Seeing Clearly — From Inside the Light

It is only from inside the identity of children of light — from the abiding, from poverty of spirit, from the open hand and the returned branch — that we can see the surrounding darkness clearly without being consumed by it or becoming superior to it.

The cultural carnality of this moment is not a mystery. The forgotten sins — gluttony, sloth, the systematic ungoverning of physical appetite — claim as many lives as any of the sexual sins the church debates, and are addressed from pulpits far less often, because they are the respectable ones, the ones sitting on the elder board, the ones signing the largest checks. Our culture has produced the GLP-1 medications — the most effective appetite-suppression tools in medical history — precisely because we have acknowledged, in the language of medicine if not of theology, that human appetite left unformed and unordered is ungovernable by the will alone. We took the pharmacological solution. And then on Sunday we walk up to the spiritual buffet — comfort yes, indictment no, grace yes, poverty of spirit no, the love of God yes, the council of Psalm 82 quietly omitted — and operate as though the same appetite problem does not apply to what we will and will not receive from Scripture.

The apostle Paul did not make the distinction we have made. He wrote one list:

"But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who calls himself a Christian who is sexually immoral, or greedy, or an idolater, or verbally abusive, or a drunkard, or a swindler."

— 1 Corinthians 5:11 (NET)

One sentence. One instruction. The greedy man in the same grammatical position as the sexually immoral one. The verbally abusive and the drunkard and the swindler all in the same clause. Paul does not tier them. He does not put sexual sin in category A and greed in category B. He places them side by side and gives them the same weight and the same response.

The church that applies this verse to some of the list while exempting others has not kept faith with the text. And the watching world notices. What they read in the selective application is not theology. It is politics. They are not wrong.

But the answer to the carnality around us and occasionally within us is not a harder sin-management program. It is not a more rigorous cycle of confession and return. The answer is the same answer it has always been. Children of light do not fight darkness by studying darkness. They walk in the light that is already theirs, and the darkness retreats before it.

The word degenerate earns its place here and is worth sitting with. It does not mean wicked in some abstract sense. It means moved away from what you were made to be. A degenerate condition is one in which the nature has turned against its own design. And the person in defended, ongoing sin — the person who has stopped fighting and started building a theological framework to excuse the fight — has moved away from what they were made to be as surely as the great ones in the council did when they used their power for themselves. The flinch that word produces, if it produces one, is worth examining. It is often diagnostic.

Poverty of spirit governs the one delivering the indictment as it governs everything else. The grief that belongs here is Amos grieving Israel from inside Israel — not a visitor's sadness about a declining culture, but the anguish of someone who knows what they and their people were made to be and cannot stop caring about the distance between the design and the present reality.