Giving to the poor may be a sign of spiritual morality, but if it is the primary reflector of Christian morality, then Christianity is neither unique nor divine. It’s no more profound than a self-help manual blessed by Oprah. True morality arises from the movement of the spirit in and around divine truth—the truth that saves souls by bringing them into contact and agreement with God—not from movements around bread that saves bodies, even if God provides both.
I digress—but only slightly. I write in the age of Trump. One presidential candidate is an open homosexual who proudly calls himself a devout Christian. His Christian supporters are not dismayed because their own faith is equally contradictory. Another candidate appeals to “Christian values” while transparently using religion as a political tool. His supporters are equally unbothered, so long as their personal sentiments are confirmed. Both cases reveal just how broken public Christianity has become under the default assumption that Christ’s morality is expressed primarily by physical alignment and needs no transcendent justification.
I hate politics, but in a republic, we have a civic duty. Yet that duty does not extend to confusing faith with politics, or politics with faith. I’m a conservative—but my allegiance, I hope, is to a truth whose origin is higher than Elizabeth Warren’s fraudulent Cherokee ancestry, as egregious as that is. Politics becomes “heavenly” only in the fevered imaginations of a people who have forgotten how to separate the superficial from the spiritual.
Christ’s morality, when expressed by mortals, is symbolic—not literal. But modern Christianity cannot accept that. We believe that morality is physical because we increasingly believe that righteousness itself is sourced in human effort and spiritual sentiment. Conservatives decry homosexuality (and rightly call it sin), while ignoring their own unbiblical support of reprobate politicians. Liberals lament evangelical support for men like Trump, forgetting that moral hypocrisy is not the distance between scripture and practice—it is the falseness of the reason for believing Scripture in the first place.
The true hypocrisy is not found in how well someone follows the rules. It is found in the motivation for believing the rules. If you affirm a biblical principle because it aligns with external human expressions—heterosexuality, nationalism, or public virtue—you have already traded truth for a mirror. You’ve made morality a reflection of yourself. And no sermon or book will help you find where faith begins if you believe it ends in you.
Proud homosexuality in a professing Christian is not itself the great sin. It is a symbol—a visible sign of a deeper theological dysfunction: the failure to understand and love the truth that prohibits it. You cannot change the reality behind the symbol by adjusting the symbol. The symbol stands or falls by the reality it reflects.
Likewise, conservatives who cite “render unto Caesar” as a command to pay taxes—nothing more—or support a candidate who wears Christianity like a campaign badge, are offering equal evidence of spiritual confusion. I say this as a Trump voter. Not political confusion, but spiritual. And you can’t be too sure about your own soul unless you know what your symbols are pointing to.
No physical act—no vote, no habit, no policy—is a reliable indicator of your standing with God. And nothing Jesus ever said about morality was meant to be fully emulated by bodies. It was meant to be spiritually interpreted: “Who do you say that I am?”
The only perfect fulfillment of Christian morality is a spiritual act—a movement of the heart toward divine truth. Every other act, every physical behavior, is partial at best. The world of visible things—the carnal world—can only ever poorly reflect the world of invisible things.
We should be sexually aligned with the created order not because it makes us righteous, but because it reflects God’s will for spiritual life to arise from opposites in love. We should be kind because God sent Christ to all—wicked and righteous—that the truth might save them. We should pay taxes because even fallen governments secure the conditions under which revelation may be preached.
But every attempt to engineer a political system that embodies Christ’s righteousness ends in either capitalist injustice or socialist tyranny. One is real but never ideal; the other is ideal but never real. God promises both in one—but only under His reign. This world is not capable of such governance. The most powerful Christian political symbol is no symbol, unless it points with total clarity to prophetic revelation fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Spiritual symbols are effects—reactions and indicators—of deeper internal realities, whose only medium is divine knowledge. A belief is such a symbol. It is a spiritual act that points beyond itself to the authority of the truth it affirms. To say “Jesus is Lord” without anchoring that claim in the revealed reason why He is Lord is not belief. It is theater.
You do not trust someone merely by saying, “I trust them.” Trust arises from demonstrable, truthful knowledge—evidence. You trust a neighbor because he walked your dog, helped your family, lived with quiet integrity. Not because you heard a voice in a dream. Likewise, faith in Christ must arise from a truth whose evidentiary force transcends personal intuition or cultural tradition.
But unlike trust in a neighbor, which is justified by a limited set of personal experiences, trust in the Savior of the world requires a universal foundation. It must be grounded in revelation that speaks across all times and all peoples—a demonstration of truth whose rejection or acceptance determines eternal life or death.
Even so, God’s work in the physical world is not for the benefit of the physical world. He acts for the sake of the spiritual mind. Nothing physical has eternal value unless it manifests a truth about divine righteousness. Feeding the hungry is good, but it is not the essence of Christianity. The essence lies in meeting the deepest hunger: truth that gives life.
We recoil from this. We shy away from calling faith a spiritual action. The language of the Church has abandoned it. Faith has become an intellectual assent, a sentimental response, a matter of cultural belonging. But true faith is the movement of the spirit in response to divine truth—not merely knowledge of truth, but judgment, alignment, obedience, love of that truth as the essence of God Himself.
Judgment, faith, trust, and truth are not theological abstractions. They are spiritual realities, or they are nothing. If these are not spiritual, then there is no spirit in man.
That may be hard to read—but it is harder still to face.
You can say that Christian faith is “trust in Jesus,” “preaching the gospel,” “love for others,” or “compassion for the poor.” But these are symbols. They may point to spiritual realities, or they may not. Saying “Jesus is Lord” may symbolize faith, or it may be an empty shell—like a flag raised over a conquered land that no longer belongs to its people.
Physical symbols, actions, and words are unreliable indicators of spiritual states. They can point in the right direction, but they cannot verify the reality they are supposed to reflect. Faith must be expressed to others, yes—but unless it is first recognized by God as genuine, it is no faith at all. And God recognizes only what He has authored.
False symbols abound. We believe that if we hold to the right concepts—“Jesus is Lord,” “God loves me,” “the blood covers all sin”—then these statements will act like magical talismans, conveying spiritual reality regardless of our engagement with their substance. But concepts are not God. They are containers—symbols. And they are empty if they are not filled by God’s own revelatory power.
Treating spiritual symbols like physical ones—like cars you can enter and drive without understanding them—leads to delusion. A car gets you where you want to go even if you know nothing about engines or mechanics. But spiritual truth does not work that way. You cannot simply “get in” and be driven to salvation by an idea. The vehicle of salvation is not a concept; it is the knowledge of God revealed, accepted, and acted upon in spiritual movement.
There is only one driver of this vehicle: God. We are passengers—but only if we have responded to His invitation with honest, moral assent. Only if we have judged rightly that what drives this truth is not sentiment, or tradition, or ideology, but God Himself.
A billion people may love the concept “Jesus is Lord,” but if they do not love the reality behind that concept—if they do not respond spiritually to the truth that made that statement necessary—they love nothing. They worship a word, not the Word made flesh.
What God has revealed is not an idea but an act—an informational disclosure of Himself in history. He offers that disclosure as an object of judgment and alignment. That is the purpose of faith. That is what it means to become a symbol of God: to receive His Word, respond spiritually, and live as one who has seen and heard.
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