Gray Matter: Media, Movies, and Miller Time

  • Reid Monaghan
  • Sep 28, 2006

As believers who are called to walk into culture with the gospel of the Jesus Christ, we will confront many issues together which, for lack of a better term, may be called gray areas. Many times these will surface in the form of questions: How much should a Christian participate in certain cultural forms, art, entertainment, social scene, etc? People vary in convictions, yet the Bible is not silent on these things. However, it can be confusing with many issues coming down to matters of conscience where all may not agree. Some think it sin to drink a beer; others think it only a sin to drink a light beer. To live an answer to these many issues, we must first consult the clear teaching of Scripture and evaluate our current views by that light. Yet many times Christians just launch into debates on gray matters without knowing the real reasons we should care about such things. I will give two reasons why we should care. First, how we live our lives matters to God. He has called us to live in a matter worthy of the gospel, to walk in holiness, to stay close to Jesus. In doing so Christ is seen and savored in and through our lives. To summarize the first reason: we do not want to live in sin offending our God. If we love him, it will be our heart's desire to obey him (John 14:21-24). Second, we care about these issues because we desire to be good missionaries in our culture; ambassadors who represent Jesus to others, not those who represent an American Christian subculture. We forget that many people will live by rules given to them by their church culture, yet never examine them to see if they have their basis in the Word of God. Many times these subcultural prohibitions keep Christians from walking in meaningful relationships with non Christians. We are simply bound because of our cultural preferences not because the activity is actually sinful. The issues we face every day will not be solved by creating extra-Biblical rules or by closing our eyes and wishing the world would go away. Many of us constrain ourselves far too much in order to stay away from "the world," while others jump headlong into just about anything in the name of relevance and cool, sinning it up big time in the process. Both paths are not to be desired; what we need is wisdom and biblical discernment.

Here we will discuss how we might live together around some specific issues in culture with wisdom, love, and understanding, to walk both in a manner worthy of Christ and to engage friends in culture without Non-Biblical "Christian" cultural baggage. The cultures we live in are a complex mixture of things which are enjoyable, wicked, beautiful, ugly, and many times very perplexing. In this brief paper we will ask how we live in culture to share the gospel with people while also loving one another in a community where we may have different views on issues of conscience. To do this we will first look at the nature of sin, why we should reject parts of culture which are clearly sinful. Second, we will look at issues that may be called issues of conscience, where we need to show love and toleration for our differences. Finally, we will discuss how we live in these complexities as a community, exhorting one another towards holiness and allowing grace in areas where we disagree. To the issue of sin we now turn - well, hopefully we will not turn to sin, but only discuss it.

To read the rest, see the complete paper here.