Beyond Moral Failure

BY CLIVE W AYRE

Moral failure takes many forms, and sometimes we would prefer not to know about them. But consider the story you can read of David, Bathsheba and Uriah in 2^nd Samuel 11, 1-15. Part of the irony of this drama is that David is one of the heroes, “a man after God’s own heart”. Yet here is a story of moral collapse in which Scripture makes no attempt to tone down the seriousness of it because of who David was. Still, in the outworking of this tragedy there is room for encouragement and hope, that we will be able to see “beyond moral failure.”

We can see how an initial moral lapse quickly became a tangled web of deceit and murder. David never set out to disrupt anyone’s family or to kill anyone, but when we begin with deceit, we should not be too surprised if we are led on ways that we never intended to go. There comes a time when that cycle has to be broken.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians: I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love (Eph 3:14-17). The danger comes with complacency and in turning away from God. The gift comes as we recognise that God never intended us to flounder amid the many temptations and complexities of life, but gives us strength in our inner being.

The strengthening comes within our spiritual life as God in Christ lives within us. Further in Paul’s prayer in Ephesians, he refers to “the power at work within us” which “is able to accomplish far more than we can ask or imagine.

There is a story of a young prison chaplain who was about to take his first service in the prison chapel, and he was very nervous. He was so nervous that he tripped on the steps leading to the podium. There was a great uproar of course; but this young man was a quick thinker. He leapt to his feet and said, “Men, that is what I have come here to tell you – that a man can fall down and get up again!” In real terms, this is the gospel of grace on the other side of personal and moral failure. A person can fall down and get up again.

But there is a corporate dimension to this moral failure as well, and there is no better example of that than the global environmental crisis. As a people, we may not intend to take more than our share or to deprive future generations of a liveable world; we may not intend any of the catastrophic outcomes that are clearly starting to unfold in our time. But when our collective lifestyle fails to care for God’s creation, we start on the same kind of slippery slope that David discovered.

Put another way, we can move beyond moral failure through the God who meets us in Jesus Christ.