“My church offers no absolutes.
She tells me, ‘Worship in the bedroom.’
The only heaven I’ll be sent to
Is when I’m alone with you.
I was born sick,
But I love it.
Command me to be well.”
– Hozier, Take Me to Church
These lyrics were penned and sung by Irish musician Hozier in his hauntingly beautiful song Take Me To Church, which is basically a treatise against organized religion’s legalism and the singer’s battle cry against imposed standards of sexuality and behavior. Not only does Hozier reject traditional guidelines in his ballad, but he even maintains that heaven is to be FOUND in the transcendence the human feels while rejecting the divine and embracing the most carnal human experiences. The song was so successful because it was incredibly well written but also because it tapped into something that many in my generation feel- that the church is legalistic for legalism’s sake, unrealistic, and preventing them from experiencing good things that the world has to offer for no real or valuable reason.
There is some truth to this allegation because the church has at times been disconnected from the reality of a young person’s struggle in the modern world amidst the culture wars. Sometimes its answers have been shallow. Sometimes its demands have been loveless. As the late evangelist Ravi Zacharias said, “If truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.”
Even if the church has sometimes been less than successful at expressing the REASONS for holiness or providing useful METHODS to achieve it, that does not in any way detract from the value of personal virtue. The church should be at the forefront of guiding our young people (as many churches are), but the answers are not to be found exclusively in the pews. The Bible is very clear that personal holiness is about keeping ourselves from pain and strife and pleasing a Holy God with whom we seek to be in the closest possible communion. When we abandon it, we deaden ourselves spiritually and make ourselves less useful for God’s purposes. When we purposefully stray from God’s teachings, we not only compromise ourselves, but we make it far more difficult for anyone to find Him through our example.
This does not mean that we must actually be perfect- an impossible task- but that we must continually SEEK to be perfect although we know that we will fail. We merely try again. When Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” He did not expect us to succeed in this pursuit but to continue trying and therefore get closer and closer as we refine ourselves more and more.
A troubling characteristic of our culture that has even permeated Christian circles, however, is the idea that we are close enough already and that when God told us how to be perfect, He was not really serious. The implication is that when it comes to matters of personal accountability, we do not really have to try. Many preach a different Gospel- one that tells us that God does not require anything of us but a general kindness and sense of goodwill to our neighbor. They preach a Jesus who did not call for repentance. Because He embraces us in our sin and meets us where we are, they say that the sin is not important to Him and that we need not amend it.
So many young Christians live exactly like the world. They think that sexual relationships outside of God’s limits will not hurt them. Drunkenness will not hurt them. Pornography will not hurt them. Foul language will not hurt them. They make a practice of these things rather than striving for a different standard than their surroundings. They claim that God’s Word does not contradict these choices or that the parts of it that do are outdated and archaic. They will sometimes even cite Jesus’ victory over Old Testament law as a reason to be lawless.
If we are reading God’s Word, we know this is not the correct interpretation. Although we are not slaves to the law in the sense that our salvation does not derive from it but rather from God’s grace, as Jesus said, “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:18) 
This means that the trueness and rightness of the law is still just as much in effect and just as useful for guiding our lives. James reminds us that “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (James 2:17) As Paul warned us, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:1-2) We should not even be able to abide by the ways of the world when we are truly trying to live in Christ. When we do fall, we should feel guilt and the desire to make ourselves right.
The difference lies in an attitude of repentance and renewal vs. an attitude of satisfaction with ourselves as we are. A man who knows that his struggle with pornography is corrosive to his own soul and dishonoring to God but who fights the urge daily (even if he sometimes fails and starts the battle again) is very different from a man who says that there is no battle to fight and sees no contradiction with his behavior and his Christian values. This concept is along the lines of a quote by Howard Pyle, which roughly translated says: “It makes a man better to hear of those noble men so long ago. When one listens to such tales, his soul says, ‘put by your poor little desires and seek to do likewise.’ Truly, one may not do as nobly oneself, but in the striving one is better…” We will NEVER do as nobly as Christ and probably not as nobly as Paul or many of the heroes of the church, but in the striving we make ourselves better and better.
We should not strive because we want to earn our way to God, however, but because we want to please Him and be close to Him and be useful to Him. We should want to make our own lives as easy as possible, and that is what His laws do for us. If we follow them out of a legalistic obligation, then we will indeed be enslaved to them. If we follow them out of wisdom, then we will be the best version of ourselves with the fewest road bumps in our life path. It is amazing to me how much more smoothly my life runs when I am following God than when I am fighting against Him, even if I had managed to convince myself that the thing I was fighting was inconsequential to my happiness or to that of others.
In conclusion, I will say one last word about myself. I was hesitant to write this because I did not want it to appear that I thought I had won the battle or that I was not one of the people who struggle with personal holiness. We ALL struggle with it. I share my own struggles with God and not with the public, but rest assured that I have them. It is my vow to myself and to God that I will keep searching my heart even for the things I have become numb to, and that I will keep attempting to course-correct when I detect them. I will try to remember Psalm 139 in which David pleads, “See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” That is my prayer for you, as well, brothers and sisters. Let us not judge ourselves too harshly- because we are redeemed and we are forgiven as soon as we seek it- but let us not forget to seek it!
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Jackie Chea is a blogger from San Antonio, Texas who holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Community Counseling from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She writes on political and cultural issues from a conservative, religious standpoint. She lives in the Lone Star State with her husband Nick, her 5-year-old son Lincoln, and her rescue dogs. |
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