I needed to read this, so I though I’d share it, just in case anyone else needs to, also.
“I now realize that no value system, Christian or otherwise, can express the essence of Christianity. A life built on Christian values is a caricature of New Testament Christianity. It is not God’s purpose that our lives be built on a system of values. It is His desire that they be built of the person of His Son. Value systems may influence behavior, but God is not interested in systems of living. He is interested in relationships. An intimate relationship with Him will produce a Godly lifestyle. A focus on behavior will not create intimacy with God or a Godly lifestyle.
[...]
I highly recommend that you give up your Christian values. You may find this statement startling, but I want to shake you into serious thought. I’m not advocating moral anarchy. Nor am I suggesting that how you live is unimportant. What I am saying is that focusing on a value system is not God’s intended way for you to live. God never proposed for your lifestyle to be built around the principle of right and wrong.”
- Steve McVey, Grace Walk
Interesting thoughts… I said “YES” to most of what he said and “eh” to a few things…
How would McVey take like.. most of the New Testament epistles that contain essentially moral mandates on how to live under salvation in the Gospel?
I don’t think morality and right/wrong are separate from worshipping God. They are REQUIRED for worshipping God. BUT BUT BUT what McVey hinted at and is SO TRUE is that we can’t fulfill those requirements.. Christ does. SO our lives are built on Christ fulfilling a VERY REAL moral requirement for communing with God, and fulfilling a VERY REAL punishment for our transgressions against those requirements.
What McVey I think skewed here is Gospel-centered living. Essentially he’s advocating license.. well he is for a second.. then he isn’t.. then he is. He kinda jumps a lil back and forth up in thurr. BECAUSE of the Gospel, we should feel a strong obligation to change how we live to HONOR Christ’s sacrifice and therefore show our GRATITUDE and WILLINGNESS to live under the COSTLY call to discipleship. In that vein if thinking, I’d say Bonhoeffer got this concept a little bit better, saying that morality isn’t our ends but it IS a fruit up us pursuing our ends: the ends being glorifying God.
Hope that makes sense. I cringe at the “throw out your Christian values” because that’s such a broad statement that seems to contradict scripture at times… because so many things are commanded in Scripture of the Church, but I’d rather reword it to “throw out your Legalism.”
Anyways.. that’s my 2 cents.
I think I may have just misrepresented what he was saying in that group of quotes.
He was essentially saying that so many Christians are so lost in the tides of trying to do good that they don’t realize they’re missing the point entirely; that the Christian life should be rooted in a love and desire to be with Christ, and that all of our goodness should be as a result of that. And, that even the good we do that does not flow from our love for Christ is still fake.
But his point that I was trying to emphasize here is that even the good we do that isn’t an overflow of our love for Christ is pointless, and that the reason we don’t sin shouldn’t be because we feel like failures if we do, but an overflow of our relationship with Christ. And that’s something that I’ve been struggling with lately.
Definitely man. If that is indeed what he tries to say in this book, then I am ALL for it.
I really like what he says. I agree that embracing “Christian values” as something to live by is nothing short of empty, dead religion.
That being said, I would caution one thing: the idea of “don’t ______, just love Jesus” is a harder proposition than he seems to give it credit for. We cannot forget that part of loving Jesus, and a way in which we learn to love Him more, is hating sin. Living by “Christian values” is by no means synonymous with this–in fact often times it is antithetical to true holiness. But it still remains that if we want to love our God we must also hate what he hates. It’s a two-sided coin, and “loving Jesus” involves much more than any one thing.