In order for us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world that Jesus has saved us to be (Matt 5:13-14), we need to stop mirroring back the world’s agenda, which our media soaks us in, and get practicing a different moral agenda. 

For the last year, there’s a phrase that’s been rattling around in my head. It comes from Hebrews 5:14 and talks about our “powers of discernment [being] trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil”. I think it’s a phrase we, as Christians, need to get acquainted with.

This phrase shows us that distinguishing good from evil isn’t the black and white business we like to think it is. It’s not always obvious. It takes training. Knee-jerk, off-the-cuff reactions aren’t a reliable guide. Moral reasoning is something we need to invest effort in. When we think about right and wrong, there’s nuance. There’s emphasis and degree. There are shades of grey. There’s prioritisation.

Jesus uses the vivid picture of people straining out gnats and swallowing camels (Matt 23:24). He says there are “weightier matters of the law”, and, therefore, by inference “lighter”, less important parts of the law. The Bible is quite clear that we can major on the minors, and minor on the majors. That means we can be quoting something true from the Bible and still be getting the Bible wrong! 

It seems to me that as Christians our powers of discernment are in desperate need of training. We’re living in a media-saturated environment. Every day, headlines are training our sense of what matters and what doesn’t matter. Some subjects get all the attention. At points in the year, it’s felt like we’ve been doing morality by mathematics; algorithms have been making our moral decisions for us. In such a situation, it’s more important than ever that we train our powers of discernment. We need to take them down to the gym for a moral work-out. We’re going to have to work our socks off.

The best place I can recommend to help correct our moral disproportion is the Ten Commandments. We, Christians, need a good soak in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. (If you don’t have a Reformed view of the law, it’ll work just as well to use Romans 1 and Galatians 5). We need to get applying God’s word to the world around us. We need to stop reacting, and start applying and connecting Scripture to our real life.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on All Nations Church Ilford—however, the link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]