Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells...?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English Expatriates built the US Railroads. Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particularly odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you told we have always done it that way, and wonder "what horse's behind came up with that," you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses!

But that's not all!

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, (SRBs), made at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major design feature of what is the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's behind.

Are you taken aback by the reality that modern accomplishments and very important issues can be decided on such an inconsequential matter as the width of a horse's rear end? I don't remember where I got that story. It may not even be true? But it does illustrate a dismal fact about spiritual progress and the state of affairs in the modern church.

Too much of what passes for religious truth and moral standards is no more than long standing human tradition. The masses accept what they are taught without question, because that's what everyone believes. When our preachers say, that act is sinful, we "repent" in fear and shame. We seldom question the authoritative declarations of our teachers. Maybe we're just cowards. Perhaps we assume that they just know about these things. As a consequence we witness a church heavily laden by illegitimate moral burdens, all created by church leaders, and none of which have anything to do with true spirituality, morals or ethics.

Modern church teaching on morality is built upon the same sad foundation as first century Phariseeism. The humanistic traditions that Jesus and Paul fought in their day, are still alive and well, and ruling the thought patterns and the daily lives of all believers in Christ. The horse's behind of first century legalism is the basis of virtually all modern teaching on spirituality, salvation and morality. And, just as we don't think to ask why some aspects of modern space shuttle design is so quirky, modern church members do not think to ask why moral standards are so apparently pointless. We are all for standards when they are appropriate, and when they are based on valid authority. But we think true spiritual standards must be derived from better criteria than the width of a horse's behind.

The spiritual landscape is littered with a vast array of things that have been labeled immoral by church leaders. Every single one of them is an external act. Judgment has been passed on these external acts on the basis that they are inherently evil. Our modern standard for morality is human action. We have still not learned from Jesus and Paul that morals and ethics are exclusively matters of the heart. Is exclusive too strong a word? We shall see. Paul says, nothing is unclean of itself. Jesus says, it is not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of his heart. From the perspective of Jesus and Paul, actions take on moral and ethical quality as determined by the condition of one's heart. Therefore the standard for determining godliness, holiness, righteousness, purity and so forth, IS NOT the nature of actions, but IS the condition of the actor's heart. We will never understand Biblical morality until we discover the right standard.

Adopting a new standard for morality is a radical move. The changes required are drastic. Yet we are obligated to understand and embrace ethics as God defines ethics. This may mean we must accept as moral some things that we have always been taught were immoral. We may also have to reject as immoral some things we always thought were moral. The one mandatory thing is that we get God's revelation on this matter. If we cannot correctly discern what is and what is not sin, then we cannot correctly judge our personal relationship with God and we cannot relate correctly to other people. We must learn to evaluate our actions in light of the condition of our heart. We must, because of practice, have our senses trained to discern good and evil, (Hebrews 5:14). God now requires that we learn to recognize sin not by searching for a specific law against a specific action, but by discerning the spiritual motivation of that action. We must train our senses to see moral issues as God sees them. It is a new way to go about morals, yet it is as old as the New Testament. It began with Jesus and was later championed by Paul.

We will look at it in several articles.