Coffee & Compromise
“No compromise is what the whole Gospel of Jesus is all about... 'For I tell you...no man can serve two masters...' (Matt. 6:24). In a day when believers seem to be trying to please both the world and the Lord (which is an impossible thing), when people are far more concerned about offending their friends than offending God, there is only one answer... Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Him!”
- Keith Green
A couple of years ago I had an unsettling health episode where my heart began to pound non-stop for nearly 24 hours. The beating was so hard that my whole chest cavity began to ache. The pain was enough that I wondered if I might be having a minor heart attack.
Concerned, I called my father-in-law, who happens to be a doctor. He asked me a few questions to try to get to the root of the problem. Eventually, he asked, “How much caffeine have you had lately?”
I thought about it. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a little more than usual. He recommended that I take at least a week to detox from caffeine and see if that fixed the problem. I took his advice and within 24 hours my heart was beating normally.
I decided to go ahead and take two weeks off from caffeine just to make sure. And in the midst of those two weeks, something unexpected happened.
One morning I woke up and, to my shock, I was more awake than I had felt in years. I had always needed caffeine to help me wake up in the morning. And more than that, I was the guy who had always said, “Caffeine doesn’t really affect me.” I was the guy who could drink a cup of coffee not long before bed and sleep just fine… or so I thought.
After that detox, I realized that while I was able to fall asleep fine, my sleep had been shallow for the last three or four years of my life. While I thought it wasn’t affecting me, it was actually significantly hurting my sleep, health, and productivity.
Cool story, Luke. What’s your point? I share that story because it’s strikingly similar to how we’re treating compromise in the Church.
I recently had a friend tell me that he determines if something he’s engaging in is sinful by whether or not he feels tempted by it. Perhaps a better way to say it would be whether or not he feels affected by it. There are significant problems with that way of thinking.
I’ve heard this same sentiment over and over. “I know that show has sexually immoral scenes and conversations, but it doesn’t affect me. I don’t feel tempted by it.” Or, “I know these songs are profane, but I don’t listen for the lyrics. I just like the melody. It doesn’t affect me.”
But my question to those statements would be this: is it that it doesn’t affect you or is it that you can no longer feel it affecting you?
This thinking has so permeated our generation that I guarantee what we claim isn’t affecting us is actually just something we’ve become desensitized to. It’s affecting us, we just can’t feel it anymore. It’s become our new normal.
In the same way that caffeine was robbing me of sleep, our compromises are robbing us of intimacy with Jesus and effectiveness for the Kingdom. In the same way I didn’t feel caffeine’s effect until I detoxed, we have become desensitized to the effects of the sinful things we consume.
The question we should be asking is not, “Is this movie, song, or show permissible?” But instead, “Is this thing actively drawing me to Jesus?” And if it’s not, cut it out. Detox from it. If you’ll do that, you’ll be shocked at the ways you unexpectedly grow in intimacy with Jesus and effectiveness for the Kingdom.