Answering Questions About Spiritually Gray Areas

When I started off at college in Jacksonville, Florida a few years ago, we were required to attend the chapel services. During one of the famous, chapel sermons, I heard a message that (at the time) was very important to me. It was delivered by our Executive Vice-President and was entitled “How to Deal with Spiritually Gray Areas.” The title itself struck me to be very relevant to what a lot of young guys were trying to discern was the best way to deal with issues about which the Bible just did not have a definitive answer. They were not black or white; they were just gray.

As I was scrolling the other day through old sermons I have kept through the years, I ran across this one, and couldn’t help but mentally enter that old dialogue about what in life is acceptable to do and what is not. For me, I know the issues that were important to me as an eighteen or nineteen year-old have since changed now that I am a thirty-one year-old. I felt, in those days, that I was highly isolated from reality. I was trying to fulfill the command “to be in the world, but not of the world.” I was trying to “come out from among them,” and striving to “be separate.” What is fascinating to me now, however, is that as I look back over the points of his sermon, that many of the things he said are still very compatible with my worldview, except that I look at it in a totally different light than I did then, and interpret his words much differently.

For the sake of anonymity (and boredom), I will conceal the outline of the sermon, but will jump right into the task of asking the more pressing question that confronts many Christians today, as it did for me then (although I am still grappling with many of these issues): How do we determine what things are right and wrong, in the event that the Scriptures (hopefully our primary rule of faith and practice) fail to deal explicitly with that issue. Well, let me state at the outset of this that I do agree with this speaker that there are larger Scriptural principles that speak indirectly to many of these “spiritually gray areas.” Nevertheless, I think it is dangerous as well as legalistic to define what those areas look like for every Christian. Moreover, to set up clearly defined rules based on one’s clearly defined interpretation based on what is not clear to Christianity at large is not only arrogant, but remarkably cultic.

In fact, Paul warned us about this in Romans 14, when he was trying to handle a disputation over some other minor matters and said, “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.” In other words, figure out what is right for you. That might sound a little too post-modern for some of us, but the truth is that is exactly what Paul was communicating. In fact, in verse 25 he says, “So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves.” The issue, he goes on to state, should always be a matter of faith. If we fail to trust the Lord in what we are doing, then whatever it is we are doing is sin.

How does that translate, however, to a situation in which a believer might ruin his or her good Christian standing? Let me, first of all, say that there is not a “one size fits all” approach to this. The brutal reality of this discussion is that if you “offend” one type of Christian, you might “impress” another. In this vein is also the problem of what many well-meaning people have erroneously quoted in defense of not ever doing anything that is spiritually gray: 1 Thessalonians 5:22, which has been translated in the King James “Abstain from every appearance of evil.” In the NIV, however, it is translated “Avoid every kind of evil.” The difference, of course, is pretty sizable in meaning. One is what appears to be wrong; the other is in actuality wrong. The word for “kind” or “form” is the Greek word “morphe” which is also used in Philippians 2 to refer to Jesus’ being very God and very man. He did not merely appear to be God, but was in fact God, and He took on the “morphe” of a man.

I guess what all of that means is very simply that it is not that simple to pull that verse out of our spiritual wallets and use it at the first glance of something spiritually ambiguous. The truth is that our Christian lives are in the midst of an incredibly changing world that will stretch us far more than I believe any generation before us has been stretched. We will have to think through strategies and ways of ministry that will seem to many questionable and perhaps even crossing the line. But, this idea of risky ministry is no different than what Jesus did during His day. In fact, Jesus might have been cast out of some local fellowships, or gossiped about by some church gurus. Why? Because, to them, he would have crossed the line. When he met the prostitute at the well in Samaria, He was (by the standards of the day and of His own disciples) crossing the line. In addition, the Pharisees, of course, saw that Jesus was eating and drinking with sinners so much that they not only called him a “friend of sinners,” but “a winebibber and glutton” (for those who believe in a non-alcoholic bible, it would be a grape juice bibber). Think of that, Jesus did not, in fact, abstain from every appearance of evil, in seeking people to be saved (we, of course, know that He did abstain from every form or kind or evil, because He lived a sinless life).

So, how do we determine what is good and what is bad, if the Bible does not spell it out for us? Well, we could ask our nearest cult leader, but that might cause more damage than good. My opinion is that we filter what we do through two Scriptural questions: (1) Will this thing or course of action help me to treasure Christ as the most satisfying passion of my life? And (2) Will this help me to introduce others to the treasure of Christ? I think that is what Paul meant when he said, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” He went on to say “For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.”