An Encouragement to Faithfulness

I know it’s hard to find any agreement on what is or isn’t good for our bodies to ingest these days, but in our home we try to take a bunch of vitamin C when sickness is lurking around.

I am noticing a powerful strain of moral sickness in our culture, and I want to offer a dose of vitamin Cs. Here are three Cs to beef up our immunity to some very contagious diseases. Our moral immune systems seem to be badly compromised. And, in case you’re tempted to think I wrote this about “the current thing” (whatever you see that as), please know that I wrote this quite a while back. It is aimed at timeless truth. It is also, I believe, perpetually relevant.

Have you noticed this? When our tribe or team does something questionable, we make excuses for it and resort to sentences that begin, “Yeah, but what about ______?” However, when the other tribe or team does the same thing, we pile on the scorn and condemnation.

It’s bad to do that.

We should be consistent, and use the same standards to evaluate reality, even if it hurts our team. If the truth is tough on our tribe, then we need to reevaluate our tribe’s behavior. That is a gift of consistency. Growing up, I was warned of few dangers more sinister than moral relativism. Now, many of those same folks who gave that warning employ it as a regular strategy. That’s bad. We should keep the strike zone the same and be brave enough to see our side strike out if it deserves to.

This takes courage. Courage is a good thing when employed for Goodness’ sake. Consistency takes courage. Pragmatism is so alluring. In an age of easy deception and siloed-services of self-propaganda (that the algorithm keeps feeding us stuff that makes us think only evil or stupid people could possibly disagree with us), it works to be a mere pragmatist. But just because something is effective, doesn’t make it right.

It seems like we all need to go back to our basic childhood stories and our Sunday School lessons. It’s bad to lie. Judging fairly with equal weights and measures is good. Perverting justice is bad. Cheating is bad.

Bad news. We are not perfect. The truth is we do the wrong thing—sometimes for what we think are good reasons, and other times not. So, we need to confess that. It’s what the Bible and the Church call sin.

Sin is bad. Confession is good.

Confession is the way out of the self-imposed slavery of self-righteousness and rebellion. Confession means to “say the same thing as.” In repenting of sin—like, for example, the sin of bearing false witness—we acknowledge with sorrow our failure to meet God’s standard, and we say the same thing he says about our sin. That it’s bad. We turn to him and away from our way of sin and he is faithful to forgive the sins of his children. Which is great news!

So, we should have consistency, and stop being useful propagandists for our tribe or team. This will take courage. Be brave! And it will take humility—the kind that confesses sin and agrees with God.

But there’s another way to confess and this one bears on this topic in a big way. Christianity is a confessional religion. (Yes, Christianity is a religion.) We have creeds that all Christians everywhere agree on. The Nicene and Apostles Creeds are in that category. They are biblical guidelines to what is and is not believable inside the Faith. They aren’t a replacement for Holy Scripture, but an important summary of important core teachings of the Bible gathered to fend off false teachers, heresies, and cults. But my point is that we possess an agreement about what reality is, and it serves us as we measure whether or not something is faithful and true.

In my own Christian tradition, the Lord’s Day sermon is sandwiched between the readings of Holy Scripture and the Nicene Creed. If anything in the sermon contradicts either, it should be rejected.

The point is that we as Christians have a standard. This standard is not contingent on the colors of the jersey of the player who is playing and on how badly we want them to triumph. Just because the other team uses lies and perversity to achieve goals does not mean that lies and perversity are now on the table for us to use as tools to win.

Losing an argument, or an election, is okay. Losing our souls, is not.

We need to be consistent. We need courage. We need confession—both to affirm what God has said as true and required for us and to admit that we have fallen short of his standard.

In many ways we do live in a sick society. These Cs are curative and, I believe, contagious. Pass it on.

I hope this serves you, encourages you, and/or challenges you. I’m on your side,

Sam