Often one of the biggest barriers to our spiritual growth can be our desire to be moral. This sounds like the opposite of what you might think: isn’t it good for our spiritual growth for us to be good people? This desire to be good, however, can be very dangerous to our spiritual growth and to the gospel. In a recent article, Dr. John Coe of Talbot Seminary talked about this danger and called it “the temptation of moral formation.” He defined it as “attempting to deal with our spiritual failure, guilt and shame by means of spiritual efforts, by attempting to perfect oneself in the power of the self.” In a recent two-week Venture sermon series, we discussed Coe’s article and the temptation of moral formation. If you did not hear these sermons, I would encourage you to listen to them. Direct links to the sermons are here:

August 2 The Temptation to be Moral
August 9 Spiritual Formation and the Cross

The gist of the message of the sermons is this: we are to give up the quest to be moral, the drive to improve ourselves and assuage our guilt and shame through our own self-improvement efforts, and we are to rest in the perfect love, perfect forgiveness, and perfect acceptance that we have in Jesus.
I encourage you to listen to the sermons because this discussion is going to be very important to much of what we will be discussing as a community moving forward in sermons, retreats, etc. Also, practically, the sermons will help:

-to define what moral formation is, and how to identify it in our lives
-to understand why we try to improve ourselves
-to be honest about our weaknesses and failures, and to run to the cross
-to experience the perfect love, forgiveness, and acceptance in Jesus
-to trust Jesus to transform us and his Spirit to strengthen us to follow him

So listen to the sermons if you haven’t, and feel free to post any discussion here as a comment.