What’s wrong with the world today? Here’s what you said last week in our survey:
• Reality TV
• Pursuit of Money
• War
• Sense of Entitlement
• Disrepect
• Debt
• Idols/Statues
• Lies
• Secularism
• Selfishness
• Disregard for the Value of Life
• Abortion
• Murder
• Just Being Mean
• Greed
• Trying to replace God
• Broken Relationships
From Romans 12: A Living Sacrifice to God
1 And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. 2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
What Paul is asking us is to just STOP doing this—stop letting the world conform our thinking.
We looked at two words Paul could have used for explaining to us not to be conformed:
Summorphos – denotes the alignment of the entire being to a given character or facet (morphe – complete change)
Suschematizo – to take the outward appearance of something that is not really true to the objects nature (schema – outward display)
I was the second word used in the text in Romans… so maybe it would be easier to understand this way: Stop allowing yourselves to be conformed into looking like the patterns and behaviors of this world.
So even though we’re not changing (to conform to the world) on the inside, it’s important to not LOOK like we’re changing (or conforming) on the outside. If we’re not careful, we’ll allow the change on the outside to affect our inward selves. More on this today…