By: Shane James O’Neill
Matthew 5:22-24
The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
A Subtle Problem With Big Implications
“Once a sinner, always a sinner,” is a phrase we Christians often throw around. We use it out of sensitivity, because life is hard and the struggle is real. But this sensitivity is raising up a generation of feeble Christ followers. The idea behind the phrase is teaching our Christian culture that you can only fight sin so much — and by implication, you know only so much freedom. This cultural teaching creates an expectation of failure that constantly reminds us that our sin is normal, because after all, “you can’t be perfect here on earth,” as the remarks often go. Consequently, this emphasis is neutering the growth and confidence of Jesus’ Body.
I get the rationale. But was Jesus who said, “Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Are we compromising the call of Jesus in order to meet a worldly expectation of freedom?
The consummation of the cosmos will bring perfection, but if we’re not pushing into that now, are we really following Jesus?
What the heck is grace?!
I know that objections about works and Law can come into a conversation like this, so let’s look into that area for a moment.
Grace is a nifty Gospel element because it sidesteps past the ‘right and wrong’ dimensions of human psychology and works on a field of relationship. Jesus, in John 17:3, says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Salvation is quite literally, knowing God. Sanctification is the process of getting to know God, through the person of Jesus. The Christian Covenant is one that says, “God when I fail, I will no longer run to other things to know safety. And God, when I’m doing well, I will embrace your delight”. The point is to always be His and the issue of failure is taken off the table, entirely. Or, as I heard someone once say, “With grace, when you sin, you don’t backslide you always front slide into His arms.”
Paul says, “whatever does not come from faith is sin.” There’s a lot of simplicity in that statement. It isn’t about wrong or right, falling or standing, failure or success — it’s about knowing Him and being His.
Grace is not just something we claim when we fail — it’s the empowerment to know God in everything that we do. Perhaps we’re marginalizing areas of Jesus’ teachings because of our watered down understanding of grace.
Getting Back to Matthew 5
I think the most difficult thing for me, when I’ve watched porn, is how much it distorts my image of people. The Gospel has given me a new heart, but that gift becomes a kind of curse when I am trying to serve two masters (lust and Jesus). It really is as though there are two contrasting lights inside of me, trying to create opposing lenses for me to see the world by.
This passage is helpful because it tells us: what we look at colors what we see and what we focus upon is what we are serving. And this passage forces us to ask ourselves (amongst other things): what are the images that we are regularly looking at? What are the ways we are choosing to see people? What are the ways we’ve chosen to see ourselves? And are we forcing Jesus to share space inside of us with darkness?
Settling for the enslavement of pornography is damaging you in more ways than you know.
Getting Past The Lie
Believing you’re a saint theologically and a sinner experientially isn’t doing justice to yourself or to Jesus. Are you the sinner who will always be stuck and trapped in your sin, or are you a saint and child of God who is committed to Jesus’ discipleship of freedom?
It’s time to stop being a Christian who serves two masters.
Grace carries us in a direction, and the teachings of Jesus puts us on a path. We can’t passively sit in our filth and say that we’re following Jesus, and we can’t live like hell and call ourselves citizens of heaven.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for ProvenMen Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.