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Cultural Influence
By
Pastor Bill Mitchell
1/20/12
We are currently in a
series examining the impact of culture upon our church and personal
lives. We began on Martin Luther King Sunday with a quote from Dr.
King:
‘But American Christians,
I must say to you as I said to the Roman Christians years ago, “Be
not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of
your mind.” [Romans 12:2] Or, as I said to the Philipian Christians,
“You are a colony of heaven.” [Philippians 3:20]; For our
citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the
Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ’. [NKJV]
‘This means that although
you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the
empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time
and eternity; both in heaven and earth. Therefore, your ultimate
allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to
nation, not to any man-made institution (culture). The Christian
owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution
conflicts with God’s will it is your Christian duty to take a stand
against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands
of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands
of the Almighty God.
I
am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a
living than making a life’.
–Martin
Luther King, Jr., “Paul’s Letter to American Christians”, 4 November
1956, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery Alabama
It is
quite apparent that Dr. King believed and taught that the demands of
our culture (secular, personal and church) are not toake precedent
over the eternal demands of Almighty God. A powerful truth to
embrace indeed.
But first
we must develop a definition of culture, since Alfred Kroeber and
Clyde Kluckhohn
compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in
Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952).
Here is the meaning we are working with:
Broadly
speaking, the social heritage of a group (organized
community
or society). It is a
pattern
of
responses
discovered,
developed,
or invented during the
group's
history of
handling
problems
which arise from interactions among its
members,
and between them and their
environment.
These responses are considered the
correct way to perceive, feel, think, and
act,
and are passed on to the new members through immersion and teaching.
Culture determines what is
acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant,
right
or wrong, workable or unworkable.
It encompasses all learned and shared, explicit or tacit,
assumptions,
beliefs,
knowledge,
norms,
and
values,
as well as
attitudes,
behavior,
dress, and language.
The burden of
the Spirit in this series is to differentiate between being clothed
by our culture and being clothed (transformed) with Christ
(Romans 13:14; Gal. 3:27).
The first
essential to breaking the stronghold of cultural enslavement
contains three fundamentals (Eph. 2:1-4) that you will not realize
through the media or even Christian TV or publications. In fact,
very few, seriously believe these essentials. They are not a part of
our cultural assumptions of human beings:
1)
Without a Savior all are dead in sin and incapable of any
spiritual good;
2)
Without a Savior all are imprisoned and blinded by Satan;
3)
Without a Savior all are under the wrath of God and eternally
lost.
This passage in Ephesians
reads like this in the Message:
1 It
wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of
sin. 2
You let the world, which doesn't know the
first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your
lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience.
3
We all did it, all of us doing what we felt
like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat.
It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole
lot of us.
The phrase “course of this world” is
intriguing to say the least. “Course"
is aiōn, which Trench defines as "All that floating mass of
thoughts, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims,
aspirations, at any time current in the world, which it may be
impossible to seize and accurately define, but which constitutes a
most real and effective power, being the moral, or immoral
atmosphere which at every moment of our lives we inhale, again
inevitably to exhale…”
Let’s see whose domain this floating mass
of thoughts, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims,
aspirations, is:
John 12:31 (NASB)
"Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will
be cast out.
John 14:30 (NASB)
"I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is
coming, and he has nothing in Me;
John 16:11 (NASB)
and concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world has been
judged.
2 Corinthians 4:4 (NASB)
in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the
unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of
the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
In the words of John
Piper, “According
to verse 2 we all once followed the course of this world. We were in
step with the times, in tune with the world, at home in the spirit
of the age. The reason for this is that Satan is at work in the sons
of disobedience.
There is a
personal, supernatural reality called the prince of the power of the
air, and he has easy access to the hearts of the disobedient. And so
he easily keeps their behavior in his approved channels—sometimes
moral, sometimes immoral, but always self-centered. He blinds their
minds to the glory of Christ in the gospel and so protects his
captives from the rescue operations of the church”.
So, how are we to deal with the demands to be
culturally relevant or to embrace the myth of seeker sensitivity? I
ask our church community to consider these two contemplations:
1)
Whenever a church takes its cues from the culture and conforms to
cultural ideals, it is a powerful indicator of poor leadership. Now
we feel to reach the culture, we must cater to the needs of the
culture and eventually secularize the church. Why do we take our
cues from a culture that is lost and without hope? Shouldn’t we as
the church be the examples and leaders to culture? Keep this in
mind, whenever culture feels we are acting, thinking, and behaving
on their level, we have forfeited our anointing to lead them and in
their mind, our authority is no better than theirs.
2)
Some undiscerning advocates of cultural relevance are so devoted to
being hip and contemporary as a fundamental prerequisite of ministry
that they have entered a haze of shrewd strategies and have lost
their orientation. This fog bank can be observed as Biblical
priorities slide from genuine evangelism and discipleship, to
spotlight events driven by the value of simply sustaining something
exciting and stimulating. Such a context in due course will
ambush the timeless. While culture constantly
transitions,
the keys to touching people
for eternity has not changed.
Some of the
timeless listed below:
The Timeless
Unshakable
Bedrock Of Scripture
Pursuing An
Intimate Walk With God Including Design & Discipline
The Commitment
To Body Ministry
Passion For The
Great Commission
Faith-Filled
Conviction To Build Marriage & Family
If the church
is not rock solid in Christ, it may not withstand the overwhelming
complexity and resistance of the encroaching principality and power
of culture.
Pastor Bill
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