Proverbs 4:24-27

“Put away from you crooked speech,
and put devious talk far from you.
Let your eyes look directly forward,
and your gaze be straight before you.
Keep straight the path of your feet,
and all your ways will be sure.
Do not swerve to the right or to the left;
turn your foot away from evil.” NRSV

How much are we willing to compromise? Oh, I think I would be the first to protest and say that I never compromise, but that would be a lie, a compromise in itself. For when I want to win, to be right, to be in control, I’m more than willing to compromise. Unconsciously, I think I see it as some kind of trade-off. I guess it is. A trade of my righteousness for my desire.

Bad idea.

For the fact is, crooked speech isn’t always obvious. Deviousness isn’t always easy to see. When I put aside the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—and pick up a cause like a standard, I embrace crookedness and deviousness. I put myself in place of God Who is ever more concerned about each soul than He is who wins some kind of cultural or social war. The fact is, He wins each and every time because, over the long haul, God gets everything His way. Period. And when I’m willing to believe, somehow, that the end justifies the means, I lose. It’s that simple.

I visited a website this weekend that purports to be Christian. I say “purports” because many of the discussion boards are filled with anger, with rage, with insults, with demeaning talk. I don’t see patience there or kindness or gentleness or self-control. Rather I see people willing to embrace crooked speech, people willing to say just about anything if it means they “win” the argument. It seems to me it’s something like winning the battle but losing the war. How often do we embrace behavior that we know, in an isolated situation is wrong, in order to try to promote a cause we believe to be right?

“Turn your foot away from evil.”

It’s pretty straight forward. There doesn’t seem to be any room to compromise, even if the end in sight seems to justify what we are doing now. But the fact is, how is what we do in these situations any different from what Satan does?

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15-16a NRSV).

Wolves aren’t classified by their “wolf-ness” but rather by their “fruits” (same word as that used in Galatians 5). By all other appearances they look like the sheep.

Ouch! Am I sometimes a wolf?

I think that I need to ask myself what’s important. Is it important that I exude the fruit of the Spirit or is it important that I advance the cause of Christ? What’s important to Him? The fact is, there isn’t anywhere that we are commanded to convince the world of the rightness of Christianity, only that we are to preach the gospel and to love each other as Christ loves us. I think that we get so obsessed with trying to prove our own position right, we forget that the war’s already been won.

© 2008 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. International copyright reserved. This study may be copied for nonprofit and/or church purposes only without permission when copied in its entirety (including this notice).