Dear Editor,
It seems many Christians have become swept away by what I call the Cultural Morality Movement.
To try and bring morality to an immoral culture is quite difficult and there are more than a few things we should be aware of.
The first is that, as Christians, cultural morality is not our commission.
Jesus called us to take the Gospel message to the ends of the earth. The message of the Cross has been empowered by God to save people from their sin.
The Cultural Morality Movement also wastes a great amount of time, money and human energy on something, which according to Scripture, is not going away.
This movement also sets us up to fail. We cannot make people moral. Only God, by imparting the Holy Spirit, can do this.
This movement also puts the responsibility on man to make the world better instead of getting people to God through Christ for their conversion.
One of the real dangers of the movement is the only pattern for this type of activity in the New Testament is the Pharisees and Jesus did not speak highly of their activity.
This movement also creates unholy unions. The movement binds together Christians with enemies of the Gospel for the sake of a more moral society. Christians are building a Kingdom that is not of this world.
We cannot make alliances with unbelievers for superficial surface works that will not save.
This movement is also selective of the sins in which it attacks. The Gospel message changes hearts and spirits.
Through a spiritual transformation all sinful actions will be changed not just the select few.
This movement also fails to understand true spiritual warfare. We are fighting human ideology with the truth of God. The salt and light that Jesus speaks of is not as much a moral influence as it is a Gospel witness and pure holy living in our own lives.
A severe problem with the movement is that it tries to create human morality without Christ. This leads us to be persecuted for the wrong reasons. We make those we are trying to reach, with the Gospel that saves, into our enemies.
When those on our mission field despise us we will have very little effect reaching them.
Scriptural persecution came from the highly religious that held to a Cultural Morality Movement instead of the Cross of Christ.
This is still going on today if you are unwilling to get behind certain moral movements.
The true Christian loves the lost and desires that they come to Christ to be saved from their sin. We cannot knock the sin out of the human nature. Christ is the only one with the power to transform a sinful human into a holy child of God.
A major misunderstanding in this movement is that a moral culture gives the Gospel the ability to work.
This is false. The Gospel message is our only hope because it is the only way God has made for us to be saved.
Today’s social gospel is preaching morality without serving up the Good News of Christ as the only way for a person to be right with God.
I believe this is the sum of it all.
The people behind the Cultural Morality Movement want others to be right with their desire for a moral society. They are more concerned about the culture that surrounds them than they are concerned that people come to Christ to be saved for all eternity.
We must understand that the greatest gift we can give to those we love is a message that will save.
To force morality upon people without a conversion to Christ is the greatest act of legalism in our world today.
We, the Christians, must get back to spreading the message of Christ!
Thomas R. Swain,
First Church of God,
Great Bend