An article appearing in the August 11, 2007 edition of World Magazine entitled, “Sex and the evangelical teen” suggests evangelical teenagers on the whole may be more sexually immoral than non-Christians.
“Christian parents and churches need to face up to a problem long hidden in the dark: Evangelical teenagers are just as sexually active as their non-Christian friends.
“In fact, there is evidence that evangelical teenagers on the whole may be more sexually immoral than non-Christians. Statistically, evangelical teens tend to have sex first at a younger age, 16.3, compared to liberal Protestants, who tend to lose their virginity at 16.7. And young evangelicals are far more likely to have had three or more sexual partners (13.7 percent) than non-evangelicals (8.9 percent).
“What about abstinence pledges? Those work—for a while—delaying sex on an average of about 18 months, with 88 percent of pledgers eventually giving up their vow to remain virgins until marriage.
“These are the findings of sociologist Mark Regnerus, himself a Christian, published in his new book Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
“It isn’t that evangelical teenagers do not know any better. Some 80 percent of teenagers who say they have been ‘born again’ agree that sex outside of marriage is morally wrong. Still, as many as two-thirds of them violate their own beliefs in their actual behavior.”
Gene Edward Veith , http://www.worldmag.com/articles/13208
Sad and astonishing isn’t it? Knowing right from wrong two-thirds actively choose wrong.
Don’t think that I’m just picking on teenage Christians this morning. There’s also a disconnection between the beliefs and behaviors of adult Christians. Christians in America are looking less and less distinct. Although their theology and politics may be different, believers are looking a lot like nonbelievers. Take for example divorce.
“…when evangelicals and non-evangelical born again Christians are combined into an aggregate class of born again adults, their divorce figure is statistically identical to that of non-born again adults: 32% versus 33%, respectively.”
http://barna.org/barna-update/article/15-familykids/42-new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released
Last week we turned a corner in our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. After spending three chapters describing the wonderful things God has done for us and given us through Christ, Paul gets practical and urges us to “live a life worthy of the calling you have received” (4:1). The first step in living out one’s salvation involves radical commitment to the church: we’re to love and serve one another even when we disappoint and hurt one another. Just as we’re to be radically committed to the body of Christ, Paul exhorts believers to be radically distinct from nonbelievers. We’re to be separate from them behaviorally, not socially. As you’ll see in a moment, a big part of living a life worthy of the calling you have received means a distinctive countercultural way of life.
Guidelines for Going Countercultural
Keep in mind that this is not an option. This is an essential means for living out your faith. Radical distinctiveness will shape you spiritually, influence a skeptical, watching world, lead to the life you’ve always wanted – the one God wants to give you – and ultimately bring honor to the Lord. The first guideline is a life long commitment:
Resist conformity to the culture
Before we read verse 17, remember that the Ephesians were Gentile Christians. They lived in one of the largest most influential cities of ancient Asia Minor.
So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. Ephesians 4:17
Why would Paul give them this command? The most reasonable explanation is that some of the Christians were living like Gentiles. Rather than demonstrate the distinctives of the Christian life they were blending in. “Paul describes the majority of the inhabitants of the Greco-Roman empire … as aiming with silly methods at meaningless goals” and some of the Christians followed the same futile pattern. (He’ll describe how they were living momentarily.)
Paul tells them and us in no uncertain terms that God’s call to salvation and personal life mission involves the rejection of godless cultural norms. Some things that our neighbors take for granted as normal, healthy, and okay we must resist as followers of Christ. You cannot be a cultural chameleon and live a life worthy of God’s call. You’ve got to see yourself more as a cultural cardinal: bright red; pointy head; black masked eyes. When you see a cardinal there’s no question about the kind of bird you’re looking at. They’re distinctive. I can’t see how they conform to natural selection because they certainly don’t blend in. Christians should be just as identifiable and it shouldn’t take a Pro-life bumper sticker or snazzy Christian t-shirt to get it done.
Examine your society and yourself
…most [Americans] are immersed in daily exercises of covert worldview training via the
mass media, public law, public school education, the Internet, and conversations with peers. Only an intentional process designed to develop, integrate, and apply a biblical life lens can protect us from the savage mental and spiritual assault that occurs every day.
George Barna, Think Like Jesus (Nashville: Integrity Pub. 2003), 42.
We must be people who critically evaluate the messages coming at us every moment of every day. We’ve got to be ruthlessly honest about how they’re influencing us.
Paul goes on from merely telling the Ephesians not to act like Gentiles to describing their behavior. He wants the believers to evaluate themselves and their society to see if they’re conforming to ungodly standards.
They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more. Ephesians 4:18-19
Paul describes the horrible situation of people who intentionally ignore God and His ways. Their rejection of truth leads to a callused heart. They lose all sensitivity to God. His Holy Spirit no longer prompts or convicts. Their minds become corrupted and focused on foolish and perverted obsessions. There’s a slow, but dangerous progression at work in the hearts of unredeemed people:
“No man becomes a great sinner all at once. At first he regards sin with horror. When he sins, there enters into his heart remorse and regret. But if he continues to sin there comes a time when he loses all sensation and can do the most shameful things without any feeling at all. His conscience is petrified.”
William Barclay, The Daily Bible Study Series, 152.
Here’s what I find troubling: the same thing happens to Christians. I’ve seen them firsthand give into certain sins. At first they feel conviction, but after a while they feel nothing. God wounds them to bring them to repentance, but they bandage it over with easy justifications, the chief one being, “This makes me happy.”
I think Christians are losing their distinctiveness in America because we’ve stopped examining the messages of our culture and their impact on us. We believe big lies and then act on them. “It’s a consumer-driven economy and that’s okay.” That one’s dished out by credit card companies and it leads us to spend money we’ve haven’t earned. “The government’s purpose is to solve your problems.” That’s why churches, benevolence societies, and individuals have stopped being charitable. We elect a god-emperor president and his royal stooges in Congress to tax us and thereby absolve us of personal responsibility. “We should live together before marriage kind of like trying on a pair of shoes before buying them.” It’s more like trying out a toothbrush before buying it. The truth is strikingly different. “Likelihood of divorce within first ten years of marriage: Those who cohabit prior to marriage are almost twice as likely to divorce as opposed to those who do not cohabit prior to marriage.”
http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4223355/k.1320/Do_You_Have_Statistics_on_Cohabitation.htm
Cohabitating is more accurately trial divorce rather than trial marriage, but we believe the lies and follow suit.
Examine your society and yourself. You may be believing and acting on lies. Go on the offense.
Nourish your mind with truth
If the problem is a corrupted mind, the solution must lie in its renewal. Paul points to Ephesians back to what they’d already learned through formal teaching and experience:
You, however, did not come to know Christ that way. Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. Ephesians 4:20-21
Nourishing the mind on the truth that is in Jesus is the solution. Paul intends that they remember the kind of life Jesus lived, His sacrificial death for sinners, and His resurrection to new life. He wants them to meditate on Jesus character and conduct, the way He treated people and ministered to their needs. He wants them to recall their own experience of forgiveness and peace. Re-centering on Jesus Christ enables us to live a life counter to the prevailing culture.
The reason it’s so difficult to do this in our world is our addiction to various information technologies. While preparing for this message I received an interesting newsletter article from job guru Dan Miller. Listen to his take of our world:
“While attending a funeral recently I glanced up and down just my row to see several people Twittering and checking emails in the last few minutes prior to the beginning of the service. It’s now common during sermons and seminars to see people with their heads down, busy passing on tidbits of information instantly. This morning I read that one million people are following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter.
“I suggest that this massive addiction to information leads us away from wisdom, not toward it, creating what author Shane Hill calls ‘a permanent puberty of the mind.’ Recognize that information, knowledge and even intelligence do not necessarily lead to wisdom. The overload of information in fact encourages the opposite of what creates wisdom – stillness, time, reflection and solitude. With the internet, TV, email, FaceBook, Twitter and cell phones, there is no waiting. There is no such thing as stillness or quiet personal reflection. Meaningful experiences and the path toward wisdom can be diverted by constant information.
“Increasing the rate of information input to your brain may make you a candidate for Jeopardy but it probably has little to do with increasing spiritual characteristics like love, trust, compassion, faith, courage -- and wisdom.”
Want to increase your wisdom?
• Practice reflection, meditation and introspective thinking for 30 minutes each morning. Many who allow constant input are keeping themselves in the shallow end of the wisdom pool. Don’t be one of them.
• Turn off the TV for at least two hours every evening
• Read your email at set times during the day – perhaps once in the morning and once in the evening. Don’t allow yourself to be interrupted with every new incoming message
• Spend four hours on Saturday without your cell phone or computer
• Plan one day a quarter on an “information fast.” Get away from your computer, your cell phone, TV and the newspapers. You’ll be amazed at how your creativity will increase – you may get the one idea that will change your future
• Read one good non-fiction book each month. Chose carefully from the wisdom of the ages.
Dan Miller, “Twitter vs. Wisdom,” 48 Days Newsletter, Issue 466, June 23, 2009
Might I recommend the Bible as one of those non-fiction books? I’d suggest systematic daily study, but I’ll take what I can get.
Eradicate self-exaltation
Commentators are divided over the meaning of the next verse:
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; Ephesians 4:22
Is Paul saying that the old way of life was put off when one came to Christ? Or is he saying that we need to continually put off the old self? Any time I run across a paradox like this, I agree with both. When you came to faith in Jesus the old life was put off. The problem is, like a well worn coat, we keep slipping it back on again. The old self is our preoccupation ourselves.
Martin Luther defined sin as homo incurvatus in se, “a human being curved in upon itself.” He said we’re like a wood chip whittled from a log. Once detached it curves in on itself. Apart from God we obsessively focus on ourselves. Christ enables us to take our eyes off self. He gives us the ability to choose God’s way and to serve other people rather than self. Eventually, our desires become less self-exalting as well, but I believe that takes a lifetime.
There’s good reason to eradicate self-exaltation. It leads to corruption. Humanity was created for worship. When we dethrone God something has to take His place. Usually, the thing that takes God’s place is self. Self become an idol and idols always demand a sacrifice. When self-interest is our god the sacrifice can be broken relationships, broken hearts, ruined health, and a life entirely misspent. For those who do not know Jesus Christ that corruption is eternal. Hell is an everlasting self-obsession. Jesus described it as an existence where “’their worm [personal self-obsessed sin] does not die, and the fire [God’s judgment] is not quenched. (Mark 9:48)
Finally …
Wear the spotless garments of Christ
…to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Ephesians 4:23-24
These verses are as controversial as 22. Did putting on the new self happen at your conversion or is it an ongoing process? And again I answer, “yes.”
When your mind is right because you’ve made the commitment not to blend in, you’re constantly evaluation the message that you’re living out, you’re taking the time to nourish your mind, and you’re intentionally putting down the desire to exalt yourself, you can put on the new self. The new self is who you really are in your heart of hearts. It’s the new self created by God the moment you had faith in Jesus Christ. As a Christian you have the ability to put on the old self or the new self.
The old self looks like everyone else – self-interested, dominated by the pursuit of pleasure, insensitive to God, daily corrupting. The new self is counter cultural – righteous which means doing what’s really right, holy meaning uncontaminated by moral filth. When we put on the new self we display the image and glory of God who is righteous and holy.
“About every time this year along the shores of Lake Michigan, huge Chinook salmon,
aka King salmon, move upstream to spawn. What is so interesting is that these behemoth fish, as they swim upstream, move to their death. They spawn, they give life, but they are not renewed, they live to die. And later on in the salmon season, the stream is full of rotting, bloated, decaying fish.
“When we give ourselves over to thinking like and making decisions apart from Christ we get caught in a stream of life from which there is no return. It leads to death. But, in Christ, we have become something new-a new creature that even though it dies, it lives. We are being renewed inwardly day by day through the person of Jesus Christ who changes everything about us, most notably our thinking, so that our lives produce holiness. Why would we want to evaluate life, make business decisions, lead our families, treat our friends, or our spouse in a manner of life without Christ. That way of life, that way of thinking is corrupted, it’s dead like a rotting salmon. As one commentator said, “Every trait of the Old Man’s behavior is putrid, crumbling, or inflated like rotten waste or cadavers, stinking, ripe for being disposed of and forgotten.” Every decision, every way of thought that is informed, not by Christ, but by the old man, is likewise putrid and rotten.
[Resist conformity to culture; examine your society and yourself; nourish your mind with truth; eradicate self-exaltation; wear the spotless garments of Christ]
“The French sculptor Auguste René Rodin, an innovative and sometimes controversial artist, created masterpieces such as The Man with the Broken Nose, St. John the Baptist, The Bronze Age, or the uncompleted Gates of Hell. But he is most likely known for his work entitled The Thinker. You’ve seen it. The unnamed man, seated, hunched over, leaning on his knees, hand on his chin. Contemplating thinking. Art historians believe that Rodin meant to create Adam who was at the moment thinking contemplating the choices of righteousness or sin. We must contemplate as well. For we have a choice like Adam. To give our minds life or death. How will the life of your mind fare?”
http://www.lifeofgrace.org/uploads/Ephesians_4_17-24.pdf
