If you’re sleeping with someone else’s spouse, I need not inquire into the motives of your heart to know that you are in sin. God has already told us that there is simply no righteous way to do what you are doing. Before we even look, we know that the motives of your heart are going to be a mess. (What sort of mess, we’ll find out when we look. But there will be a mess, right enough.) As a minister of the gospel it is my solemn duty to name your adultery for what it is and encourage you to get out of it, right now.
But when it comes to what you eat or don’t, which holidays you celebrate, and similar matters, I am not allowed to tell you what to do, and you are not allowed to let me. Colossians 2 and Romans 14 are painfully clear on this point.
Christian liberty does not mean that there is no way to be wrong before God. It means that the nature of the issue is such that it’s your mistake to make. The thing may be fine in itself, but something God is calling you to leave behind as a hindrance for you. I don’t get to make that call for you; my pastoral authority does not extend that far. I can (and do, cautiously) make observations and suggestions, but the matter is between you and God.
God may give you Rolex watches, catalog dresses, snazzy cars, ice cream, good Scotch, fat theology books, interesting movies, thick steaks. These are all good gifts to enjoy, so enjoy them, knowing that a day may come when He calls you to give them up. As David Field recently put it, there is nothing in your life that you did not already lose the day you became Jesus’ disciple. God can, at any time, with anything you have, say, “I’ll have that back now, thank you.” He has given you everything, down to your very breath — and the day will come when you release a breath, and God does not give you another.
So hold it all loosely. God might call you to wear your blue jeans to church in order to mortify your vanity. He might call you to wear a suit and tie to church, to mortify your sloth. He may call you to dye your hair pink for reasons that aren’t quite clear to you, or to quit dyeing your hair pink…or even to quit dyeing your hair its pre-grey natural color (gasp!) because that’s become an idol for you. Now taking one thing with another, hair dye is among those things which perish with the using, and I don’t have the right to tell you what to do. This matter is within your liberty, and that means that you are permitted to do as you like, even though you may be dead wrong.
The point is not that God can’t or won’t require you to move in a particular direction; the point is that nobody else can.
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