Living in a dying world

Rom 12: 1 – 8

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 21 Oct, 2007

THE PASTOR got out of his Lexus sedan in the church car park, and looked around. It was crowded today ― that was good. He was glad, though, of his designated parking spot.

The congregation was large, as the full car park predicted. Over 1000 easily. The band was already in full swing, people were finding their seats. The quality carpet on the floors deadened the sound of the moving around.

The pastor looked around at the people. He knew many. Some were among the 25 original members when the church started, way back. Professionals and business owners now. He had been with them in their days of struggle. Now they were doing well. He thought of the fleet of four–wheel–drives in the carpark, of the two–storeyed homes, the overseas holidays. They were doing well for themselves.

And they gave well. The church had all it needed and more. No more second–hand, no more scrounging around the op–shops. They bought well now. They had a band, instruments, amplifiers. And, of course, the salaried pastoral team: any big church needs it.

Yet the thought came. “There is something wrong with all of this.”

It nagged at him through the week. He worried about it. Something was wrong, and he couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

Mid–week, it came to him. He scrapped the announced sermon and began again.

Don’t be conformed to this world.

He looked it up again, in J.B Phillips’ paraphrase. It was even more pointed there:

Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mould.

The pastor sighed. That was exactly what he and his church had let happen. They had let the world squeeze them into its mould.

The pastor thought about some of his sermons. He had talked about God’s blessings for those who are faithful. He couldn’t remember having actually said that wealth is the result of faith, but he had certainly told the stories of wealthy believers, like LeTourneau, who made his first million during the Great Depression. Even stories of people like George Müller, whose orphanages never lacked while they continued praying for God’s support ― they all implied that faith without wealth is dead.

Sunday morning, the pastor got up in the pulpit and began.

“God has been speaking to me this week. I have to begin with Romans 12. It warns us,

 ² Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

I want us to focus on this verse, and let God’s word drill down into our hearts.

We have become proud of ourselves.

When our neighbours play sport on Sunday, we have been at church. We haven’t fallen into the worldly patterns of Sabbath breaking we see all around us.

When there is a party at work, and they are all drinking beer, we either drink soft drink, or we don’t go at all. We don’t follow the world’s patterns when it comes to drinking alcohol.

When we see that it is fashionable for men to wear stubble, we men go clean–shaven. When the young people wear tattered, worn jeans and scrappy tee-shirts, our children wear pressed slacks and neat shirts or blouses.

The neighbourhood children attend the world’s schools ― the State schools. We send ours to the best private, Church–run schools.

But, the truth is, we are as worldly as anyone else, maybe more so.

The time has come for us to change, to start over, to adopt a new and truly distinctive way of life.”

The congregation sat there, open–mouthed. They hadn’t expected such things to be said from the pulpit.

When the pastor went on, when he began talking about the way they all struggled for the trappings of status, when he started discussing the cars they owned, the houses they lived in, the places they shopped, some of the congregation got up and walked out. There were mutterings about how there was nothing wrong with enjoying the finer things of life.

“I always buy Mercedes Benz cars, because they are more reliable, and that’s good stewardship!” said one.

“Why shouldn’t we have good houses,” said another. “Does he want us to live in hovels?”

Soon there was a deacons’ meeting in the car park among the four wheel drives, and plans were underway for a very important Members’ meeting next Sunday...

NOT CONFORMING TO THE WORLD

When Paul wrote that we must not be conformed to the world, he was serious.

When Jesus said that we must take up the cross and follow him, he was serious.

He said,

^{MT 16:24} ...“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. ²⁵ For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. ²⁶ What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?

And he meant it.

There is a very clear underlying message throughout both the Old and the New Testament, that we Christians must be radically dissociated from the world around us.

When I was young, our pastors used to warn us to be “in the world, but not of the world.” That’s a pretty sound Biblical teaching.

Where we went wrong was that we had far too shortsighted an idea of what the world and its patterns was like.

All those petty things we focused on were little more than matters of fashion and personal preference.

When the various participants in the Uniting Church were still negotiating, some of the young people used to sing,

The Prezzies and the Methos should be friends,
The Prezzies and the Methos should be friends:
The Prezzies drink an awful lot,
The Methos never touch a drop,
But that’s no reason why they can’t be friends.

There’s a truth there. Drinking alcohol or not drinking alcohol is not a hanging matter. Some do, some don’t. What we wear or don’t wear is more about preference than morality. Whether or not we watch TV after 8:30 pm is hardly something to hold seminars about.

But, so often in the past, we focused on such things. We young people at Fairfield Baptist got hauled over the coals for our worldliness if we bought a Coke at the shop after Sunday School.

There is a very strong emphasis throughout the Bible on the idea of separation from the world around us.

God told the Israelites,

^{LEV 18:24} “ `Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. ²⁵ Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.

Again, he said,

^{LEV 20:23} You must not live according to the customs of the nations I am going to drive out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them.

or he said,

^{LEV 20:26} You are to be holy to me because I, the LORD, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.

Jesus preached,

^{MK 1:15} The Kingdom of God is at hand

He also said,

The Kingdom of God is in your midst

Paul told the Corinthians,

^{2 COR 5:17} If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, the former things have passed away, everything is becoming new.

And he said

^{2 COR 6:7} Come out from among them, and be separate.

The Bible emphasises separation from the world.

The Bible teaches that the Kingdom of God is already present in Jesus and, by faith, we belong to that new Kingdom, or, as Paul puts it, to the new creation. We no longer belong to this world and its ways. In Christ, we have died to it. He is dead as far as this world is concerned, and, by faith in him, so are we.

If you are in Jesus Christ by faith, you have entered the new world of God’s rule, where everything is becoming new.

If we let ourselves get squeezed back into the mould of this present age, we let ourselves get moulded like wet clay in a brick mould. We begin to take on again the shape of the world we were rescued from by the blood of Jesus.

MODELS OF SEPARATION

In the past, the Anabaptists and the Baptists took discipleship very seriously. To be a Baptist is not like joining a club. You had to show that living for Jesus was changing your life. The Methodists went even further. You only ever had a time limited membership. At the quarterly meetings, they determined if the members were living a life worthy of the Lord. If you were deemed not to be, your membership was suspended until the leaders met you, restored you, and led you back into the fold.

Those Amish people in the US ― Anabaptists ― are our close spiritual relatives. But they don’t own cars or TVs or telephones or computers. They dress like their ancestors dressed over three centuries ago. They live as they lived nearly 500 years ago.

These can all be ways to build yourself up and strengthen yourself to avoid being conformed to the world.

Yet often there is an element of selfishness even in these efforts.

It is so easy to give up what we didn’t really want in the first place.

The Syrian Christians in the first century thought they were very spiritual, because they fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. It wasn’t that they fasted. That wasn’t what they thought made them spiritual. It was the fact that, when they fasted, they didn’t do it on the same days as the Jews did, so they were not being squeezed into the mould of the Jewish world!

In an era when most people fasted, fasting ceased to be the thing, it was just a routine. But fasting on a different day ― the most trivial thing in the world! ― became the way they defined themselves.

Jonathan Swift is famous for writing a book, Gulliver’s Travels. You probably read about Gulliver in Lilliput when you were at school.

The version they read at school has the rude bits cut out.

Gulliver’s Travels is satire. It is a humorous critique of English and European society.

The story of Gulliver among the Lilliputians tells of war between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscans, who live on a neighbouring island.

They war with each other over the fact that one group opens their boiled eggs at the big end, and the other group opens their boiled eggs at the little end: the Big–endians and the Little–endians.

Swift is satirising the conflict between Catholics and Protestants. But it has a wider application.

When people use meaningless, pointless things to separate themselves from others, this has nothing to do with true faith. It is about what tribe I belong to. Are my colours blue and yellow, or are they red and black? Do I sing a hymn or chant a haka when my team plays?

The Presbyterian tribe drinks alcohol, the Methodist tribe doesn’t.

We always have to be on our guard against such silly and meaningless separations.

Paul warned the Colossians,

  ^{COL 2:20} Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: ²¹ “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? ²² These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. ²³ Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

All those, “Don’t handle, don’t taste, don’t touch!” rules look like a rejection of the world, people will sell them to you as the way out of worldliness, but, in fact, it is all as important as what end of the egg you cut open. It has nothing to do with consistent Christian living.

People often arise, trying to deceive believers, trying to seduce us into abandoning our freedom in Christ. And Paul says that that is another gospel, totally foreign to the gospel of Jesus, no matter how often they mention him.

REALISTIC PROPOSALS

The answer has to be not rules to follow, not a pattern which merely says, “I am different from you.” The answer has to be about looking at our world, learning to critique it, and aiming to discover how Jesus might have lived in it.

In a world running out of resources, are we doing right to use our comparative wealth to make sure we get the biggest share of the cake? I read recently about a Christian couple with grown kids. They sold their five bedroom house, moved into a little villa, and found that, with a smaller house, and less to heat and cool, they not only had more to give away to overseas aid and mission, but living was costing them less so they were living better than they used to. But another Christian couple doubled the size of their house, because they were taking in overseas students and reaching them for Christ, so they needed the space.

Many Christians are choosing to live more simply so that others may simply live.

Or how would Jesus run his church? Like a smoothly–operating business? Or with rough edges and lots of love, like a great family? Years ago the ABMS went down the corporate path, and turned off its key supporters to the extent that funds dwindled to a trickle. More recently the same happened to one of the great church–run charities. They turned around, and focused on ministry once more, and they are really impacting on the community again. The world tries to squeeze the church into its management patterns. I’d never say it is good to be badly organised, but it’s a matter of focus.

How would Jesus want kids educated? In a prestige church–run school? Or learning to share their lives with their neighbours in the State School, where kids get better final results and learn to cope with life as it really is?

The Bible tells us not to be squeezed into the world’s mould. God tells us instead to let him transform us by renewing our minds. And he makes a great and good promise: then we will know by testing how good and perfect and acceptable his will is.

Let’s all look at our lives and our lifestyles and choose not to let the world squeeze us into its mould!

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)