Christian moralism

I have found in my years of preaching that telling people to practice biblical commands is incredibly easy. Telling them they should do it out of love for Jesus is also very easy. But telling them about Jesus in such a way that they will know why they should love Him is another story altogether.

We've grown very comfortable with our Christian moralism, or what some call, "The gospel of Behavior Modification." It's easy to fight for laws to prevent homosexuality. It's easy to develop a list of things Christians don't do or at the very least "shouldn't" do. We shouldn't watch movies with a rating over PG. We shouldn't listen to secular music. We shouldn't drink alcohol. We shouldn't ever spend any time on ourselves. We shouldn't even sit down to enjoy a baseball game, because we should be out witnessing to someone instead.

The first problem here is that all of the "shouldn't" commands, many of which we make into universal for all Christians, are nowhere to be found in Scripture. The second problem is that this nice list of rules (and you can add your own to it) takes away from the truth about Jesus and destroys Christian freedom. The list above has become so common in Christianity that if average Joe Christian were to stumble upon this blog, he would be shocked to hear a Christian suggesting that we can indeed responsibly drink alcohol and would conclude I was "turning the grace of God into a license to sin."

We've gotten ourselves into a big mess on this issue, and it's going to take a while to get us out of it. A radical return to "Christ alone" is desperately needed.