So Swings the Pendulum

I was a young man back in the ’60’s.

My father pastored a church in South Africa that, at the time, was associated with the holiness movement. The holiness movement began in the late 1800’s, influenced by the renewal of the teaching that the return of Christ was imminent. They reasoned that, if indeed it was imminent, they needed to win the lost and be found holy at Christ’s return.

My father, a product of this movement in the mid-1950’s, was genuinely and deeply concerned with living a holy life and called the people of our congregation to do the same. In hindsight, some of the standards of conduct might have been a little arbitrary, but, even as a teenager in his home, I knew my father’s heart was honestly just to love and please the Lord.

When I arrived in this country to go to college in 1966, the school I attended was also part of a holiness movement with standards even stricter than those with which I was raised.

The problem I began to observe was, in many instances, the holiness standards had become ends in themselves. They had either become a basis from which to judge others and/or a source of pride over one’s accomplishments in holiness. In fact, many of the people who espoused these standards were sometimes the meanest and most unkind.

So, my generation rebelled.

We were baby-boomers and into what pleased us. We claimed our freedoms were based on our spiritual maturity but, in reality, we were just selfish and self-absorbed.

We took pride in demonstrating how many of the holiness codes we could break and still be saved. The goal became demonstrating our freedom, over loving God and others.

And so the pendulum began its swing.

Today, holiness is a word everyone runs from.

Here is the difference between now and then.

When we “broke the rules” to demonstrate how free we were, the only people we affected was our inner circle of friends.

Today, with the size of the platform of so many celebrity pastors and our current insistence on flaunting our freedoms on the global stage of social media, we risk dragging an entire generation of undiscerning believers into life-destroying disobedience to God’s Word.

A friend and Biblical scholar, Dr. Jackie Johns, posted on Twitter recently, that “if you feel compelled to flaunt your freedom, you don’t have any.”

Is it time to swing the pendulum back towards holiness, in the life of the believer, that derives its life from a thriving love relationship with Jesus and draws its behavioral standards from Scripture, motivated by a love for others? And is it time we start calling each other to that quality of love for God and others that radically conforms our private and public conduct to the image of Christ?

While I am not talking about whether or not we hang out with unbelievers and/or approve of their conduct (it is not our place to try and change their behaviors until Jesus has changed their hearts), Paul urges the Corinthians to, “not associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality, greed, idolatry, slanderer, drunkard or swindler…don’t even associate with such a one” (1 Corinthians 5:11).

It seems we live in an age when many pastors, prominent on the very public stage of social media, build a following by flaunting their edgy behavior, paraded as spiritual freedom. Not very long ago one of the pastors in my area, with multiple campuses and a huge social media following, prided himself in dropping the “F bomb” in his sermons. When marijuana became legal in our state, the pastoral staff of another huge church in our area stopped smoking cigars on their staff retreats and started smoking weed.

YouTube provides global access to televised interviews with celebrity pastors who refuse to identify with what the Scripture says about sin and are at a loss for words when asked if Jesus is the only way to relationship with the Father. Others are seen by the world, in videos, downing shots in a bar with actual celebrities or jiving to music with vile lyrics which degrade women.

And the rest of us are supposed to remain silent?

Isn’t our silence tacit agreement?

Hasn’t the pendulum swung too far?

Paul tells the Ephesian Christians that not even a “hint” of impropriety is acceptable for God’s holy people (Ephesians 5:3) and that we are not to “be partners” with believers who are living in disobedience to Scriptural standards of holiness. (In the Greek, “Partner” is one who shares in a possession or relationship.)

Holiness is a matter of the heart in love with God. That is true. But it also has to translate into transformed behavior…not just for our sake, but for the sake of those who are watching us now, much more closely than when my generation thought it was cool to be edgy.

Let’s not allow our freedom to destroy the brother or sister “for whom Christ died” (1 Corinthians 8:11).