Clever Lies We Should Avoid 2/3

“I’m not perfect, and therefore I can’t speak into anyone’s life.”

When I was in college, and the president of a Christian student organization, we faced a crisis on our leadership team. One of our leaders had made a mistake and slept with a girl. I don’t remember many of the details at the time, but he approached me and said that he needed to step down from leadership—at least for a time. I agreed and at our next meeting, I brought up the issue and informed the team that he would be stepping down.

The crisis was not that one of our members had messed up. We are none of us perfect. We all make mistakes and need to address those mistakes well. We need to accept the consequences of our actions and work through things. However, the crisis in this instance was the response of the rest of the leadership team. The unexpected response was, “why should he step down?” The thought was, if no one was perfect, how could we hold anyone to any kind of standard?

This situation also calls to mind something I recently read somewhere—I can’t remember where exactly—that the most memorized portion of scripture in today’s culture is Matthew 7:1, “Do not judge lest you be judged.” It also happens to be one of the most out-of-context-taken passages. The idea in our culture’s estimation is: no one can judge anyone. i.e. There is no standard of excellence or behavior.

The truth is that the Bible does spell out a very clear standard. And, the fact that no one can live up to that standard in their own power does not excuse us from trying to improve. And we need to take corrective action when we fail badly. And, the goal is for church families to be exactly the sort of place where we—lovingly—hold each other to a better standard. Elsewhere, the Bible says that “the church will judge the world.” If we are to be good judges, we need to know the standards and be able to hold each other to that standard.

Recently, another passage (from the same text as the last quote, 1 Corinthians 6) was quoted to me to argue that we cannot have a standard in the church. Paul goes on from the last statement about the church being judge, to say.

“All things are lawful for me,
But not all things are profitable.
All things are lawful for me,
But I will not be mastered by anything.”

The interpretation tried on me was to say, “if it were not for the fact we are in community, if we were all alone in the world, we could do anything. The only standard is love and it is out of love for others that we limit our freedom at all”

Of course, this is a bad interpretation of scripture. No one, reading the context of even just the New Testament, would seriously argue that everything is permissible to a believer. One has just to go back a few verses in 1 Corinthians 6 to find a list of things that Paul says are strictly forbidden to us. So what does he mean when he says “all things are lawful?”

Some read this passage as one of the—typical for Paul—cases where he entertains an imaginary opponent. The “lawful” lines in that case are not Paul’s position. He is arguing against them. On the other hand, Paul may just be arguing for the many many areas of life where sin is not clear. In that case, he is saying that even among ther many “lawful” things in life, some are sin to us in the way that they affect our neighbors.

In any case, we need to take special care to avoid falling into the trap of the lie that says there is no standard for good because no one is good. There IS a standard and someone has lived up to it. We do not aim to imitate Christ out of a desire to earn His favor, but in gratitude for what He has done, we do our best to please Him.