“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.
Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
Romans 12:1, 2 MSG
Who or what has had the most impact on you? Your culture? Is your desire to fit in and be accepted? Is that your constant under-tow? Or is it God? Is He the One that you gratefully acknowledge for your very existence?
Don’t fool yourself. It can’t be both. One changes you from the outside in (a temporary fix). The other changes you from the inside out (an eternal fix). And remember, whichever one you focus on…you become.
So if you’re starting to be desensitized by your culture, you’re well on your way to being dragged down to that level of immaturity. And as you “skip through the daisies” you are becoming oblivious to the noxious weeds infesting your path. You’ve become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit in without even thinking.
Stop. Take a time-out. Do an inventory of your wants, your ways, your thoughts. Are they God thoughts? God ways?
If not, it’s time to turn around and do a 180! Run back to the Father! Just like the Prodigal son did. His culture had wooed him. He chased it which led to a wonderful life of slopping pigs.
He had bought the lie, culture tells us, and was missing out on the benefits of his father’s love…and ultimately His Heavenly Father’s love. Until “he came to his senses”, repented of his foolish ways and ran back to his waiting father!
See, when you fix your attention on God, you will quickly respond to His cues, resting in the fact that His desire is to bring out the absolute best in you.
