Growth

Slippery Slope

In rhetoric, you often hear of slippery slope arguments. The term is used to describe stances or ways of thinking that once you go down, you have to accept a a whole host of other beliefs and propositions too – and these propositions may be things that you would normally be opposed too . For example, if you say the government has a right to invade its citizens’ privacy if the invasion serves a greater good, then you have to ask who defines the greater good. Depending on who defines the standard it could lead to a situation in which citizens’ privacy is invaded in order to serve the government’s interest, rather than what is of the greatest good for the citizenry. And if you aren’t comfortable with a government that has this liberty  of invading citizens’ privacy based on their own determination of good, then you shouldn’t argue for the government’s right to invade its citizens’ privacy at all. And that’s how a slippery slope works, one argument leads to the next, until an end (usually a nefarious one) is demonstrated.

Sometimes sin can work the same way. We get started down a path where we make a wrong decision and in order to justify or cover it up, we make another wrong decision. That bad decision leads to the next until we’re someplace that we never thought we’d be.  Wrong decision after wrong decision hardens our heart, and soon we’re rapidly descending down the slippery slope.

What gets us started on this path?

Often, it is a wrong view of God that pushes us off this precipice. We begin to think less of God than He is, and so we started convincing ourselves that the “small” sins don’t matter.  We compromise our commitment to God a little and before we know it, we start compromising it a lot.

A popular country song illustrates this principle well. The lyrics state “When you’re going through hell, keep on moving, don’t stop now, if you’re scared don’t show it, you might get through it before the devil even knows you’re there.” This little ditty may seem harmless enough until we realize the seriousness of the words. Hell isn’t something that you go through and get out of; hell is eternal separation from God. When we dilute the significance of what life apart from God means, we begin diminishing our understanding of the benefits of life with God. And what seemed like an innocuous tune on the radio, starts compromising the rightful position that God occupies in our life. We diminished Him in our minds, and before you know it, we also start diminishing Him in our words and actions as well.

Slippery slopes are so named for a reason. Once you get started down one, they are hard to stop. May we be ever vigilant to guard our minds against their attacks, and may we valiantly maintain a rightfully high view of our Savior.

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Growth

A Work in Process

Our pastor has a saying that has become very helpful in understanding the process of sanctification. He says that although we will never be sinless (this side of Heaven), our goal as Christians is to sin less. I think it’s an important distinction. After all, it can become discouraging after you have walked a while in the Christian life to realize that you still are so far from what God calls us to be. (Matthew 5:48) One might be tempted to give up when we realize the gap between God’s standards and our lives. We might think we haven’t grown at all, and wonder if we really deserve to be called by God (which of course, we don’t – that’s the foundation of grace. See Ephesians 2:8-9) However, in the midst of this discourse, we need to remember that even this realization is evidence of God’s work in us.

Here’s what I mean. Before we were Christians, sin wasn’t something that we were too concerned with. Sure, we might have felt badly if we treated someone hurtfully, but generally speaking our guilt was focused on the result of our sin, not on the fact that that we had violated God’s holy standards. When we became a Christian, we realized that we are sinful, that we need His grace, and then we must, with diligence, grow to become more like Him.

First, we might focus on the “obvious” sins – those things that we and others can readily agree are wrong. However, as we grow, we begin to pay more attention to the hidden sins – a hardened heart, a stinging spirit, an unforgiving nature. These are sins that others may not readily be aware of, but according to God’s standards are just a much a violation of His holiness as lying, cheating and stealing. When we recognize how much our heart needs to change in order to mirror Christ’s life, this is when we tend to get discourage. But in recognizing these sins, we show that we’ve grown. We’re demonstrating the process of sanctifcation at work in our lives because our hearts are increasingly troubled by the same things that anger God. Our pursuit of the holy is becoming more focused, more intense, and even the seeminly “minor” inpurities are being refined away. The more we recognize our sin, the more engaged we are in the process of sinning less.

Paul is a great example of this. One of the founders of the Early Church, and a man who wrote a substantial portion of the New Testament has this viewpoint- “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,of whom I am the foremost.” (I Timothy 1:15, emphasis mine).

Paul recognized the depth of his sin, and this compelled him to continue to strive for holiness so that he was able to say “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Corinthians 11:1). May we be able to say the same.

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