The Balanced Christian - Part One

Those who know me well know that I am an advocate of balance in the Christian life. What do I mean by this?

Remember when Jesus told the Disciples to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Saducees. They at first thought he was speaking literally but became aware that he was actually telling them to beware the false doctrines of both groups. What were there false doctrines? Boiling it down to its simplest terms the Pharisees were guilty of adding to the Scriptures a whole pile of rules and regulations that became the focus of their religion which blinded them to Christ. The Saducees took away from the Scripture certain things they rejected and thus were also blinded to Christ.

There is an important principle here. The Bible essentially teaches a balanced life for the Christian and whenever we add to or take away from the Scriptures we get unbalanced. Sometimes this is blatant: Did you grow up in a church that required a dress code for attendance at church? This was the yeast of the Pharisees as the Bible teaches no such dress code for church attendance - it was simply the preferences of men that were being enforced. Did you grow up in a church that tried to explain that the miracles of the Bible weren't really miracles but could be easily explained via natural phenomena? This was the yeast of the Saducees as the Bible was doubted.

For most evangelicals, the yeast of the Pharissees is a far greater temptation. If you are an evangelical you probably saw more of your church in the first example than in the second. However, the yeast of the Saducees is making a tremendous comeback through some of the emergent church teachers and their allies.

Most of us have a problem with a mixture of the two. We sometimes side with the Pharisees and sometimes with the Saducees making us guilty of both. Actually, when you look at it, both groups were essentially similar on the inside as both rejected Christ outright and, whether they wanted to admit it or not, they rejected God's Word as well.

This thing we are calling balance is very important. Sometimes inbalance is easy to see and sometimes it is not. Sometimes we accidentally invoke either extreme without meaning to do it. This comes primarily from focusing on parts of the Bible's teaching without focusing on the whole teaching of the Bible. While we may be sincerely trying to uphold God's Word, we actually undermine it through our unbalance, and thus get infected with the yeast. The Thinking Servant has been guilty of this at times and still occasionally has to repent when shown his error. Examples of some of these current day inbalances will be featured in the next column.