We All Know About Fifty Shades Of Grey. Maybe you haven’t thought about it like this before.
It is Sunday morning. Pastor Jones stands in the pulpit, his heart burning with a message about how important it is to be passionate about our relationship with God, and how much we must be consumed with a zeal for His heart.
Pastor Jones refers to King David and his psalms about following hard after God; how he rises up early in the morning to seek God’s face. And Pastor Jones says, “we must all be like David.”
The congregation, moved by his message, says, “Yes. Yes. We must all be like David.”
The next Sunday morning, Pastor Jones stands in the pulpit, his heart burning with a message about how important it is to be faithful in marriage; about how David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and what damage and chaos it brought in his life and the lives of those he touched with his infidelity and collusion to murder.
And Pastor Jones refers to the decieptfulness of sin and how much it destroys in our lives and our relationship with God, and says, “we must not be like David.”
The congregation, moved by his message. says, “No. No. We must not be like David.”
We All Fall Down
The scriptures have many records of generally good people who stumbled along the way. Abraham lied about his wife to save his neck; Samson was chosen as leader of his people, but gave into the wiles of a woman and lost so much. David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and later had her husband killed to try to hide the evidence. Saul started out well, but as life went on, jealousy set in and he did many foolish and sinful things that destroyed the potential for God to use him. Some, like David, ended well. Others, like Saul, did not.
We all fall down sometimes. Like the lyric in the song says, “a saint is just a sinner who falls down, and gets up again.”
Micah 6:8 says
“He hath shown thee, o man, what is good and what the Lord requires of thee? To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”
We need to encourage each other to good works, always looking for a view of people as God sees them – looking at their potential to draw near, to repent of sin, to become more Christlike. “His anger is but for a moment; but his mercy endures to a thousand generations.” And remember that it ain’t over till it’s over.
Because, as much as we often want to see everything in black and white, the reality is that we are all just varying shades of grey.