This question, typically voiced with indignation, is the response of a legalist to discovering there is the possibility—or even just the suggestion—that they might be unknowingly sinning.

A healthy believer would respond: “If that is biblical I want to know more! How did you come to that conclusion? Can we open the scriptures together?”

Only someone whose sense of comfort in regard to their relationship with God derives from feeling they are performing well, responds with indignation to the idea they might be unknowingly sinning.

A healthy, mature believer is in touch with the reality that they are utterly dependent upon God’s mercy and grace. And, consequently, is motivated to improve their reflection of Christ’s character not out of any hope of deserving, but out of gratitude and passionate allegiance to Jesus as their Savior and King.

Therefore new realization is an opportunity, not an indictment.

Ezekiel 14:13-14

“Son of man, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly, and I stretch out my hand against it and break its supply of bread and send famine upon it, and cut off from it man and beast, even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness, declares the Lord GOD.”

It used to be that porn displayed the desires a culture entertained but didn’t want to publicly acknowledge. The demarcation between our entertainment and our porn is disappearing.

The topics that previously were pornographic now dominate our public consumption, indeed, even our advertising.

Now that adultery and homosexuality are the stuff of living room consumption, incest and pederasty will begin to dominate our porn. It is an increasingly short step from there to the living room.

Because we are all created in God’s image, when a culture rejects sin as a category individuals still experience shame. The secular solution to shame is to make shameful behavior public and brazen, and the next step is to demand it be celebrated.

While humans are fickle and will often comply with the ludicrous demands of the brazen to be celebrated, the land is immune to their tyrannical tantrums and continues to record the sins committed against it with no change in standard from creation.

Leviticus 18:24-30

“Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you (for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean), lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For everyone who does any of these abominations, the persons who do them shall be cut off from among their people. So keep my charge never to practice any of these abominable customs that were practiced before you, and never to make yourselves unclean by them: I am the LORD your God.”

“The cultural air we breathe fuels our hunger for the extraordinary, yet in Romans 12 we are told that our everyday, ordinary lives are worthy of being offered to God as a true sacrifice to Him. This is because we have the resounding “IT IS GOOD” from the Father tumbling down to us from Genesis right into our present lives. The blessing of the Father was not reserved for the special exotic animals. Nor was it reserved for Adam when he had done something really heroic. It was on creation itself – creation with its limits, its rhythms, its extraordinary ordinariness. Without an understanding of the blessing of the Father on creation itself – on life on earth as our place of communion with Him – we will be seeking a higher spiritual experience, like the ancient Gnostics. We will always need to convince ourselves that we really are ‘sold out’ or passionate.”

Julie Canlis, A Theology of the Ordinary, pg 27

“Encamp outside the camp seven days. Whoever of you has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves and your captives on the third day and on the seventh day. You shall purify every garment…. Then Eleazar the priest said to the men in the army who had gone to battle: “This is the statute of the law that the LORD has commanded Moses… You must wash your clothes on the seventh day, and you shall be clean. And afterward you may come into the camp.”

Numbers 31:20-24

Woman is the glory of man, because in her softness she receives, enhances, celebrates, and embodies what a man’s hardness provided. Hardness, however, is not comforting nor sustainable, and man therefore longs to see, to touch, to connect with, and to reside within the softness his flinty determination has provided for and enabled.

Hardness takes out of the world, carves, separates, tames, defines, borders, excavates, sculps, and protects: a man wrests the opportunity for peace from chaos. Softness receives, shapes, rearranges, bears fruit: women fill the now boundaried void with peacefulness.

Men are designed to more easily compartmentalize the hardness required in a sin-broken world from the environment of home, while women are more interconnected and struggle to separate what may be required from where they find rest.

Men learn from a woman’s softness that pleasure is obtained not through hardness but through gentleness. (Gentleness is strength under restraint.)

A man cannot sustain a constant state of hardness but prepares ahead of time to be ready when called upon. Softness, on the other hand, is a state conducive to dwelling.

A man must learn the necessity of preparatory denial. A woman learns that persistent joy is experienced by providing comfort.

A goal or purpose is obtained via hardness but enjoyed via sharing and reception.
Hardness exhausts; softness comforts and restores. Provision exhausts; reception inspires and renews.

Mutual satisfaction and ultimate personal expression is conditionally experienced within the confines of and after the provision of shelter and sustenance. This is seen in relational dynamics and in physical environment. The raw opportunity provided by a man is received by the woman and filled by her soft skills with comfort and peace.

As a hardened one, a man’s greatest longing is fulfilled and pinnacle experience is realized through the reception by and intermingling with a woman’s softness. He sees, feels, and otherwise experiences the glorification of what his hard sacrifice has won, and what he has provided becomes what it otherwise could not have been. In perceiving this transformation of what has been received, gratitude is experienced, wonder is evoked, appreciation whelms, loyalty is reinforced, and weariness assuaged.

Because each man and each woman is unique, the specifics of how this presents in any given marriage is widely varied.

While my oldest daughter was in Bible School I would receive almost weekly pleas to come replace her professor of this or that (which I must admit, makes ole Dad feel good).

This morning her prof started off a unit on Soteriology by proclaiming that Christianity is a relationship not a religion. My daughter, of course, groaned…as we all should at that inaccurate platitude. But it got me to thinking about why we hear this so commonly in Christian culture.

Religion is the form of one’s relationship with a deity. All relationships have form. Marriage, for example, is the form of the relationship with one’s spouse. We would laugh at someone who said, “I have a relationship with my wife, not a marriage.” So why don’t we laugh when someone says, in equally ridiculous fashion, “Christianity is a relationship not a religion”?

It comes down to two things, I think. First, we forget that religion is a relationship, so the over-correction doesn’t strike us as odd, like it should. Second, we’re misdefining religion as “an attempt to obtain righteousness via works.” But that’s a definition of false religion, not of religion. Granted, “false religion” applies to any religion but Christianity, so it’s an easy misstep to make.

Why is this distinction so important? Well, what’s happening with marriage as we increasingly ignore the requirements of its form(s) should give us a clue. The form of a relationship is what gives that relationship its permanence. It is the practice of a relationship’s forms that distinguish it from different relationships, marks it out as sacred, and enables it to endure. Any relationship without form is fleeting, transient, and limited in its ability to shape or impact us.

The very word religion tells us this. The word comes from ligare, the Latin word from which we get “ligament” and it means to bind; just as ligaments bind muscle to bone, so religion binds us to God. So the next time you hear someone say that Christianity is a relationship not a religion, beg to differ, and explain to them that religion is the very nature of our relationship to God, and without being a religion our relationship to God would falter and wither.

The practice of Spiritual Direction is ancient and takes as its foundation the biblical precedent that when perplexed we are to look for Christ’s guidance in the words of another. Ecclesiastes 4 (vv 9,12c) informs us that two are better than one because the results of their efforts are magnified, and a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Jesus promised his disciples that wherever two or more gathered in his name, he would be in their midst. After his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus Paul cries out, “What am I to do, Lord?” and is instructed, “[G]o into Damascus, and their you will be told (by Ananias) what to do.” As he read the Scriptures, the Ethiopian Eunuch exclaimed, “How can I understand, unless someone explains it to me?”

Spiritual Direction is the communal practice of focusing our attention on the experience of another so as to notice the work of God in the midst of life’s tumult. It is a three-way effort, with the directee sharing, the director listening, and the Spirit supervising. The spiritual director must be attending not just to the voice of the directee but also to the work of the Spirit, whether revealed in the narrative or perceived as they listen. The goal of spiritual direction is ongoing conversion to the image of Christ by observing and responding to the promised work of God in our lives.

Moral law provides the structure of freedom. Liberty is living freely within that structure.

“Mores” (the plural of mos), are the group of standards or norms that express societal understanding of right and wrong. It was first used by Cicero (De Fato, II.i) to translate the Greek ethikos. “Moral” means “according to the mores.”

When used of human societies this is a subjective groups of norms, pertinent to the group or culture from which they spring. When used by Christians it refers to the character of God as the norm or standard which defines what is good and right.

Moral law then, is law that springs from the unchanging nature of God as the norm by which good or evil is determined. That which accords with the character of God is good and right. That which is out of sync with the character of God is evil or wrong.

Liberty is not freedom from rules but the right to live according to the law and free from tyranny, which rides roughshod over the law.

Moral law provides the structure of freedom. Liberty is living freely within that structure.

“Human beings are by nature actors, who cannot become something until first they have pretended to be it. They are therefore not to be divided into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane, who know they are acting, and the mad who do not.” -W.H. Auden

The process of transformation is not exclusively, or even primarily, interior nor exterior; rather, it is intentionally a tapestry of life’s aspects. Liturgy is a storied framework into which we enter and discover ourselves participants in a grand narrative. According to God’s design it is word-comprised, action-oriented, imagination-stimulating, and imagination-received.

We have been indwelt by the Holy Spirit but not habituated to Christ’s character; that is a process of taking thoughts and behaviors captive as we find ourselves increasingly within the story we were at first only rehearsing (Auden says “pretending”). Then captured by, formed by, and eventually inhabiting and inhabited by.

We are not brains with bodies. Information is not the sum of what creates understanding, nor the ultimate goal of knowing God (or one another).

Thinking the right things is important. Let’s be honest, hugely important, but it is not the primary goal of coming in to relationship with God, exploring that relationship, and coming to live out of that relationship.

We are saved by the grace of God (kindness we do not deserve) through faith in Him, but what is “faith”? Let’s be clear — faith is not absolute certainty; only God can be absolutely certain. Faith is having enough confidence to yield. Faith is an allegiance evidenced in action and motivated by trusting confidence. It is comprised of some certainty, some mystery, and an at times reckless trust, which is affirmed and enhanced by experience: our own and that of others.

As Michael Heiser has said, “God doesn’t ask that we get a comprehensive education before we believe. He wants us to embrace fully a simple idea: that we cannot save ourselves, but what Jesus did can save us.” There is an overwhelming amount of evidence to support that simple idea, but humans are such complex creatures we can easily ignore the weight of evidence and fool ourselves into a different conclusion.

I can testify that many years of intellectual investigation have convinced me allegiance to God makes sense, but it is profoundly powerful to the persistence of my loyalty that my experience confirms this conviction. Especially in my youth, however, I relied upon the experience of others to bolster my confidence, and that is as it should be.

God’s revelation to us is intended to encounter our minds, our bodies, and our emotions. His plan ignores no aspect of our person, though we can easily neglect to make use of His robust provision by over-emphasizing our minds, our feelings, or our bodies. There is goodness in attention to every aspect of being created in God’s image (of being human), and there is danger in ignoring the total package.

This is why over the years of your childhood I have commended to you a 3 Streams approach to the Church. The evangelical churches tends to emphasize the mind, the sacramental churches to emphasize formation through action and its repetition, and the charismatic churches tend to focus on our emotional/spiritual experience. This is not to suggest that any of those traditions entirely neglect the other streams, but to speak of what is easily mistaken for what they most prize.

I encourage you to expand beyond what you took away from your upbringing, but I also exhort you not to abandon the allegiance you were taught and saw modeled in your parents, our friends, and your grandparents. I can tell you confidently that while there is no end to exploration, the conclusion of it all will affirm the pillars of what you have been taught: God exists, He is good, He loves you, and He will save you from yourself, the world, and the devil.