What This Church Teaches About Ethics and Moral Theology

Christian ethics is not a checklist — it is the whole person, compelled by grace, fleeing the wrong things and pursuing the right ones. Here is what keeps coming from this pulpit.

The Verbs Are the Same; the Nouns Are Everything

Every human being on earth is doing the same basic things with their life — fleeing certain things, pursuing certain things, fighting for certain things, taking hold of certain things. That is not what separates the Christian from everyone else. As the text of 1 Timothy 6 makes plain, "these are verbs that all people do. These are things that human beings just are about." ^[1] What is actually different is the objects of those verbs. "What's really different between the Christian life and the non-Christian life is the nouns. The verbs are common to all people. The nouns are not common to all people." ^[1] Christian ethics is not about becoming a different kind of creature who does strange things — it is about directing the full force of a common human life toward an entirely different set of objects.

And the goal of that redirected life is not mere rule-keeping. The goal is integration — the whole person aimed in one direction. "The great goal of the Christian life is to love God with my whole self, with all my parts... all the sled dogs pulling in the same direction for the same master. This is certainly the best possible life, to be a person who is fully integrated, who is using all of the network to serve God." ^[8] Jesus himself summarized the entire law in the great commandment — love God with the full stack — and that summary is not a reduction of ethics but its fulfillment. ^[8]

Obedience Flows from Grace, Not the Other Way Around

This church confesses that "genuine faith in Jesus always overflows in glad obedience of his commands: compelled by grace, believers grow in the knowledge of God, obey Christ's commands, walk by the Spirit, mortify sin, and pursue God's priorities and purposes. Although such actions are not the ground of our salvation, they demonstrate its authenticity." ^[SF] Obedience is not what earns anything — it is what grace produces. The sequence matters enormously.

That means the posture toward obedience should be eager, not merely tolerant. "A lot of things fall into line and make more sense when there is an eagerness to obey, not merely an openness to obedience." ^[3] The power source for that eagerness is gratitude — not willpower, not self-improvement, but gratitude for what God has already done. When God prefaced the Ten Commandments with "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt," there was no grammatical therefore — but the therefore is implied: "look at all I've done for you, and out of that gratitude, allow that gratitude to stir up desire for obedience." ^[16] Hebrews 12:28 says it explicitly: "let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe." ^[16]

Hard commands do not become easier by softening them — they become easier by anchoring them to what God has already provided. "When He tells us to do something we don't want to do, that we find painful and confusing, friends, it's still light. In fact, it might just be pretty bright light, which is the problem." ^[14] Hard words from God are better than no word at all. ^[14]

The Two Ditches: License and Legalism

There are two ways to get Christian ethics wrong, and they look nothing alike — but they are equally wrong. On one side is license: "I can do whatever I want to. Don't you dare tell me that I've got sin in my life... God loves me and He accepts me just the way I am." ^[11] On the other side is legalism: a precise checklist of dos and don'ts — no R-rated movies, no non-Christian music, no parties, no public schools, no unsaved kids in the youth group, family devotions every night, kids in bed by 8 — "they live their lives according to those dos and don'ts." ^[11]

Both errors miss the point. License treats grace as permission. Legalism treats obedience as the ground of standing. The corrective to both is the same: love God with your whole being first, and let that love produce the specific obedience. "If you will not have zeal to obey the first commandment, to love God with your whole being and jettison the idols in your heart, then I would ask that you please not have any zeal to obey the second one. Because you'd just be making a mess of things." ^[17] Neighbor-love that is not grounded in God-love is not a virtue — it is a substitution.

Kindness — genuine, theologically grounded kindness — turns out to be one of the most practical forms of ethics available. "If you were just kind, it would never cross your mind to commit adultery... It wouldn't really necessarily need to be told to you to not murder if you were just committed to kindness... kindness has this incredibly bright future." ^[20] Obedience done from love looks different from obedience done from fear, and the difference shows.

Sexual Ethics: Creation Order Is the Standard

When Jesus and Paul address sexual ethics, they do not start with the law codes — they start with Genesis. That move is deliberate. ^[9] The reason they bypass the marriages of David, Solomon, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is that those men were not modeling the ideal — they were departing from it, and the consequences were catastrophic. "Their lack of faithfulness, their rejection of monogamy wreak havoc on their families." ^[9] The standard is not what those men did — the standard is what Genesis 1 and 2 established.

This church confesses that "God instituted marriage as the union of one man and one woman who complement each other in a one-flesh union that ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church; this remains the only normative pattern of sexual relations for humanity." ^[SF] That is not a cultural preference or a denominational distinctive — it is what Christ himself affirmed when he described marriage as between a man and a woman, and it is what the Greek word porneia has meant for two thousand years: "all sexual activity outside of marriage." ^[5][15] Paul's list in Colossians 3:5 puts it plainly — "any sexual activity outside the confines of God-ordained marriage between a man and" woman falls under the category of porneia, regardless of what the surrounding culture celebrates. ^[15]

At the same time, there is a ditch on the other side. Paul in 1 Timothy 4 confronts those who treated the body and its God-given pleasures as spiritually contaminated. "Everything God created is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving." ^[4] The Reformers pushed back hard against the medieval church's tendency to treat sexuality as dirty — "Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and their contemporaries... pushed forward a biblical understanding of the health and beauty of sexual intimacy in marriage." ^[18] Both sexual license and sexual over-scrupulosity "come from a wrong view of God." ^[4] Single men and women are "no less able to enjoy and honor God and no less important to his purposes" — this is not a consolation prize, it is a confession. ^[SF]

The Tenth Commandment and the Heart of the Matter

Ethics in Scripture is never merely behavioral — it reaches all the way to desire. The tenth commandment, which forbids coveting, bookends the first commandment, which forbids idolatry. "The first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. God is saying, love me, treasure me, prize me, relish me, be satisfied in me, find all your joy in me above all else. And now here in the 10th commandment, he says, let me so fill you that you desire nothing more than you desire me." ^[19] The moral law is not only asking what you do — it is asking what you want.

This matters enormously for how moral instruction is given. Behavior-level correction that never reaches desire-level diagnosis will not hold. What God is after is not compliance — it is a person so satisfied in him that the wrong objects simply lose their pull. The call to "get rid of all the idols in our lives, all the other things we trust in" is not just a call to clean up behavior; it is a call to a reordered heart. ^[16]

Ethics as Witness: The Life That Shines

Christian ethics is not a private matter. The call is to "live in such a way that our lives are light to a lost and dying world. They're bright with gospel glory." ^[10] When the light of Christ changes a person, the expected result is not withdrawal from the world — not retreating "into the cellar or hide under baskets" — but a life placed on a lampstand so that others can see what gospel transformation actually looks like. ^[10]

That kind of witness requires doing the hard thing when it is costly. When the Canadian government criminalized the preaching of biblical sexual ethics, pastors gathered and preached it anyway — "in defiance of this bill" — because "the Bible commands us to pursue" what God has revealed, and "we don't get to do that with the Bible... We don't get to go through the Bible and say, eh, not for me, that's not really a me thing." ^[7][13] Ethical faithfulness under pressure is not heroism — it is ordinary discipleship. "If what you do for 80 years is listen to God and do what He says, it's all good. That's an incredible privilege. That's a great way to spend a life. That's an eternally significant way to spend a life." ^[14]

This page synthesizes what Chris Oswald has preached on ethics / moral theology at Providence Community Church. Every claim above traces to the cited sermons — follow any citation to read the full sermon, listen to the audio, and see the surrounding context. Minute marks are approximate, estimated from each sermon's transcript.