SBS:The Good and the Bad of Moral Neutrality

In recent days I've come to belong to a circle of bloggers, demurely labeled the Secret Blog Society. Once a week someone poses a question that the other members must reply to on their respective blogs. It's all very exciting and exclusive. But anyways, this week's question had been posed and I must, in all my infinite wisdom, answer it.

The question is based on a quote by Matt Chandler and reads... "The majority of us lack depth in Christ, not because of bad/wicked things but rather, morally neutral things - things that scripture wouldn't outright call sinful, but we just have so much of them [the morally neutral things] in our lives that we've kind of drowned out the voice of G-d, drowned out time to be with Him, drowned out...[insert something you have drowned out]. So we just busy ourselves with morally neutral things and then we think we're DOING ALRIGHT, because we're not doing BAD."

So the question is- Can too much of a morally neutral thing be eternally bad; and are there morally neutral things in your personal life that Christ is asking you to get rid of, or remove - things he just wants out, even though there is nothing evil about it?

My answer is thus. ( I am on borrowed Internet time, so it shall be brief, but life changing)

Yes.

As Christians our highest calling is to be imitators of Christ. Not just believers, but imitators. We are urged to not merely have alright behavior, but blameless behavior. So if we are satisfied with living a merely alright Christian life then I'm afraid we've missed the point. Shouldn't it be our deepest desire to live a life that is pleasing to God? It's not that morally neutral things, like tv, video games, what have you, are bad-it's that they can keep us from living a Spirit filled life. They can distract us from our purpose, which is to serve Christ. When our lives are filled with seemingly innocuous activites, we risk losing that intimacy with Jesus. It's a sly trick of the Devil...his greatest victory comes not if we do something obviously evil, like commit murder or have affairs; it comes when we choose to spend our time watching tv instead of spending time in the Word. It's those small gradual shifts of focus from God to other things-that's where the danger lies. The morally ambiguous things in life become bad when they keep us from living life as imitators of Christ. We shouldn't be satisfied with 'just alright". We should strive to live holy lives, or we might find ourselves slowly falling away from God. CS Lewis hit the nail on the head when he wrote that "The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

I had a lot more to say but not enough time to say it. But maybe that's for the best. Whatev. Goodnight.