Sin is slavery. If we don’t understand that, we’re not going to get anything else about our life in Christ right. Jesus himself said, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). And yet, such is the power of deception and habit, that even after we’ve been set free, we keep flirting with sin. We don’t want to fully dive back in, that would too obviously be self-destructive. We want to obey God, sort of. Not like some kind of fanatic, of course, but enough to escape hell, and maybe congratulate ourselves that we’re not like those poor lost sinners enslaved to drugs, or sex, or money. We want the middle way.
Now, if we were thinking straight, we could see immediately that there is no middle way in Jesus’ statement, only obedience to sin or obedience to God. Disobedience to God is obedience to sin, after all. If I see something I want, I either steal it or I don’t. If someone hurts me, I either forgive them or I don’t. All day long I’m constantly making decisions to obey or to disobey. Those little decisions add up to a lifetime of serving God or of serving sin. Serving neither doesn’t seem to be an option. But we want there to be an option.
In part, our problem is that we make the mistake of trying to live as though being born again were the end, rather than the beginning, of what God wants to do in us. Yes, Christ’s work on the cross is finished, but the Spirit’s work in me is not. The Christian life is not just being born again and someday going to heaven, with nothing very important happening in between. On the contrary, living as a follower of Jesus is a moment-by-moment choice to obey God. Not as a way of earning salvation, but as the result of having, by God’s grace, received it.
At this point, somebody is certain to raise the issue of legalism, and that’s a legitimate concern. So what is the role of the law? The apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, “We know that the law is good if one uses it properly” (1 Timothy 1:8). And it is through the law that the sin living inside us is revealed (Romans 7:13, 3:20). This, in fact, was the purpose of the law. Reduced to its fundamental components, the true law is just to love God and to love my neighbor (Romans 13:8-10). But expressed in those terms, it’s all too easy for me to deceive myself that I’m obeying those commands when I’m not. It’s only when God lays out in minute detail what love actually looks like, in a real world example, that all the ways in which I fail to love are exposed.
The real fulfillment and purpose of the law, however, is Christ (Romans 10:4). The law is fulfilled in me when the Spirit of God enables me to obey what God actually intended, which is to become like Jesus (Romans 8:29, 2 Corinthians 3:18, Ephesians 4:11-15).
But I don’t want to become a fanatic. Who does? So there’s got to be a middle way, right? A way that I can maybe be kind of like Jesus, a little bit, but not too much? So let’s look at that.
I think it’s interesting, first off, that this argument, “I don’t want to be a fanatic” is only ever used in one direction. I never find myself saying, “I do like to share gossip with my friends sometimes, but I don’t want to be a fanatic about it.” Or “I’ll look at sexy pictures now and then, but I don’t want to be a fanatic about it.” It’s always the things I should be doing that seem to bring a call for moderation, not the things I know I shouldn’t. Which warns me that the thought, “I don’t want to be a fanatic,” might not be coming from someone who has my best interests in mind.
Let’s try this out: “Yeah, I’d like to get rid of this addiction, but I don’t want to be a fanatic about it.” How about, “I know staying in slavery isn’t the best, but I don’t want to be a fanatic about freedom.” Hmmm. Those don’t sound so good. But if Jesus said that “everyone who sins is a slave to sin,” then maybe “I don’t want to be a fanatic” is a deceptive message that’s actually telling me “what you really want is to stay a slave.” And that’s a lie.
Okay, so there’s no middle way there. Let’s try another tack, and look at everyone’s favorite passage of Scripture:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Awesome! All I have to do is believe. That’s easy! And in the next verse it gets better:
“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17).
The gospel is all about believing and being saved. I like it. Let’s keep going:
“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:18).
That’s a little uncomfortable. Non-believers are not just facing the possibility of being condemned in the future; according to Jesus, they have been condemned already. But on the other hand, those who do trust in Christ will not be condemned. Although a time is coming when everyone will face the judge of the world, the verdict has already been determined. I do believe that Jesus died for my sins and that he rose from the dead, so I think I’m still okay. Let’s continue to the end of the paragraph:
“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God” (John 3:19-21).
Okay, Jesus is making a connection here between pairs of contrasting ideas; believers vs. non-believers, coming into the light vs. remaining in darkness, and actions done “in the sight of God” vs. evil deeds. These are parallel ideas; the believers are the ones who come into the light and whose actions are done in the sight of God. The non-believers remain in the darkness, and their deeds are evil. Importantly, Jesus does not say here that the people who won’t believe will be sent into the darkness; he says they are there already. And the third contrast, at the end of the paragraph, is especially notable, in that doing good without God seems to be excluded as a possibility. Just as, apart from Christ there is no eternal life, so apart from God, no one’s actions are good.
So what’s the middle way here? Is it that part of me can be in the light and part in darkness? If this were simply physical light I could see that happening, but in this context that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Is the middle way, then, going back and forth between light and darkness? Doing some good and some evil? That may be possible, but it doesn’t really sound like a great idea. “I don’t want to be a fanatic, so I’ll make sure I spend half my time doing evil?” I can’t really see God being okay with that. In fact, he’s already said:
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin (1 John 1:5-7).
The problem I run into whenever I try to find a middle way is holiness. Scripture says that “by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Hebrews 10:14), and “without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). It seems that God wants to take this whole “righteousness by faith” thing (Romans 3:21-24) all the way to the end. He doesn’t just call me holy and righteous in his sight; he’s determined to make me holy and righteous. When the Scripture says in 1 John 1:7, “the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin,” God means that in its fullest sense. He’s not just removing the guilt and the punishment for sin, he’s removing the sin itself.
And that’s a big problem if I’m trying to find a middle way, because it means I’m working against God himself. God wants me to be holy. Not moderately holy. Not holy some of the time. Completely holy. But it turns out that holiness doesn’t look very much like its popular stereotype. Rather, as I said earlier, it looks like Jesus.
In the end, there’s no middle way because there’s no middle destination. Life does not let me stand still as I am. Day by day I’m changing, growing, being transformed. And in this process of change I’m either growing to be more like Jesus or I’m becoming less like him. I’m allowing God to mold me into the person he created me to be in the first place, or I am molding myself (or allowing somebody else to mold me) into someone very different than what God intended.
As I’ve said before in another article, the reason I call the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition of honoring saints unfortunate isn’t because there’s anything wrong with honoring faithful Christians. It’s unfortunate because it has led far too many Christians to be comfortable with not being a saint. And we Protestants have gotten comfortable with that as well. We forget that God expects every follower of Jesus to, well, follow Jesus. To follow him in reality, and not just in our words.
So we’ve come back to the beginning: sin is slavery. Obedience to God is freedom. And in between these two is nothing. There is no middle way.