Romans 12:2
Margaret Gorman in 1921, at the age of 16, was crowned the winner in the first Miss America beauty contest. In the swimsuit competition, she wore a wool bathing dress with a baggy tunic top over leggings. What made her outfit risqué was that she had her leggings rolled half way down her leg, revealing her bare calf.
The most modest bathing suit worn today by any Christian woman, would have been considered scandalous in 1921. It was not until 1947, twenty-six years later that the first two-piece bathing suit was worn in a Miss America pageant and this was a far cry from the bikinis that came later.
There is nothing in the Bible that tells us what kind of clothes to wear. In fact, there is nothing in the Bible that tells us we have to wear any clothes at all. The teaching is that we should dress modestly, relative to the culture. And the culture drifts over time. What is considered modest in 2010 would not at all be considered modest in earlier decades. And what is considered modest changes depending on what culture you live in.
I remember an exhibition when I was at seminary of missionary photographs. One picture showed a South American tribal group with everyone naked except the chief’s wife who was wearing a bra she had been given by some missionaries. That’s all she was wearing.
In that culture, modesty did not include covering what we consider essential to cover.
Cultures vary and culture drifts and we drift along with it. Clothing styles, the length of skirts, the width of ties, wearing hats or not wearing hats, all these change. I have a cousin who works for Armstrong, a flooring, ceiling and cabinet company. Her job is to go to the conventions where people determine what colors will be popular in five years. Once the color is decided, then the marketing arms of the companies gear into action. They promote, in various ways, the colors that they have determined will be popular and lo and behold, five years later, when you go to buy a shirt or dress or household accessory, these are the popular colors.
Some particularly bad choices were made in the late 60s and early 70s. I am amazed, when I look back at photographs, at the loud, wild color combinations I wore which I and everyone else thought was wonderful at the time.
Clothing styles do not matter so much. They can drift and all it means is that we have to buy new clothes. But there are other cultural values that drift over time and work against the teachings of the Bible.
There is very clear teaching in the Bible about divorce. When we marry, we are meant to stay married. There are two exceptions to this: one is if there has been sexual immorality and the second is if an unbelieving spouse divorces. In these cases, the innocent spouse is free to remarry.
But even in these two cases, the spouse is permitted to get divorced but it is not the case that the spouse must get a divorce.
Marriage is a biblical institution we are to protect and preserve. Anything that weakens the institution of marriage must be resisted.
But what is the reality today? 40-50% of marriages in the US end up in divorce. The percentages for Europe are similar. The percentages in Africa are lower, but wife abuse and extra-marital affairs are more tolerated in the countries of Africa and some of these marriages should be listed with an asterisk. In various ways, the institution of marriage is being threatened by the cultural drift that allows divorce to be a minor infraction.
Divorce used to be a scandal. In 1952 Adlai Stevenson lost the US presidential election to Dwight Eisenhower, in part because he had divorced his wife in 1949. Eisenhower used this divorce as part of his campaign. Seven elections later, in 1980, the divorce of Ronald Reagan, the darling of the Christian right in the US, was never even raised as an issue. Today preachers get divorced and the next week continue on in the pulpit as if nothing happened.
As the cultural view of divorce has drifted, the church has drifted with the culture and moved away from God’s intention for us.
I am reading a book on economics that pointed out that the prices prostitutes in the US are paid has fallen over the years because of the increasingly liberal sexual views held by the culture. In economic terms, as the supply has increased, the demand has decreased and wages have fallen. With liberalized sexual values, there is too much free competition for prostitutes to continue to earn high wages.
In my freshman year at university in Boston, in 1968, there were men’s dorms and women’s dorms. Women were allowed in the men’s dorms only on certain days and at certain hours. The doors had to remain open a specified width when a woman was in the room. When people smoked marijuana, they kept the window open, even on the coldest days of winter, and put a wet towel under the crack of the door so the odor would not go out into the hall.
Four years later, the dorms were coed, male and female floors and women came and went and sometimes stayed whenever they wanted to. Some mornings I would walk into the bathroom and a woman would be showering. Drugs were smoked out in the hallways. The culture drifted rapidly over those four years.
Casual sex is on the increase. A new term has been coined for friends who want to have sex without any emotional attachment: friends with benefits. Cohabitation, living together, is on the increase and marriage on the decrease.
The culture has shifted over the years in our attitude toward divorce, pre-marital sex and we are currently drifting on the acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. If you measure the attitudes of Christians by the decade of their age, you will see an increasing acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle as you move down the decades. Christians in their twenties are much more open and accepting of homosexuality than Christians in their fifties.
In these and many other ways, our culture is taking us away from God’s intention for us.
Romans 12:2 is an antidote to this cultural drift.
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
When you read the Bible, it is always necessary to read a verse in context and the context of Romans 12:2 is eleven chapters of Paul’s heart and mind revealing to us God’s great mercy in rescuing us when we were lost for all eternity. This led him to Romans 12:1 which urged us to respond to his great mercy by offering ourselves as living sacrifices. This is what I talked about last week.
It is in the context of offering ourselves as living sacrifices that Paul then urges us in verse 2, not to conform to the pattern of the world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we will then be able to test and approve what God’s will is.
I often hear people saying they want to know the will of God for their lives. Well, here Paul lays out how to do that.
First Paul says:
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world
Eugene Peterson translated this in The Message as
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.
And in the JB Phillips translation it reads
Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould
Followers of Jesus and the world have always been moving in different directions.
I heard once about a joke, a cruel joke, played on a bride and groom at their wedding. The newly married couple was taking a train to their honeymoon and the ushers and bridesmaids hustled them over to the train station after the reception and in all the commotion, put the bride on the train going north and the groom on the train going south.
Please don’t ever do that to a married couple. It is a cruel joke and it is equally cruel when the church, as the bride of Christ, sets off in a different direction than Jesus, the bridegroom.
It is a maxim of mine that followers of Jesus should always distrust the values of the culture around them. Most often, those values will lead us away from Jesus.
This is not just my own thinking; it is a clear teaching in Scripture.
In Leviticus 18:2-3 the Lord said to Moses:
“Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the Lord your God. 3 You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices.
This is a teaching that runs through the Old Testament as God gave laws and revelations that worked to make Israel a people consecrated to him, separate and distinct from the polytheistic culture around them.
This theme is continued in the New Testament. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that we are not to be yoked together in marriage with unbelievers. (2 Corinthians 6:14-18)
And then he quotes Old Testament scripture from Leviticus, Ezekiel and Isaiah.
“Therefore come out from them
and be separate,
says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
and I will receive you.”
“I will be a Father to you,
and you will be my sons and daughters,
says the Lord Almighty.”
God continues to want to create his people as a holy people, consecrated unto him. He wants us to be drawn into his family. He wants us to be, as Peter wrote in his letter (1 Peter 2:9-10)
a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light
John encouraged us in his letter: (1 John 2:15-17)
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
So examine your culture and see what it is your culture thinks is important and then ask if that value is biblical.
For example, in the US the culture values independence and self-sufficiency. Our cultural icon, at least in my generation, is Clint Eastwood who needed no one and took care of himself. When I was in university, there was a popular picture of John Wayne, from one of his cowboy movies and the caption underneath said, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest SOB in the valley.”
This cultural value of independence and self-reliance is not a biblical value. We are meant to be dependent on God and on each other. We are meant to live together in community.
Our model is Jesus who Paul said in II Corinthians 13:4
For to be sure, he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God’s power. Likewise, we are weak in him, yet by God’s power we will live with him to serve you.
Paul followed the example of Jesus. In II Corinthians 12:10 he wrote:
That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
This is one of many examples. My point is that it is necessary to identify what it is your culture values and then to examine it critically to see in what way it is not biblical.
It takes effort to do this because what comes most naturally is to absorb the values of our culture without thinking.
Think of all the hours you spend watching TV, videos, internet entertainment, playing video games, reading books and magazines. All these pour values into our lives.
I am not a video game player, but I watched my daughters and nephews playing a video game a few years ago, ok, maybe 12 to 15 years ago, but that seems increasingly few as I age. The game involved going from room to room, picking up weapons and ammunition and then blasting away. When someone was killed, blood oozed out in a pool.
As gaming has become more sophisticated, the graphics have become more real.
If you play a lot of video games, you need to know that the images you see and the actions you take are affecting your values. I watched my nephews playing a game in which the goal was to kill as much wildlife as possible and I felt disturbed at this wanton slaughter. They didn’t even think about it.
I don’t want to pick on video games. The books we read, the movies and TV shows we watch, the magazines we read, all of these are also sending messages to us. The advertising industry is extremely clever about this. They are experts in knowing how to manipulate us by identifying cultural values and human needs and taking advantage of them.
The obvious solution would be for us to listen to Paul’s advice to the Philippians, at the end of his letter. (Philippians 4:8)
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.
This is great advice and we need to work toward this as a goal, but I do not think it is possible to shut out the things in the world that do not fit into these categories. Sometimes things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy come mixed in with things that are not.
When my daughters were young, we did not allow them to watch R rated movies. But one day, they came home from playing with our neighbor’s kids and I learned they had watched an R rated movie.
I realized that it was going to be impossible to protect my daughters from the messages of the world, so I determined that I would teach them to discern the messages of the world. Unless we cut ourselves off from society, we will be unable to avoid the messages of the world. Even Siddhartha one day came out of his idealized seclusion and came into contact with the reality of the world.
Because we cannot cut out the world, we must learn to discern the hidden messages in the books and magazines we read, the TV and videos we watch and the video games we play. If you are able to discern the message being communicated, then you can bring it out of the subconscious and examine it in the light of day and see it for what it is.
When you see a car commercial where a guy pulls up in a gas station and the beautiful girl looks up and drives off with him, what is being communicated? If I buy that car, then beautiful women will be attracted to me? Women are attracted to what we own more than who we are? Are women really that stupid? Some women, perhaps, but not the ones I want to like me. Will the things I own give me what I want? Not really. But that is what is being communicated.
I encourage you to talk together about what you read and watch and discuss the messages that come with what you read, watch and play. I did this with my daughters and you need to do this with your children. And you need to do this with your peers. Make it a goal never to watch a movie or TV show or play a video game or read a book without talking with someone about it afterwards.
I don’t know if you remember a movie with Tom Cruise titled Top Gun. This is a film about elite US Navy fighter pilots. This was a cool movie about cool pilots. My oldest daughter, when she was a teenager, talked to me one day after having seen this movie and said that when she got married, she wanted to marry a man who was sexually experienced. I asked her why she thought that and she referenced this movie where the coolest guys were sexually active.
We talked about the messages of the movie and I talked with her about my marriage to Annie and how we were both virgins when we got married and how wonderful that was for us.
This is what we have to do. The world is constantly sending its message through films, television, games, books and magazines and we have to be aware of what they are trying to tell us. If we don’t pay attention, we will swallow their message and trot along with the world, away from God’s intentions for us.
The Phillips translation says:
Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within
In the NIV it reads:
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
How do we resist the pressure of the world to mold us and shape us as it wants? Our minds have to be renewed.
Notice that Paul did not say we need to have a heart for God. Paul was much more specific. To have a heart for God does entail having a focus on God that involves all we are, heart, mind and spirit. But he focuses here more specifically on the renewal of our minds.
I think this might be why he wrote that. The problem many of us have with the cultural drift that takes place is that we are ruled by how we feel. When we have friends who are gay and who love each other, care for each other, who have been hurt by the rejection of their families, friends and community because they are gay, our heart reaches out to accept them and we move along with the culture. Doesn’t God want us to be in loving, caring relationships? If my friends have that kind of relationship, how could God not be pleased with it?
The same thing happened with divorce. A woman is married to a man who does not appreciate her, who does not support the development of her talents, does not love her as she wants to be loved. And then she meets a man who does all of this. She feels wonderful when she is with him. She comes alive as a person when she is with him, and so she divorces her husband to marry this man.
How could God be displeased when something so wonderfully alive came out of the dead marriage?
Paul calls us as followers of Jesus, in light of his mercy that has been displayed for eleven chapters of Romans, to offer ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. And for this reason, he urges us to resist the pressures of the world that will pull us away from his intention for us.
It may be that a woman might be happier if she got a divorce and married someone else. I have a friend that struggled for years and finally came out of the closet and admitted to himself and to the world that he is homosexual and entered into a relationship with a partner. He expresses great happiness and contentment now that he no longer has to resist his homosexual desires.
But our happiness is not to be the measurement by which we judge our actions and set our values. The institution of marriage, created by God, is more important than our happiness.
I talked the other day with a friend who is married to a very difficult woman. She has been difficult for years and continues to be difficult. He is, most of the time, denied the pleasures of the marital bed and yet he remains married to her. He told me that perhaps God wants to develop his character through this marriage. I admire him for not giving up.
It is interesting to me that so many of the issues with which our modern world is struggling center on the institution of marriage. Abortion is a denial of the procreational consequences of sex and a denial of God’s instruction to be fruitful and multiply. Same-sex marriage is a denial of the procreational intention of God to populate a planet with people who would give him praise. Sexual activity outside of marriage is an attack on God’s intention to protect his gift of sex within the safety of a committed relationship. Cohabitation, living together without being married, is a cheap shortcut that mimics the marriage relationship God wants but without submission to him.
It is by a focus on the Word of God, the Scriptures, that we sharpen our minds. It is by sharing with each other and discussing the things we watch and read and play that we sharpen our minds. It is by relying on the Holy Spirit to lead us into truth as we read our Bibles that we sharpen our minds and they become renewed, protecting us from the world with its constant bombardment of insidious messages that seek to lead us away from God.
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Identify the cultural values that influence you. Analyze the messages that the culture sends to you though what you read, watch and play. Discuss with family and friends these things and discern the hidden messages being sent. Then you will be able to know God’s will for your life.
Try to follow God’s will without doing this and you will drift along with the culture thinking that you have evolved in your understanding when you have only blurred your thinking and are drifting aimlessly along.
God’s intentions for us have not changed over the centuries. What he wanted for Mary and Martha and Pricilla and Aquilla and Paul and Timothy and Barnabas he still wants for us today. What was good for them is still good for us. The wrapping has changed but the content is still the same, God’s good, pleasing and perfect will.
The world is drifting by. You need to identify what part of the culture that is drifting by is neutral and you can drift along with it. But it is critical that you also identify what part of the culture is moving away from the foundations and principles of Christian faith that do not change over time. The way the culture influences us is often hidden and difficult to discern. Sharpen your mind through your study of Scripture and discussion with friends and family so you will know when to be flexible and when to resist the drift of culture.
