Most of us do not decide to live a divided life. We arrive there by degrees.
“I’m a whole lot better
~ The Choir, Shadow Weaver, “What You Think I Am”
And a whole lot worse
Than what you think I am.”
It might begin with resentment we keep rehearsing, something on a screen we return to, an expense we would rather not explain, or a truth we shade because the whole story would make us look bad. Sometimes it is simply an apology we know we owe and keep postponing. We recognize the tension, but nothing seems serious enough to force the issue, so we make an exception and get on with the day.
Life continues pretty much as before. We work, take care of our responsibilities, go to church, pray, spend time with people we love. We still believe what we believed yesterday. From the outside, perhaps even from the inside, very little seems to have changed.
Except that we have begun allowing something in our lives that does not agree with what we say is true.
In The Breastplate of Righteousness, we started with the righteousness God gives us in Christ. We cannot manufacture it from discipline, reputation, religious performance, or a respectable record. Christ is our righteousness. We fight from that standing rather than trying to earn it.
Paul, however, never leaves righteousness as a theological status disconnected from the life being lived. Before he tells the Ephesians to put on the breastplate, he tells them to “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” What follows is strikingly ordinary: tell the truth, deal with anger, work honestly, pay attention to your words, let go of bitterness, forgive. Then, in the middle of these instructions, Paul adds, “give no opportunity to the devil.”
Apparently the ordinary places where we obey or compromise matter in a spiritual war.
The Small Exception
C.S. Lewis understood that moral choices do something more consequential than produce a tally of good and bad behavior. In Mere Christianity, he argues that our choices are slowly changing the central part of us. We are becoming a certain kind of person.
That makes the small exception worth paying attention to.
Resentment rehearsed today is easier to rehearse tomorrow. The truth shaded once becomes easier to shade again. An imagination repeatedly fed becomes more difficult to govern. Refusing an apology teaches us how to justify ourselves. Over time, something that once troubled the conscience can become familiar enough that we hardly notice it anymore.
James describes desire conceiving and eventually giving birth to sin. Jesus speaks of hungering and thirsting for righteousness. Both take us below the level of visible behavior. What we desire matters. What we repeatedly permit ourselves to desire matters too.
A moral collapse can look sudden to everyone watching it happen. It rarely feels sudden when you trace the story backward. There was usually a time when the eventual crisis was still a collection of much smaller choices, each one easy enough to explain. A boundary moved here. A rationalization was accepted there. Something once resisted became tolerated, then familiar.
By the time everyone can see the collapse, the heart may have been surrendering ground for a long time.
What We Permit, We Learn to Protect
Pascal may be one of the better guides to what happens next. He had an uncomfortable understanding of self-love. In the Pensées, he observes how difficult it is for us not only to face our faults, but to tolerate other people seeing them. We want to be thought well of, and when reality threatens that picture, self-deception becomes useful.
The problem with a tolerated compromise is that eventually it has to coexist with everything else I believe about myself.
I think of myself as an honest man, but there is something I am concealing. I believe forgiveness matters, but there is a resentment I intend to keep. I say Christ is Lord, but there is one appetite whose terms I would rather negotiate myself.
Living with the contradiction requires some maintenance.
Sometimes we simply lie. Usually we are more sophisticated than that. We leave out the inconvenient part of the story. We explain the circumstances. We emphasize our intentions. We find a more agreeable name for what we are doing. We compare ourselves with someone whose behavior is worse. We learn which conversations to avoid and which people are unlikely to ask another question.
Before long, the original compromise has acquired a supporting structure. It has recruited our imagination, our memory, our words, perhaps even our schedule. We are spending energy protecting something we once thought was giving us something.
That is a strange reversal of Paul’s image. The breastplate is meant to guard the vulnerable center of the man. In a divided life, the man begins using himself to guard the thing that is wounding him.
The Cost of Keeping It Going
This is where the Belt of Truth and the Breastplate of Righteousness belong together.
If I intend to keep living contrary to something I know to be true, eventually I need another version of reality. I need a story in which my behavior makes sense. Maybe what I am doing isn’t really wrong. Maybe my circumstances make me an exception. Maybe other people are being unreasonable. Maybe God understands.
The first compromise may have been about appetite. Keeping it usually involves some measure of deception.
Thomas à Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ, “High words do not make a man holy and just.” It is an old warning, but familiarity with Christianity may actually make it more necessary. We can become fluent in Christian language while becoming equally skilled at keeping portions of our lives outside its reach.
A man can understand grace and still hide. He can believe in forgiveness and nurse a grievance for years. He can affirm God’s provision while being governed by money. He can speak about truth while carefully managing what others are allowed to know about him. None of this requires him to abandon Christianity. He only needs to maintain enough distance between what he believes and how he lives.
That distance is the divided life.
Integrity is sometimes defined as doing the right thing when no one is watching. That is part of it, but Christian integrity goes deeper. It is the slow reunification of a life under the rule of Christ: belief, desire, confession, and conduct increasingly belonging to the same man.
Perfection is not the measure. A righteous man still sins. The more revealing question is what happens next. Does he bring the failure into the light, or does he begin building a case for why it should be allowed to remain?
An Opening in the Armor
Paul’s warning in Ephesians 4 is easy to pass over because it appears among such ordinary instructions: “give no opportunity to the devil.”
We should be careful about making too much of that sentence. Not every bad outcome is a demonic attack. Sometimes consequences are simply consequences, and blaming the devil can become another way of refusing responsibility.
Still, Paul put the warning there.
He could speak about anger and the devil in the same paragraph because he did not regard ordinary conduct as spiritually neutral. Neither should we.
The enemy does not have to manufacture every weakness he uses. Resentment that has been fed for months already has a well-worn path through the heart. A man practiced in concealment is easier to drive deeper into hiding. An appetite repeatedly indulged does not need much encouragement the next time temptation arrives. A reputation that must be protected makes exposure frightening, which makes another lie surprisingly easy to justify.
This is less mysterious than we sometimes make spiritual warfare. Paul tells us to stand against an enemy, but he also tells us not to hand that enemy useful ground.
The things we tolerate are forming us. Some of them are also making us easier to tempt, easier to accuse, and easier to isolate.
That is enough reason to take the small exception seriously.
Somewhere to Stand
There is an obvious danger in all of this. An essay about compromise, integrity, and character can leave us thinking the answer is greater vigilance: try harder, inspect the armor, clean up the record.
That takes us straight back to the problem the Breastplate was meant to solve.
Dallas Willard put the distinction memorably: “Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning.” We do not practice righteousness to persuade God to accept us. Christ has already settled the question of our standing.
And that changes what happens when the thing we have been protecting is finally exposed.
If my standing depends on my record, I have good reason to keep hiding. Exposure threatens the identity I have built. I need the explanations, the omissions, and the carefully managed version of myself because I have nowhere else to stand.
But if Christ is my righteousness, I can afford to tell the truth.
That may be one of the deepest connections between the first two pieces of armor. The Belt brings us back into reality, including reality about ourselves. The Breastplate means that when the truth exposes something ugly, we do not have to run.
Confession is what becomes possible when we no longer need the lie.
It is not the moment the Christian life falls apart. Often it is the moment the pieces begin coming back together. We stop asking deception to preserve our reputation. We stop spending energy defending what needs to die. We agree with God about what is true, trust what he has said about us in Christ, and begin again.
There is freedom in that, although it may not feel like freedom at first. Telling the truth can cost us. An apology may be humiliating. Restitution may be expensive. A relationship may have to endure an uncomfortable conversation. A habit may require boundaries we wish we did not need.
But compare that cost with the cost of maintaining the divided life.
One leads toward wholeness. The other has to be paid again tomorrow.
The Breastplate does not make a man flawless. It gives him somewhere to stand while Christ makes the divided places whole.
Field Exercise: Stop Protecting It
Set aside some quiet this week and ask yourself a question you may not particularly want to answer:
What am I protecting that I should be surrendering?
Don’t go searching for the most dramatic possible answer. Pay attention instead to the places that require maintenance. What do you repeatedly explain to yourself? What would you rather not be asked about? Where have you changed the name of something so you can continue living with it? What part of your life would become considerably simpler if you simply told the truth?
Bring whatever comes to mind before God without improving the story. Then consider whether bringing it into the light requires something more from you. Perhaps someone needs to know. Perhaps an apology is overdue, restitution needs to begin, access needs to be removed, or another man needs permission to ask you questions you have become skilled at avoiding.
None of this purchases God’s acceptance. That is precisely why you are free to do it.
Christ is your righteousness. You no longer need to spend your life protecting what he is asking you to surrender.
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