Quick—what’s wrong with this picture?
Can you see it? Or are you so used to seeing Easter bunnies sitting on colored chicken eggs that you don’t even see the contradiction anymore?
If you have kids, if you’ve ever been around kids, or if you’ve ever been a kid, you’ve heard the question, “What’s wrong with it?” Once children reach a certain age, they ask it regularly—like any time they hear the word “no.”
Some of us never outgrow that stage. We continue to challenge everyone who questions our whims using the same dubious standard:
- “What’s wrong with spending $1000 on a dress? It’s my money!”
- “What’s wrong with watching porn? I’m not actually doing anything!”
- “What’s wrong with watching movies about sorcery? It’s only fiction!”
Here are three reasons why I think we should chuck this standard:
1. It presupposes our ability to perceive “wrong.” Satan’s become really adept at flying just under our radar on this score. He changes our outlook by small, imperceptible degrees, by changes so subtle that we’re not even aware of a change at all. In this way, we’re exposed to images or ideas that successively push the border. We become so used to seeing something goofy—like a rabbit incubating eggs—that we no longer register the image as goofy. Similarly, we begin to perceive things as not-that-bad simply because they’re familiar.
2. It lowers our sights. We end up diving after a touchstone that is sinking deeper and deeper into the muddy silt of “wrong.” And what will that eventually make us? Bottom-dwellers! The Bible encourages us to reach for an entirely different goal: “Fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honorable” (Philippians 4:8, GNT). So instead of focusing down, on the ever-changing benchmark that society recognizes as “wrong,” we should focus upward on “right,” emblazoning this standard in our minds through what we see and hear.
3. It spoils God’s gift to us. “God has called us to live holy lives, not impure lives” (1 Thessalonians 4:7, NLT). In other words, Jesus didn’t leave His throne, live in poverty, and die a torturous death to leave us floundering around in the same pool of sin that poisoned our lives in the first place. He did all that so we “might have life—life in all its fullness” (John 10:10, GNT).
What’s all this mean? Simply that we’ve been asking the wrong question. We should quit settling for “What’s wrong with it?” and seek the far better standard of “What’s right with it?”