Colored Christianity

I recently covered the concept that there is more than one absolute "correct righteousness." In viewing morality we often fall into a mode of judgment that views everything as black, white, or somewhere in between.

However, seeing that God has each of His children at different places in their spiritual walk, we often find it difficult to see the 'color' of someone else's faith, if you will. We would like to point to a place on the picture above and say, "this is how pure your faith is." We would like to easily judge spiritual life of another and give an exact judgement, then move on in our faith to see what else we can find to classify and judge.

However, there are two key flaws in this approach. First, we find that morality is not really a greyscale pattern that goes from black to white with some grey in between. Instead, we find that it is more like a color wheel, where it is not always easy to see if your yellow is as close to the white center as my blue.

We find that it can be much more difficult than a simple black and white judgement, but we find that God, and by extension morality, is far more complex then what we first assume or perhaps desire it to be. And in desiring the simplicity of judgement on our peers and their lives, we run into the second major flaw in greyscale morality: Love, or more accurately, the profound lack thereof once we find ourselves so enamored with judging other people's spiritual state.

"Wait a minute," you may be saying, "Are we not told to judge the fruit of others in the Sermon on the Mount?" Indeed, we are told to judge. But we are told to judge the works of these people on the basis of being good or bad, not the level of goodness or level of badness. Our flesh so often creeps in and want to be the best at whatever we are doing. This can apply to our spiritual walk far to easily as well; we want to be the most holy, or most wise, or ironically, the most humble. We go to great lengths to judge others walk with God in order to lift our own up. This is a struggle that happens daily, and we are called to daily deny ourselves, and put that part of us to death.

So wether you are on the blue side working up and to the right, or on the red side working toward the left, we need to remember that our position, and even the position of others is not the focus. The focus is to be Christ, the perfect center. If we keep our focus there, we are bound to improve. If we focus instead on others and their errors, we will only try to correct their mistakes in our lives. It may be that someone in the green area needs to go further down on the 'color scale of holiness' but if the person in the purple sees this and tries to correct themselves by what they feel the green needs, they will end up further away rather than closer to the center. We cannot easily correct others, nor is it often our job; this belongs to the Holy Spirit.

The point I am heading toward is simply this - If we try to judge other's spiritual walk by where we are, we will fail. We cannot easily see other's place. Often we cannot comprehend why others do what they do, but we judge them anyways. We are to judge the fruit of a person by its good or bad state; we are not supposed to rank the taste of each fruit to our own liking for then our personal bias has far more of an effect than actual morality does. If we each strive to become purer and more like Christ each day and see that others are doing the same, that is be best fruit we can ever wish for.