The world’s culture can taint Christian culture
Let’s pray that we don’t wake up one day and find ourselves in a position where we have been selling our goods for the exchange of the world value system.
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. Colossians 2:8 (KJV)
The above scripture tells us that don’t let these things spoil you.
The word “spoil” in Greek means: to carry off booty, to carry one off as a captive (and slave),
to lead away from the truth and subject to one’s sway
Our lives have to be examined in light of truth and how Jesus lived. Those things that the Lord hates, we should hate. The things that matter to Him, we should care about. We don’t want to give away our goods as spoil to the culture and the worldview we are surrounded with.
As believers in Christ, we are dealing with the world’s culture and the Christian culture. If we are not careful, worldly values creep into the church, and after a while scripture is used to support carnal and worldly view, and even call it a Christian value. For example, we may talk about God promoting those who are faithful in the Kingdom and honoring them. God does do that. However, there are a couple of things we have to be cautious of. First of all, we don’t want to produce performance oriented mentality in the life of the believer/church. That’s the way of the world. Performance can drive a person to do more to get attention, reward, and promotion. They may continually feel that they haven’t done enough. It can also cause competition, envy and strife with brothers and sisters in Christ. Secondly, those that God promoted in the Bible, weren’t looking to get promoted. They were just being faithful to God, and God chose to promote them not because they were striving to get it. We can’t look at the end result of a Biblical character’s life and produce a worldly formula on how to reproduce it in our lives.
We are also a society that is very much entertainment, sports, and Hollywood driven. The messages our children and young adults get via TV, magazines, and various online sources gives them skewed outlook on success, beauty, wisdom, & relationships. The challenge with those values is that they become so prevalent that they look like normal life to most people even Christians. Sex outside of marriage, broken homes, abortion, and divorce are so common that even as believers we can get calloused towards them. When was the last time you cried over a broken marriage or an aborted baby?
The church is called to be relevant
While we need to watch out for the world value system not to creep into our lives/churches, but the same time we need to be around unbelievers. Our challenge is that we don’t want to be influenced by the culture but be an influencer. To have an influence we need to be in closer proximity. This will challenge our Christianize vocabulary, so we can speak simpler and more relevant to those who have never opened the Bible. “Simpler” and “relevant” does not mean the truth needs to be distorted.
Jesus called us the light and salt of the world. He didn’t call us to be a special spice that only certain groups of people or ethnicities use such as saffron, cumin, or chili powder. Salt is something that people of various cultures use as a seasoning and preserver. In order to be light and salt we need to come into closer contact with people, so our lives could actually have an affect in their lives.
Lord, we pray that you would expose any area where the worldly culture has creeped into our thinking. Give us the courage to look to you to define the right values in our lives. Amen.