Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” Proverbs 14:12 (NIV)
There are sometimes voices and impulses within us that speak with such seeming truth that we are unable to see them for what they really are-poison to the soul. These voices and impulses can take many forms and usually are deeply tied with desires we have, which may be conscious or subconscious and either good or bad. These desires sometimes call on us to heed them with a deeply compelling urgency, yet we may not be fully aware of the sway they hold over us nor the fact that our hearts and minds react to them by coming up with unhealthy ideas on how they may be quenched.
These ideas do not always register with us as being unhealthy. The fallen human heart is deceitful, we are told by the prophet Jeremiah, and more than capable of fooling us into thinking good evil and, more importantly for our purpose here, evil good. This has been true throughout human history and perhaps at no time so prevalent as today. We live in a society that says if it feels right, do it. Perhaps more significantly contemporary culture increasingly tells us that if it seems right it usually is right. This tendency should not be too surprising in an age which has come to largely reject the idea of an objective and absolute code of moral behavior, one that has been revealed to us by a transcendent God, in favor of making self-centered man the measure of all things.
The result of this rejection should be increasingly obvious to believers in that God, but this is not always the case. We (the author included) are only as likely to recognize it as we are able to stay close to the truth through disciplines such as consistent Bible study, sincere prayer and real Christian fellowship. All of these can be conduits for the direction of the Holy Spirit. Our own discernment of right and wrong is inviolably linked to such practices and without such discernment we find ourselves more likely to rationalize illicit ideas about how to avoid pain and/or seek pleasure. Part of this rationalization is a result of tapping into the deceit of the flesh without knowing (and often not wanting to know) that we have done so. As a result, we come up with notions on how we should live that seem right but put us on a course of self-deception that can distance us from God without our knowing it until the damage is done.
One example of this self-deception that is particularly prevalent in the Church today is the increasing tendency of believers to come to the conclusion that, at any cost, “God wants me to be happy.” This sounds good to people who are not very conversant with the biblical truth that in a fallen world we may have to endure pain, even long periods of pain, for an ultimate good that will not be realized in this life but the next. This creates a sort of spiritual Myopia which leads to thinking that we must be happy now because the now is all there is. This might seem like an error that could be easily corrected by hearing any number of Sunday sermons but the aforementioned tendency of our flesh to rationalize sin, in order to meet a consciously or unconsciously felt need, is powerfully present.
If you doubt this “happiness now” spirit is growing in the Church today you only need to look at one glaring example, the increase in our divorce, and re-marriage statistics in the last half-century. It is amazing how many today will break a covenant they made before God and their spouse and wreak destruction upon their children, because they have decided they have made a “mistake” in marrying the husband or wife of their youth (This is often helped along by adulterous “true love” for someone new that promises the renewal of the intrinsically transitory romantic bliss they once knew with their first partner during the dating period and early in the union.)
The state of marriage in the Church is obvious evidence for feel-good solutions that end in misery, but it is surely not the only one. We also see it in our materialism, our entertainment choices, our politics, and our treatment of people both inside and outside the Christian community, among other things.
The question then obviously begged is how we avoid self-deceptions that feel and, thus, seem right? The answer is largely found in pursuing the spiritual disciplines mentioned earlier, namely Bible study, prayer and fellowship. The last of these is a discipline that is increasingly ignored in our hyper-busy and self-centered age. We cannot meet with each other for two hours on a Sunday morning and think this is being in authentic biblical community. We must consciously endeavor to live as much of lives out in common with our fellow believers as possible. Within that mandate we also need to be intentional about pursuing good advice from more than one person for “in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14, KJV) It is also desirable to find an older, more experienced Christian, with an obvious level of holiness in living, to be a primary spiritual advisor. This often is found in the person of a pastor or Christian counselor.
If we pursue the disciplines, including these relational ones, we will be better armed against the lies that come out of the flesh (that part of us that remains which leads us into error and self-destructive action even after we have truly come to Christ, and which will remain a present challenge until the day we go to be with Him.) For all this to work we must remain vigilant in our own pursuit of sanctification while consciously depending on the Holy Spirit and His power. It is in this dependence that sinful error masquerading as truth will no longer be able to fool us into seeking the “way that appears to be right” but ends in death.