Many Christians spend an inordinate amount of time being concerned with what the sinful world thinks about how we live.
We seek to please and appease the world so they will like us. We adapt to their language, dress, entertainment and methods, so they will not mock us.
Accordingly, we have lost our focus.
Paul become “all things to all men” (1 Corinthians 9:22, NKJV). However, he did not mean that we should place the things of the world above God. When we emulate the world, and model their lives, we stand in stark contrast to God’s will.
We enter Christ when we are baptized into his body, the Church (Acts 2:38,47; Ephesians 1:22-23; Romans 6:3-4; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:27). When we are in Christ, we have left the world behind and live in a new kingdom, where our daily goal is to bring glory to Christ (Ephesians 3:20-4:1).
The world hates Christ and put him to death (John 15:18-25). It is completely antithetical to the goodness of God. In fact, we are not even to be in fellowship with darkness (Ephesians 5:11; cf. Galatians 1:8-10).
“If we say that we have fellowship with Him [Christ], and walk in darkness [Satan] we lie and not practice the truth” ( 1 John 1:6). God is light and “in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). We are to be “unspotted from the world” (James 1:27).
“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 1:15). The things of the world have no place in the kingdom.
Christians are saved out of the world, so why would we want to go back there and be a lite-version of what we were prior to salvation? If we are a little less profane, immodest and promiscuous than the world, it does not make us godly, it makes us pretenders (Romans 12:1-2).
We must seek to please God more than anything else and always walk in the light, where Christ resides.
The world will hate us, mock us and do anything it can to pull us away from God. They will never understand why we live as we do. Therefore, we have no reason to place the things of the world above Christ. Be what God desires and the rest will take care of itself.
–by Richard Mansel