I want to express our appreciation as a
family for the sentiments and for the flowers
and so on that were sent to my
mother-in-law.
Almost made me feel bad for all the
mother-in-law jokes I've told.
Almost.
Rich was mentioning Charles Spurgeon.
Charles Spurgeon was quite a character.
He actually used much of his ministry income
to build an orphanage for orphans in London
and was constantly, wherever he went, he was
taking up collections for his orphans.
And there's a story recounted about Spurgeon that
he went to one ministerial conference and because
this was his habit, they all knew that
they all expected him to take up a
collection for his orphans and they had agreed
ahead of time that they were not going
to give.
You know, this was not an appropriate time.
So, of course, Spurgeon got up and he
took off his hat and he passed it
around in a collection for his orphanage and
when it came back empty, he looked down
into the hat and he closed his eyes
and prayed and said, my lord, I thank
you that this group of skin flints at
least return my hat.
But that's the kind of humor that Spurgeon
had.
He was quite a character.
Recently, we have heard about humanism and the
problem of humanism.
There was a little bit of discussion both
from the platform and in other venues about
what humanism is about and why it's such
a serious problem.
Romans 1.25 talks about those who worship
and serve the creature rather than the creator.
That's what humanism is all about.
This idea of serving the creature and worshiping
the creature rather than the creator.
And it's certainly a threat.
It is a delusion, a deception in the
hearts of the unsaved.
And we in the church are not particularly
susceptible to that ourselves because we know that
we are creatures of a creator.
But there are other dangers to us as
Christians and I would like to look at
another one this morning as we consider a
passage of scripture that is familiar to us.
But I'm going to ask you to stand
up and read this as we consider this
warning to all of us who are inside
the body of Christ.
This is Joshua chapter 24, starting at verse
14.
We'll read through verse 24.
Now, therefore, fear the Lord, serve him in
sincerity and in truth, and put away the
gods which your fathers served on the other
side of the river and in Egypt.
Serve the Lord.
And if it seems evil to you to
serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day
whom you will serve, whether the gods which
your fathers served that were on the other
side of the river or the gods of
the Amorites in whose land you dwell.
But as for me and my house, we
will serve the Lord.
So the people answered and said, far be
it from us that we should forsake the
Lord to serve other gods.
For the Lord our God is he who
brought us and our fathers up out of
the land of Egypt from the house of
bondage, who did those great signs in our
sight and preserved us in all the way
that we went and among all the people
through whom we passed.
Then the Lord drove out from before us
all the people, including the Amorites who dwelt
in the land.
We also will serve the Lord, for he
is our God.
But Joshua said to the people, you cannot
serve the Lord, for he is a holy
God.
He is a jealous God.
He will not forgive your transgressions nor your
sins.
If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign
gods, then will he turn and do...
I guess we missed the end of that.
And the people said to Joshua, no, but
we will serve the Lord.
So Joshua said to the people, you are
witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the
Lord for yourselves to serve him.
And they said, we are witnesses.
Isn't it interesting?
Now, therefore, he said, put away the foreign
gods which are among you and incline your
heart to the Lord God of Israel.
And the people said to Joshua, the Lord,
our God, we will serve and his voice
we will obey.
Thank you.
Let's look to the Lord in just a
word of prayer.
Our father, this morning, we ask that as
we consider this important subject, this important warning
to our hearts, we ask that you would
help us to see clearly where there might
be areas in our lives and in our
fellowship where these things are a problem.
We thank you that your word is clear,
that you have not disguised the truth, and
that it is easy for us to understand.
And we ask that you would help us
to apply it to our lives this morning
as we study it together.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Thank you.
Please be seated.
Notice that Joshua said, you cannot serve the
Lord.
Isn't that interesting?
Here he's telling them they need to serve
the Lord.
And he turns around and says, you can't
serve the Lord.
You make the choice, but by the way,
you can't serve the Lord.
And what he was saying was your condition
is such that in your present state, you
are incapable of serving the Lord because he
is a holy and a just God, and
you are not holy and you are not
righteous.
And so they had to make a choice.
Now, there were a lot of choices they
could have made.
Because in the land they were dwelling in,
there were other occupants who believed other things,
who made other choices.
And in many cases, those choices had been
brought into Israel and among the people, and
they had corrupted themselves by taking other beliefs,
those of the nations around them, those nations
whom they had displaced and would have and
should have completely eliminated from the land of
their promise.
But they didn't, and consequently, they had choices
and were making poor choices.
And Joshua says to them, you cannot serve
the Lord in that condition.
And then they pricked to their hearts, say,
we will serve the Lord.
We will, and we will be witnesses to
this covenant that we're making with the Lord.
Now, the situation in which Israel found itself
is not an uncommon one.
In fact, it's very common.
It is a situation that we come up
against every day in our lives.
Men and women have choices that they can
make.
Christianity is not the only choice.
Christianity is not the only thing that they
are being assaulted with.
It is not the only belief system with
which they are familiar.
And over and over again, they are exposed
to other alternatives to the claims of Christ,
and many are making poor decisions.
And they are following after some of those
things.
There was a recent study in 1984, 1994
by the Barna Group about this concept of
what do you believe?
And one of the statements they asked was
very interesting.
It was a statement, there is no such
thing as absolute truth.
And the question was, what percentage of Americans
do you think, American adults, agree with that
statement?
There is no such thing as absolute truth.
In other words, I have choices I can
make.
And I can choose this, or I can
choose this, and there's no real ramifications of
the two because there's no absolute truth.
And when they did this study, they found
out that a shocking 72% of Americans
agreed with that statement, that there is no
such thing as absolute truth.
Now Israel had made similar choices.
They had gone away from the God of
Israel, they had gone away from the God
who had brought them out of Egypt, and
they were following after other beliefs, other gods.
And that's why Joshua gave them that alternative.
And yet here we find that in our
society, we have men and women doing the
very same thing.
Believing that there is no source of absolute
truth, and consequently they are free to make
whichever choice they choose.
Unfortunately, the concept that there is no absolute
truth defies logic.
Because there has to be something that's true
and something that's false.
Now this belief that there is no absolute
truth has a name to it.
And we'll talk about that in just a
second.
But even though they may logically realize that
there has to be something true and something
false, they still believe that there is no
absolute truth, no source of absolute truth.
Now those of us who went through the
Truth Project have seen this.
We were exposed to this at the very
beginning, the idea of veritology, that word that
was coined specifically to talk about what is
true.
The same question that Pilate asked when he
was faced with the very epitome of truth,
the personification of truth, Jesus Christ himself.
And yet he said, what is truth?
And we all have to make that choice.
We all have to determine what is true.
Now fortunately we have some reference materials that
can help us.
We look at the word of God and
we understand that the word of God is
truth.
That God is the source of truth, that
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth,
and the life.
But there are others around us who are
making other choices and who don't see the
compelling consequences of those other choices that they
are making.
And so they believe this consequence or this
statement that there is no such thing as
absolute truth.
And this concept is called relativism.
So we talked about humanism.
We see that in the world around us.
We also need to recognize this thing called
relativism.
The idea that what's good for me may
not be good for you.
And what's true for you might not be
true for me.
We see it all around us and not
only in our society are we asked to
acknowledge it, we are asked to affirm it.
We are required sometimes by our employers, sometimes
by our society, sometimes by our friends to
not only acknowledge that they have a choice
to make, and they do, but to affirm
the choice that they've made.
And to let them feel good about the
choice that they've made as if it were
the right choice, as if it were a
choice that was acceptable to God.
But it is not.
So this idea of relativism basically is wrapped
up in this kind of a statement.
What is right for you may not be
right for me.
In other words, I don't want you to
tell me what's right and wrong.
That's the essence of what's being said, isn't
it?
And I don't want anybody to tell me
what's right and wrong.
I don't want there to be any standards
that I have to live up to.
I want to make my own choice.
Does that sound familiar, vaguely, like Genesis chapter
3?
I don't want God to set a standard
for me.
I don't want him to tell me what
I can eat and what I can't eat.
I want to make my own decision about
what's right and wrong.
So I'm going to go to the knowledge
of good and evil.
I'm going to eat of it so I
can make my own decisions.
That's the problem that existed from the very
beginning of creation.
And we still have it around today.
I want to decide that for myself.
Now the problem is that not only do
we see this in the society around us,
but we are beginning to see it again
in the church.
We are seeing the same problem of relativism
moving from the secular society around us into
the church.
And we are being deluded by this concept
that I can make that choice for myself.
Now if we looked at a typical statement
of a relativist, it might look something like
this.
If you believe that Christianity is right for
you, that's fine.
I'm glad it works for you.
I just happen to believe something differently.
But I'm not going to say that you're
wrong.
And the implication in there is, so don't
you say that I'm wrong.
Right?
I'm going to make a choice what I
believe.
And I believe something differently than you do.
And that's fine for you.
I'm glad you believe that.
I'm glad it works for you and so
on and so forth.
But don't tell me that's what I have
to believe.
Because I want to believe whatever I want
to believe.
And if I want to believe in atheism,
I want to believe in evolutionism, I want
to believe in a philosophy that doesn't hold
me accountable to anyone, don't you tell me
that I can't do that.
Or that that's wrong.
So the relativist really is trying to escape.
He is trying to move away from any
kind of an accountability.
And consequently to live his life the way
he wants to live his life.
And that's the essence of what relativism is.
And the motivation behind it.
But when you look at what he says,
this might be right for you, but it's
not right for me.
I'm glad it works for you, but I've
got other beliefs.
Basically they're saying something like, let's see, vanilla
ice cream tastes better to you, but chocolate
tastes better to me.
As if there is no more import to
the choices that they make in their beliefs
than their opinion about what ice cream tastes
better.
Hopefully we see a difference here.
Hopefully we realize it's not a matter of
opinion, it's not a matter of what you
like or don't like, what you prefer or
don't prefer.
It's a matter of truth.
And dealing with the issue of what is
true.
Now many times in our lives when we
come across truth, it hurts.
It smacks us in the face.
It convicts us.
It forces us to realize that there are
things going on in our lives that ought
not to be going on in our lives.
It forces us to recognize that we've made
some bad decisions that we need to change
in our lives, or that our behavior needs
to change, or that our relationship with someone
needs to change, or that there's sin in
our lives that need to be taken care
of.
That's what truth does.
And that's why the relativist doesn't want to
have anything to do with it.
Because he doesn't want those consequences in his
life.
When we think about logic, and one of
my favorite classes to teach is a class
in logical analysis, which I teach in the
spring, and I think I've mentioned this a
few times to you.
I love logic.
I love thinking logically.
I love watching students learn to think logically.
There was an old program on television when
I was growing up called The Paper Chase,
and it was all about this professor at
Harvard Law School, played by John Houseman.
And all these students would come into his
classroom, and he would teach them how to
think logically.
And at the beginning and during the prologue
of the episode every week, he says, You
come into my class with skulls full of
mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer.
I like to delude myself into thinking that
happens in my logical analysis class, that these
students come in with no concept of how
to think logically, but by the time they
leave, they're at least able to analyze arguments,
they're at least able to communicate in a
way that is logically consistent.
And the foundation of logic, there are four
laws.
And we'll just talk about two of them
this morning.
The first one is the law of non
-contradiction.
And the law of non-contradiction says you
can't have two statements that are contradictory to
one another and then both be true at
the same time.
If one is true, the other one must
be false, and vice versa.
That's the law of non-contradiction.
And the second of those four laws, actually
it's the fourth law, but we're just looking
at it secondly, is the idea of logical
inference.
That we should be able to look at
a statement, look at the truth of a
statement, and make a logical inference about other
things that must also consequently be true.
And if we can't do that, we have
no way of thinking beyond the statement itself.
So when you look at relativism, you find
that it is internally inconsistent.
And it's interesting because in order for relativism
to be true, it has to be true
for both parties, doesn't it?
I mean, it does.
It has to be true for both parties.
It cannot itself be relative.
The relativist can't say, well, relativism is good
for me, but absolutism is good for you,
that's okay.
He can't do that.
Those are the opposites, and they can't both
be true at the same time.
If he says what's relative, you know, what
is okay for me is not okay for
you, and what is okay for you is
not okay for me, he's applying the same
thing to both parties.
Saying we have to both be relativistic.
But relativism doesn't allow for one person to
be absolute and another person to be relativistic.
They're contradictory.
They cannot both be true at the same
time.
And so the relativist himself makes an absolute.
He says relativism must be absolute.
Everybody has to believe it.
Everybody has to be relative or else, not
relatives, but relative in their thinking or else
nothing works.
So he doesn't allow for someone to not
be a relativist, which is a contradiction, an
internal contradiction of the whole system.
Plus, if you can have two contradictory statements
that are both true at the same time,
you can't draw any logical inference from them.
And so the relativist can't say what you
believe is okay for you and what I
believe is okay for me, and let's draw
some conclusion out of this.
Because there's no conclusion that can be drawn.
Because if two contradictory things are both true,
then there is no way to draw any
kind of a logical inference.
And so relativism itself is internally inconsistent.
It falls apart, as does any other philosophy
other than a biblical worldview.
So it shouldn't surprise us that we see
that, but the relativist doesn't see that.
He doesn't understand that he's grasped onto something
that in itself can't possibly work.
On the other hand, we who know the
Word of God and who understand that truth
comes from God also should understand that truth
is exclusive.
That if one thing is true, nothing else
that is contradictory to that can be true.
That's that first law, the law of non
-contradiction.
So if indeed Christ is the only way
to heaven, then there cannot be any other
way.
Because truth is exclusive.
If it's true that Christ is the means
to reconciliation with God, then it must be
false that any other means can bring reconciliation
to God.
Truth is exclusive.
If one statement is true, then by the
law of non-contradiction, every other contradictory statement
must be false.
And we know that, but the relativist doesn't.
He doesn't look at it that way.
He cannot do that.
Because the minute he acknowledges that truth itself
exists and truth itself is exclusive, then he
has no choice but to believe it.
And he doesn't want to believe it.
He wants to make his own choices.
Now what does it mean for us who
are believers?
And we understand that truth is exclusive.
Then when we look at the statement of
Jesus Christ who says, I am the way,
the truth, and the life.
No man comes to the Father but by
me.
That is an exclusive statement, isn't it?
He says there cannot possibly be any other
way to get to God.
Because if what I'm saying is true, then
I have just excluded every other possible means
of salvation.
I have excluded every other possible means of
logic, of logical choice.
I have excluded every other possible choice you
can make.
And I have restricted you to one exclusive
means of being reconciled to God.
So when the relativist says, well, I'm glad
that Christianity works for you, but I've decided
to believe something else, our response ought to
be, but if Christianity is true, there is
nothing else.
Because if Christianity is true, and the exclusive
claims of Christ are true, there is no
other belief system that can possibly bring you
any kind of merit.
So we need to understand this.
This statement that is in John 14.6,
we quote it all the time.
But do we really understand the implications of
it?
Because if we do, if we understand the
exclusivity of this statement of truth, then we
would naturally be following up by telling everybody
we know.
There's only one way.
It doesn't matter whether you want to choose
your own way.
You don't have a choice.
The choices have been eliminated.
There is only one way that you can
be reconciled to God, and that's through the
person of Jesus Christ.
So for us, relativism outside the church, and
looking at our philosophy of what we believe
for salvation, it should be pretty clear.
We get accused as believers of being, or
as Christians of being narrow-minded, and we
are.
And we are necessarily so, because the claims
of Christ are exclusive.
They exclude every other possibility.
So we should be proud.
Well, not proud.
We should be pleased that we are called
narrow-minded, because that means we're doing and
believing and demonstrating what we should be demonstrating
in our lives, that Jesus Christ is indeed
the only means of reconciliation to God.
Now, those who choose relativism often make the
associated mistake of assuming that all they have
to do is believe hard enough in what
they believe, and there will be some merit
to that, right?
I mean, if they acknowledge that they believe
something differently than we do, and that what
we believe is working for us, then they
must assume that there's some way that what
they're believing can be working for them.
And usually that way is sincerity.
If I just believe it hard enough, if
I am just focused on this one thing,
even if I'm wrong, if I'm believing it
and I'm acting on it and I'm living
my life according to this, then somehow God
is going to recognize my sincerity, and there
will be some merit in my activity, even
if I'm believing the wrong thing, even if
I'm going in the wrong direction.
That's what the relativist is counting on, that
God will somehow recognize his sincerity even if
he is sincerely wrong.
We know the word of God tells us
that's not the case.
That it is not our works that demonstrate
our sincerity that brings merit with God, it
is just the opposite.
It is our faith in Christ that results
in works that can be seen by others,
as we saw clearly in our study of
James not too long ago, but not the
other way around.
Our sincerity in believing the wrong thing has
no merit with God whatsoever.
And so the relativist has to understand that
if he makes a different choice, even though
he might put his whole heart into following
that choice, he is still damning himself to
an eternity apart from Christ and away from
God.
His sincerity is not enough.
Is sincerity enough?
Absolutely not.
The relative will say, truth is what you
sincerely believe.
In other words, my belief has some impact
on whether something is true or not.
Now how silly is that?
Truth isn't determined by our belief.
Truth is determined by what is true.
And we either believe what is true or
we choose not to believe what is true.
But our belief doesn't make it true.
Sincerity is definitely not enough.
Truth has nothing to do with belief.
Isn't that interesting?
Just because I believe something doesn't make it
true.
And just because I disbelieve something doesn't make
it false.
My belief has no impact whatsoever on the
truth or falsity of the object of my
belief.
And consequently, even though I may believe sincerely,
and I may act on that belief, and
I may be dedicating my life to that
choice that I've made as to what I'm
going to believe, it has no impact whatsoever
on the truthfulness of what I've chosen.
The only thing that determines truth is God.
And if I choose to believe with all
my heart something that God says is false,
I'm not going to make it true by
believing in it.
And I'm not going to gain some merit
from God by believing in what is false.
Now, let's talk about Christianity.
Those of us who know the Lord Jesus
Christ find ourselves in a situation where we
clearly recognize that relativism outside the body of
Christ is wrong.
We run up against it.
We talk to those who believe in it.
We talk to those who have made other
choices and want us to affirm the choices
that we've made, or that they've made, rather.
And we can't do that, can we?
We cannot say, well, I'm glad that Buddhism
isn't working for you, and I hope you're
really successful in it.
We can't say that.
Because we know that Christianity is exclusive.
And we cannot affirm the merit or the
value of this other person sincerely believing in
what is wrong and what is false.
We have to do just the opposite.
We have to say, I'm sorry that you've
made a choice to believe something that isn't
true.
Because your life is going to be expended
in sincerely following after falsehood.
Now, if you really want to know what
is true so that you can believe in
it, I'd be glad to share that with
you.
Because God has shared it with us in
His Word.
But I'm not going to affirm what you
believe and tell you that it's okay that
you believe this.
Now, we face that same thing in the
area of sexuality.
All the time we face that.
Not only are we to accept this person
who has chosen a homosexual lifestyle, we are
required by our society to affirm that choice,
to make them feel good about that choice.
The truth of the matter is, if we
love them the way we should, our highest
goal should be to bring them to Jesus
Christ, and He will reveal to them the
sin in their lives.
But it is not for us to affirm
a choice that they've made that's leading them
away from Christ, that's leading them away from
the truth, that is causing them to expend
their lives in an activity that God finds
abhorrent.
We can't do that.
But we can love them.
And we can treat them as those for
whom Christ died, and we can bring them
to Jesus Christ.
And we should.
Now I want to take a look at
a different passage of Scripture for a moment.
1 Corinthians chapter 5.
Because in 1 Corinthians we find the Apostle
Paul addressing a church that has allowed relativism
to get into their midst.
They've allowed it to creep in from outside.
The studies that have been done about societal
norms in the church unfortunately demonstrate that in
most Christian churches, that is nominally Christian churches,
whatever is happening in society is usually reflected
in the church about seven years later.
It takes about seven years for the degradation,
the degrading of truth in the outside world
to make its way into the church.
And that's what we find here in 1
Corinthians chapter 5.
Although we would never say that I have
a choice as to what I believe in
order for my salvation, we do say I
have a choice as to what I believe
I can do or I can't do, or
what's right for me to do as a
Christian and what's not right for me to
do as a Christian.
And that's called relativism.
It's relativism within the confines of Christianity that
has to do with our behavior rather than
our beliefs.
And we see that here in 1 Corinthians
chapter 5.
Let's read it together.
I'll put it up on the screen.
I'll just read it to you here.
It's actually reported that there is sexual immorality
among you and such sexual immorality as is
not even named among the Gentiles that a
man has his father's wife.
Hmm.
Isn't that interesting?
Paul, who is not at Corinth, is talking
about a reputation that has been disseminated about
these Corinthian Christians.
And the reputation is that they have allowed
something into their midst that everybody else recognizes
as being wrong.
I mean, if everybody else didn't recognize it
as being wrong, why would the reputation have
spread, right?
I mean, if somebody's doing something good in
a local church, do you hear that in
all the other churches?
Well, Paul sometimes praised churches for the reputation
they had.
But in this case, it's a reputation for
doing what is wrong, for tolerating sin.
And the reputation is such that it's come
to the ears of Paul, who isn't even
in Corinth.
And his confusion or his disdain, if you
want to put it that way, is not
that this sin took place.
It's that it's being tolerated in the church.
That these brothers and sisters in Christ haven't
done anything about it.
They haven't condemned this individual.
They haven't tried to reconcile him to Christ.
They haven't tried to cause repentance in his
heart.
They have accepted what he's doing.
And the reputation has spread that these Christians
are tolerating sin.
And not just any sin.
A sin that even the Gentiles wouldn't put
up with.
So what's happened here is this group of
believers in Corinth have somehow come to the
conclusion that this thing which everybody knows is
wrong is okay for this one individual.
I mean, he can do that.
He can make that choice.
We're not going to tell him it's wrong.
And that's called relativism.
And so we have an example here of
relativism moving out of the secular world into
the church and beginning to affect the believer's
understanding of truth.
What does God permit?
What does God not permit?
What does God call sin?
And what does God not call sin?
And what this man was involved in was
clearly sin.
And yet the believers had decided that it
was tolerable.
Not only had they considered it tolerable, they
had affirmed it.
You know how we know?
Because he was still in their midst.
They had basically said by their behavior, we
accept you in this behavior.
You're still part of us.
This is okay.
And Paul says, this is not okay.
He goes on to say, and you are
puffed up and have not rather mourned that
he who has done this deed might be
taken away from among you.
And then he goes on to say, I'm
not there, but I've already judged.
I've already looked at this and discerned that
this is sin.
I've already recognized that this is something that
you should have recognized as sin, and you
should have done something about it.
And he goes on to encourage them as
to what they should do.
But you notice how relativism had crept into
this church in Corinth?
Now, it's not just this one instance we
have.
There were other problems in Corinth.
There were problems with the way they met
together to worship the Lord, to celebrate the
Lord's Supper.
Some of them would say, it's okay for
you to just come and take the bread
and wine, but for me, I'm going to
come and I'm going to have a feast,
and I'm just going to feed myself.
And if you can't do that or you
choose not to do that, that's okay for
you, but for me, this is what I'm
going to do.
That's relativism.
And it had creeped into the church, crept
into the church, and was tainting their effectiveness
for Jesus Christ and their testimony for Jesus
Christ.
Now, it not only creeps into the church,
it also creeps into our lives.
Why didn't the church do something about this,
man?
Why didn't they see this for what it
was and see the necessity of doing something
about it?
Because they had allowed themselves to abandon the
absolute standards of God, and they had adopted
a relativistic perspective on sin.
Instead of saying, this is what God says,
this is what you're doing, it does not
agree, we need to do something about this,
repent, confess your sin, turn away from it.
They didn't do that.
They had adopted a relativistic perspective on sin,
and unfortunately, it happens to us as well.
Avoiding relativism is not the same thing as
legalism.
Legalism, we hear that word thrown around a
lot, way too much.
Because if an assembly or a group of
believers decides we are going to live after
the pattern that God has given to us,
and we expect that others are going to
do that too, that's not legalism.
That's called faithfulness to the scriptures.
But if we start to say, look, we've
got these other things that we want you
to do that aren't particularly biblical, but they
show piety and they demonstrate that you have
some concern for Christ or whatever it might
be, whatever we attach to those extra things,
and we say, you have to not only
live according to scriptures, you have to do
these other things too, that's legalism.
But that's not what we're talking about.
We're not talking about a choice of relativism
or legalism, we're talking about a choice of
relativism or faithfulness to the word of God.
We're not talking about going into legalism.
But this church had made the choice to
abandon the absolute standards of God and to
accept what was not a standard of God.
Following God's standard is not legalism, it is
faithfulness.
As I mentioned, legalism is adopting our own
standards that go beyond God's specific direction in
his word and then requiring others to hold
these new, more restrictive standards as if they
were God's own.
This is the very thing that Jesus condemned
in the Pharisees.
The Pharisees had their laws, they called the
sayag, the fence.
And in order not to violate Moses' law,
they had established all these other laws to
surround the law of Moses, and they said,
well, if we don't violate any of these,
we certainly won't violate the law of Moses.
And that's okay, that's a perfectly fine individual
decision to make.
If I don't live this way, and if
I don't allow myself to go this far,
then I will never go far enough in
order to violate the law of God.
That's okay.
You can make that choice on your own.
But when you start requiring someone else to
live by the standards that you set that
go beyond the principles of God's word, that's
legalism.
And that will destroy the fellowship in a
church.
It will destroy the joy in a fellowship,
because God doesn't require that of us.
Now what about us?
Do we ever get to the point where
we take a relativistic view of sin?
And I think if we're honest, we would
look at our own lives and say, well,
if I'm tolerating any sin in my life,
I would have to say yes, I've taken
on a relativistic view of sin.
Because if I didn't, if I held to
the standards of God, absolutely, then I would
not tolerate that sin in my life.
But if it's there and I haven't done
anything about it, I know better than the
Corinthian Christians.
Because somehow I have allowed myself to set
aside what God requires, and I've allowed myself
to make my own decision about what is
good and what is evil, about what I
will tolerate and what I will not tolerate.
And it's easy for us on an individual
basis to become relativistic on our view of
our own sin.
Or maybe it's within the family.
Maybe there's something going on in our families.
Maybe it's a loved one.
And we have allowed ourselves to tolerate what's
going on in their lives, even though we
know that it's absolutely wrong.
And as a result of that, we have
become relativistic, because once we tolerate it here,
we have to tolerate it here.
I mean, you can't have fellowship with this
family member who's doing this, living in sin
in this particular manner, and then condemn somebody
else who's doing the same thing, can you?
And so relativism creeps in.
And we take a relativistic view of sin,
and we find ourselves abandoning the absolutes of
God.
The Corinthian Christians were not unique.
They were basically us, maybe on a different
level.
Maybe to a different degree, maybe about things
that were much more obvious, but in our
own lives, we need to be very, very
careful.
Do I hold to the standards of God
in my own behavior?
Or have I allowed myself to slip?
Have I allowed his standards to be dropped
so that I can make my own decisions
and I can live the way that I
want to, even within Christianity?
Because if I have, then I have become
relativistic.
And it's just as wrong for me as
a Christian as it would be for the
unsaved person who decides to abandon Christianity and
go some other direction because they want to
make up their own mind and sincerely believe
something that God says is wrong.
So it's a challenge to us.
We recognize it in others.
We recognize its foolishness in others when it
comes to salvation.
But are we as honest in our own
lives?
Are we as honest looking at our own
behavior, at our own sin, to find it
silly, to find it untenable, unworkable, unrighteous?
That's the way God sees it.
Heavenly Father, we thank you that we have
this example in 1 Corinthians 5, that we
can see clearly in this extreme example what
perhaps we tolerate in our own lives in
a smaller way.
Help us to learn to abhor relativism, to,
as the Apostle Paul says in Romans 12,
to abhor that which is evil and cling
to that which is good, that our lives
might be characterized by very clear adherence to
your principles.
Not to go to the legalistic side, but
to be faithful and consistent in our understanding
of what you require of us and in
living our lives by the power of the
Holy Spirit in concert with your principles.
Help us not to be relativistic.
Help us to see things clearly through your
eyes so that we can see our sins
the way you see our sins and so
that we can repent and confess and keep
our lives clean before you so that we
are fit vessels for you to use in
your service and that we may bring you
the worship and the glory that you deserve.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.