That accusation, “You’re more pious than God,” when rightly used isn’t an argument against piety, but against impiety. That is, when our scruples line up with the law of God we are not being anything other than faithful, as we should be, even if the world thinks otherwise. No, what the expression means is we have a law that’s even more narrow or strict than God Himself.
Consider if you will the openly sexually immoral. This would include practicing homosexuals, adulterers and fornicators. The Bible says, with the utmost clarity, that we in the church are not to keep from associating with immoral people. To do so we’d have to leave the world (I Corinthians 5: 9-10). We would indeed be more pious than God were we to avoid the sexually confused of the world.
If, therefore, we are to treat the sexually immoral of the world with forbearance, how much more professing Christians who embrace sexual immorality? If we are free, according to God’s law, to “associate” with sexually immoral unbelievers, if failing to do so brings us under God’s condemnation for being judgmental, that must mean that we are to be especially gracious with our brothers and sisters in Christ who unrepentantly embrace sexual immorality.
Except that’s not what the Bible says. Paul says, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and against the inspiration of the spirit of our age, that if a professing believer embraces sexual immorality, (along with many other forms of immorality), believers are not to so much as share a meal with them. The grace that we are to show toward the unrepentant professing believer is the grace of church discipline. The grace we are to show is cutting them off from table fellowship for their own sakes, no matter how much it might pain us. The grace we are to show is a grace that is willing to take on the slings and arrows of being accused of being more pious than God by those who are more pious than God.
The spirit of the age is having his way with the church in our day. He has disguised debauchery as freedom, cowardice as kindness and worldliness as grace. He leads us about by the nose because he knows there’s nothing we crave more than the approval of the world. Respectability is our idol and we give up anything to have her.
The piety we are called to is that which submits to the plain teaching of the Word of God, that doesn’t look for ways to re-shape God’s Word to fit the zeitgeist. The piety we are called to is a humility that says, “When God speaks all I can say is ‘Amen.’” The piety we are called to does not lead us to respectability and the approval of the world but to disgrace and to the lion’s den. May He never give allow us to presume to be more pious than He is. And may we ever rest in the piety He gives us.