully as this goes against a lifetime of lessons.
This opens the door to freedom so drastic I’m not prepared to handle it…
