These are a series of lessons adapted from Jonathan Fisk’s book, Broken. All are encouraged buy Broken to get the full content in the book.
Never follow a rule that wasn’t written in stone a long, long time ago
While Dame Mysticism seductively calls out to you to transcend the pain of this world through deep emotional experiences, the second rule, Moralism, is more like a strongman who patrols the streets. He is ever ready, with his hand on his sword and his shield in tow.
Like Mysticism, he wears many disguises and changes into as many opinions as there are humans whom he can deceive. Moralism cares far less for what he feels than what he believes he can do if only he tries hard enough. “Follow me,” he speaks with a firm word, “and I will show you the real path to God.” He promises, “Heed my advice, and I will build a better world by what you do. Work hard and never say die, and I will teach you to find God with your hands.”
Moralism: The belief that you can access God through your personal efforts or strivings to improve yourself. Moralism, then, is nothing more than the worship of your works.
The great weapon of Moralism is that he does not tempt you with evil. Instead, he tempts you with good. With your own fondest dreams, with all your best hopes for a better world, Moralism promises that you hold in your hands the power to make it all come true. No future possibility is too lofty. There is nothing you cannot achieve. “Just do this,” he says, “and you will live.” The sad reality is that whatever “this” may be, no matter how hard you might work at it and how pure your designs might be, Moralism’s “do” is never done.
Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda
Moralism then lies in ambush for you to lower the bar. In fact, Moralism can’t exist without it. Once he has taught you that your hands are the answer to all your problems, he must also teach you to cheat–just a little, just for you. If he didn’t, then he would be only morality, a belief in good and evil.
Morality is good. That’s knowing God’s created truths, which help make the world work efficiently and in harmony. But Moralism doesn’t want you to worship God and believe in God’s morality. He wants you to worship yourself by following these two steps.
- Step 1: Trust in morality as the path to find God’s blessings.
- Step 2: Place that morality on your personal, sliding scale.
Whether it’s the Ten Commandments written or your New Year’s resolution to eat properly, lose weight, or read more books, the moral doesn’t matter. The rules you follow can be your own opinions or an eternal truth. What matters is your belief that, by following those rules, you will alter the course of your life, the universe, or both. What matters is that when you find you can’t follow those rules perfectly, you find a way to make it look like you have.
In this way, Moralism does not tempt you to believe in something good and do those good deeds for other people. He tempts you, in a roundabout way, to do good deeds for yourself. The goal is to be good, so you can look at yourself and say, “Hey, check it out. I’m doing well!” But when you fail just a little, you change the definition of “good,” just enough to convince yourself that you are succeeding.
The more you bend the “good” to fit yourself in it, the more you believe that you have been a good person! You convince yourself that you’ve done what is right most of the time. You buy into your own illusion that you are making the world a better place. But the more this happens, the more you also begin to think that everyone else isn’t living up to their end of the bargain.
When you look around, you start to get frustrated that no one else can reach the new, mostly good measure of all–you. Having come to the conviction that you are (at least) pleasing God by the work of your hands, what you can’t see is how far you adjusted the meter. Over time, you’ve nudged the results and changed the final score to appear in your favor.
2 Corinthians 10:12: “We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves to those who recommend themselves. Whenever they measure themselves by their own standards, or compare themselves with themselves, they show how foolish they are.”
– What are some dangers by measuring your goodness on such a self-generated scale?
Then one day, you wake up and somewhere deep inside you something refuses to buy the lie. Moralism’s greatest weakness is that while he can fool our heads, he cannot forever fool our hearts. Without Mysticism’s help, human hearts can only live so long under Moralism before they begin screaming out that something is wrong. Eventually, the screaming gets loud enough that our heads start to take notice.
The Placebo Defect
Moralism is so well loved. He is a strongman, or at least he is a strong pretender. His encouragements are effective, convincing you that your hands are the answer to your problems. So ingenious are his arguments, so charismatic his personality, many people don’t even begin to see the holes in his plan until they lie in a hospital bed with doctors telling them that death is at their door.
Then they begin to realize what a flood of guilt they’ve buried behind a dam built of lowered bars and sliding scales. Caught in the end-of-life whirlwind, the only answer to the guilt breaking through the dam is to fight back with a catalog of conjured-up memories. He’s a man with a set of balances. He stacks his lists of the good deeds on one side, trying to balance that against his painful awareness of the good he hasn’t done, not to mention his downright evil deeds. He does his best to ignore that he has his left thumb pressing down on the “good” side of the scale. He whispers to himself and all who visit him: “I kept my rules… I did my best… I gave my all… I did it my way.”
“Of course you did,” the nurse replies as she gives him his pills. But neither the pills nor the empty words help the moralist psyche one bit. His efforts to justify his life based on loopholes, excuses, and lowered bars haunt him like so many excuses. No matter how many times the moralist asserts his successes, not one of them brings lasting comfort. All his efforts to build the perfect excuse still cannot salve his conscience. The heart can’t lie its way out of the tragic truth that he has broken all his own rules, not to mention that God’s rules have been broken too.
Moralism’s promise, “Do this, and you will live,” is never done. The need for law and order is written on every human heart, yet the work of our hands cannot make redemption possible. The result is that we take something created for our good–order, goals, rules, beauty–and then we get horribly and scathingly religious with it.
Under Moralism’s sway, we worship our inkling that true good exists and that we can fill the world full of it. Yet, despite our inbred addiction to considering ourselves the answer to all our problems, we still fail to create a world of innocence and goodness. So, we bend whatever we must to redefine our barometer of success.
The result is the chaos of millions of people, all running around with their own measuring sticks. They chop an inch off every time it suits them, yet complain when another’s stick doesn’t match up to theirs. It all adds up to a world where evil can even be disguised as good, while insisting that everyone else learn to call my “evil” as “good.” All the while, real righteousness, innocence, and goodness slip away even further.
Moralism’s lie: You can find God in your hands. But no matter what we do, the newest car still rusts. You can glue the bite back into the apple, but even you won’t want to eat it then. The world is broken, and the cause of that brokenness is the man in the mirror. Even when someone tries to change his ways and heal the world through that, in the end, it’s only one more of selfish act, another effort to justify himself, another cut that drives the rut deeper.
Read 2 Corinthians 7:9-13
– The guilt and grief of Moralism lead to what?
– What is the proper response to grief and guilt?
In this Corner, the Winner, by Gumming
Ephesians 2:8-10: “For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves–it is God’s gift! It’s not the result of anything you’ve done, so no one can boast. For we are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God has prepared for us to do.”
In one sense, the Law of God is the most important teaching one can ever discover in all of life. It grants wisdom, the ability to know right from wrong, and the gift of seeing the truth from a lie. But it also has a limit. It cannot advance you on your way to goodness.
So consider this: if God’s own perfect, divine Law cannot help you find God with the works of your hands, how much less can your own ideas or dreamed-up schemes ever help you to achieve that end? Sadly, the Moralism dominating the lives of so many Christians in America isn’t rooted in God’s morals. Many Christians can’t even name the Ten Commandments, much less do they use them as their guide for Christian living and the new obedience.
Rather than use the real bar of the Ten Commandments, Moralism has set up the sliding scale of meager improvements and silly half laws, dreamed up by pastors who think their job is to try and make Christianity seem real. We slap Jesus’ name somewhere on the end of our latest idea, and off we go on a merry romp.
But this is precisely where Moralism’s knife-in-the-back, assassin-style warfare is as deadly as any poison that Dame Mysticism might have slipped into your tea. Where the perfect Law of God would stab any thoughts of self-lifting spirituality straight through the heart, self-chosen “good works” lull us into a death of a thousand cuts.
When someone peers at himself in the mirror of God’s perfect Ten Commandments, trying to assess himself, it is a sobering reality. Someone realizes that–if these are the real scales of God’s justice–then he is in serious trouble if there ever comes a real Judgment Day. The perfect Law pierces his heart in two. A growing conviction overtakes him. Although the works of his hands might have achieved some genuine good here and there, it will never be enough to save either himself or the world.
The brutal and glorious honesty of the Ten Commandments deliver all their truth and purity. They are entire. They define “good.” Looking to them as our mirror, we get a clear warning that we are not so good. The truth sword of the Law pierces us and we die under its shadow.
Mirror, mirror in the Law: “For I don’t do the good that I want to do. Instead, I do the evil that I don’t want to do” (Romans 7: 19).
For that gory reason, when set next to the Ten Commandments, the weakened strains of Moralism’s self-appointed rules look far more appealing. They don’t seem so deadly to the conscience. They are less pure and perfect, so they seem more achievable. All the ways we define and redefine what God wants from us make it look as if we can win. Our plans we to fix our little corner of the world, the personal improvements we make, and all our next steps and self-help efforts make it all look achievable.
So, we climb in the ring with Moralism because we think he is a toothless old man compared with the gnarly beast of the Ten Commandments caged over in the corner. But by Round 23, we find ourselves flat on our face, out of breath, and worn out from trying. We find the old man is still perching himself on our back, succeeding in his strategy of gumming us to death.
Read Romans 7:14-20
– What will happen if we seek to find saving goodness in ourselves?
Moralism is a Bad Word
Despite failure after failure, chasing trend after trend, teaching opinion after opinion about work after work, your hands shoulda, woulda, coulda, but didn’t. Moralism marches on. Unlike the Dame Mysticism in her scarlet dress, Moralism is a man of war. He is justice, righteousness, and power. He stands before you and calls you into a world where the lines are drawn clean, where the laws always work, where what is on the outside defines what is on the inside. He says, “Do it just like that, and then it will be good. Then it will be right. Then it will be righteous.”
Grave Paintings
Matthew 23:27: “How terrible it will be for you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead people’s bones and every impurity.”
Nowhere is this sad fact more obvious than in the Christianity we Christians often prefer to buy. It’s common street knowledge the Church is full of hypocrites and self-righteous jerks. It’s one of the main reasons people give for not going to church. They feel judged, not by the pastor preaching on the Ten Commandments, but by the countless, arbitrary rules of a million sliding scales.
The problem is not that American churches are full of sinners. Jesus Christ was crucified to cover all of that. The problem is that our churches have decided they’re better off not believing that they are full of sinners who need forgiveness, but self-improvement.
Ephesians 4:2: Be humble and gentle in every way. Be patient, bearing with one another in love.
Colossians 3:13: Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so also should you forgive.
Galatians 6:2: Carry one another’s burdens; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
– Does Christian love overcome sin in triumph?
– If not, then, besides calling a fellow Christian to repent, how else should a Christian deal with his brother’s sin?
We have erred in the Church. Within the gauntlet of Moralism, we’ve pushed sermon series on the dangers of credit-card debt or have taken action to end world hunger. Instead of being houses to receive God’s forgiveness, we’ve become athletic clubs for training the muscles of self-righteousness. Whether selling toned, spiritual abs or installing the latest treadmills for sanctification, Moralism is a booming business. It hopes to clean the outside until it is spic-and-span, hoping that a shiny outside will help us forget that inside we are full of curses and bitterness.
Read Romans 3:10-14
– What does such a “successful” approach to Christianity leave behind?
Moralism (not morality) is the second rule every Christian should break as often as possible. For you don’t find God in what you do. You find God in what Jesus has done for you with His birth, His life, His suffering and death, with His glorious resurrection and ascension, and with the current preaching of who He is and what He has done.
So, as a Christian, never let anyone tell you Christianity is about what you’re supposed to do, even if the rule was written in stone. Tell Mr. Moralism to go back to a righteous-sounding Devil. Instead, rely on the gift of Jesus, not the work of your hands.
