Compromise: Spiritual Dichotomy

“Do not love or cherish the world or the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him.”  I John 2:15 AMP

I must be careful about understanding the place of compromise in my life. 

Compromise makes politics the art of the possible, but in my relationship to Jesus it becomes the flaw of the impossible.

Compromise is always a sign of a previous accommodation.  When Lot chose to live in Sodom rather than the highlands of Canaan, he made an accommodation based upon a driving desire to be rich and influential.

As a result, he compromised.  

Compromise was his method of making his accommodation acceptable to himself; it was never acceptable to God.

Justification or twisting God’s Word around to suit our fleshly desires is accommodation to satisfy our desires to be popular, famous, idol worship, wealthy and selfish.

Compromise leads to finding ways of accommodation that produces disobedience which results in spiritual death and deception.

The technique of compromise is to “tone down” or “twist” the Word of God, to take its absoluteness, its stringency out of the way.

King Saul took the command of God: “Strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has” and reduced it by saying, “The people spared the best of the sheep and oxen, to sacrifice to the Lord.”  (I Sam. 15:3-15)

Despite that gross insult to God’s Word, Saul said, “I have carried out the commandment of the Lord” (v 13).  Thus, compromise enabled Saul to give the appearance of obedience while still allowing him to obtain his selfish goals.

Compromise means I have not come to grips with spiritual essentials; I still have “bleating sheep” around and I still have an uncrucified “old man” lurking inside of me.

 Compromise is a sign of a spiritual dichotomy; there is not a clean, sharp commitment inside.

The compromising person sooner or later stumbles over his own tangled cords as David did concerning Uriah. (II Sam. 12: 5-9)  

To avoid that, Lord, let me do the one thing needful, as Mary did, and offer You my all.  If I do, it will become a sweet aroma to You and the memory of it will stretch into the expanses of eternity.  (Matthew 26: 12-13)