Of all the cultures the church has lived in, the modern world is the most powerful, the most pervasive, and the most pressurizing.
-Os Guinness in Prophetic Untimeliness
It's hard to resist what the world has to offer today. Hence, we are hard-pressed to either take a stand or capitulate to the world's culture and practice. If we choose the former, we are unfashionable misfits that stand out but if we do the latter, we go astray in our faith and descend into worldliness. My professor in theology defines worldliness this way:
Worldliness is everything in a society that makes righteousness look strange and sin look normal.How does a Christian fall into wordliness? Os Guinness outlines four steps in this process and it is worth to look at it carefully:
1. Assumption
It begins when something of the world is assumed to be significant enough to be worth considering and adopting into Christian thought and practice. Oftentimes, these assumptions are made without any careful thought. This is dangerous.
2. Abandonment
When we consider adopting any aspect of the world into our Christian life, a truth that we believe or a practice that we do is bound to go against it or does not seem to be able to co-exist with this new thing. This is where the fork in the road is reached. Either we choose to reject this new thing or we alter, and even worse, abandon our traditional beliefs and practices.
3. Adaptation
The next step of this spiral into worldliness is adaptation. The habit and culture of the world is now accepted without thought and the old is thrown out. In the process, this new thought becomes the authority over the remaining traditional Christian assumptions that were not yet abandoned. When we replace or alter one truth from the Bible with something from the world, eventually the whole authority of the Bible will be questioned. After all, if one truth from the Word of God needs updating then perhaps there are other Scripture-based doctrines, beliefs, and practices that need to be changed as well.
4. Assimilation
In the last step, the culture and habit of the world completely takes over all traditions. Old ideas and practices are updated to align with the new assumptions. As a result, Christians have now fully surrendered to the world's culture and practice. When assimilation happens, a Christian is virtually indistinguishable from a non-Christian.
There are a couple of important things that Christians must always remember about God and his Word.
1. God never changes.
If God never changes, then his law never changes. He does not adjust the boundary of sexual purity according to the values of the world. Sex will always be meant to be enjoyed within the confines of marriage. He will not move that boundary and later ordain that it is good to engage in pre-marital sex. He invented marriage and ordained it as a union between a man and a woman. He will never broaden the definition to include same-sex union. When Jesus said that no one can come to the Father but only through him, this will always remain true forever. God will not change his mind and say that there is more than one way by which man can be saved. God is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8). He will always stay true to himself and to his nature.
2. The authority is Scripture, not culture.
Os Guinness writes:
For all the lofty recent statements on biblical authority, a great part of the evangelical community has made a historic shift. It has transferred authority from Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) to Sola Cultura (by culture alone).
-Os Guinness in Prophetic Untimeliness
Who is the ultimate authority in our lives? Who is the authority in the church? Is it God and his Word or does the culture dictate what we must believe and practice? People who descend into wordliness think that portions of truth in the Bible are outdated and need to be revised in order to keep up with the reality of the modern times. Really? If we submit to the authority of the Bible, then we will not change it's message just because the world is changing. Yet today, the message of the gospel has been revised in order to bring more seekers into church. The unpopular portions of the gospel such as divine wrath and sin are intentionally left out. Emphasis is on God who is good and loving and wants to give you a second chance, fulfill your potential, solve your problems, and bless you by fattening your bank account. Will people really come to genuine faith in Jesus Christ with this kind of message? The world does not decide what Christians believe in and what they do. Culture does not critique Scripture. It's the other way around. Christians engage with the world and its ways through the lens of Scripture.
Jesus was an unfashionable misfit in a world that wanted him to fit in. And Jesus intentionally called Christians to also be unfashionable misfits. When the world goes downstream, Christians go upstream. Christians don't get swayed by public opinion and don't live by the values of the world. They are faithful to God and hold fast to the teachings of his Word. They don't change God's law in order to fit it around the world's values. Rather, they obey God's law even when the world will ridicule them as behind the times. Christians do not isolate themselves from the world. On the contrary, they engage with the world because Jesus sends them into the world as his witnesses (John 20:21).
So we are to live int the world but not get sucked into the world's value system and pattern of thinking. Let's embrace our unfashionableness! The reason is because, as witnesses of Jesus, we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-14). When we descend into worldliness, we lose our flavor and we extinguish our light. In the epistles, we also identify with Paul that we are “ambassadors for Christ with God making his appeal through us” (2 Cor. 5:20). An ambassador represents his nation in a foreign land. He doesn't switch his citizenship. We are citizens with the saints and members in the household of God (Eph. 2:19). We are a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession (1 Peter 2:9)” that we may proclaim the excellencies of Christ who has called us out of darkness. We don't go back and try to fit into the shadows. We stand out!
The world needs us unfashionable misfits because we bear the good news of the gospel of Christ. We reflect the glory of God through the work of the gospel in our relationships, in our triumphs, in our suffering, in our vocation, in our eating and drinking, in the way we spend our time and money, and in our conversation with others. If we try to fit in with the world, we lose our relevance.
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