the world...

Well this is a really crazy week for me as I prepare for the new onslaught of all my graduate summer courses. I have seven assignments due (mainly papers) this Monday so....needless to say I have not had a lot of extra time to expound on some of my formulating ideas for a blog post. However, last week I spent some time reading some very insightful blog posts on Shepherd's Fellowship by Dr. John MacArthur. Here is a snippet from one of those posts:

You cannot make a biblical case for Christians to embrace worldly fads—especially when those fads are diametrically at odds with the wholesome speech, pure mind, and chaste behavior that God calls us to display. At its core, this is about ideology. No matter how culture changes, the truth never does.

I see this more and more in our culture, and unfortunately within our church walls. We live two lives, one that is sacred and one that is secular. This is not biblical, nor a God-exalting testimony to those we claim to be so burdened to see come to Christ. It requires sacrifice: sacrifice of relationships, sacrifice of perceived "fun" that we miss out on, sacrifice of time and effort to do ministry and care for others, sacrifice of what we think we have earned or deserve, sacrifice of self! Dying to self means that I should become less and less like this world and feel further and further alienated from it. I can live in this world, but I should not be comfortable in it. How many of us are quite comfortable? Even in church? Other than our participation in Sunday activities and maybe a bit of devotional time at home, how radically different are we than this world? Is our speech so noticeably different that we no longer fit in to worldly conversations? Is our love for others, particularly those within the household of faith, so enlarged that we seem strange to those around us? I would venture to say that for the most part, we often fit into this world rather easily, swimming right along with the tides of relevancy and political correctness. May it no longer be so!