conformity

All Those Transformers

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“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, The Message).

The key is to be transformed rather than conformed. So many in an effort to appease the culture we live in have surrendered their convictions and beliefs to the point that they no longer have anything unique to offer anyone in the way of hope and salvation.

That’s being conformed. God wants us transformed.

We’ re supposed to be different. We’re supposed to think, speak, and act differently than those around us. At times that may mean holding unpopular convictions and beliefs. We may be seen as outdated and obsolete. We may be viewed as narrow-minded and hate-mongers.

Yet those same people are paying attention to everything we say and do. Those same people will long for that peace and hope when they see it in us. As long as they see it in us.

No one is impressed when we fit in so well that no one can tell the believer from the non-believer. That changes no lives and impacts nobody.

I still say that if you want to see change, you often will have to be the change. More accurately, you will have to be the one changed a.ka. transformed.

 

 

When You Can’t Think of Any Good Blog Ideas . . . .

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Since I am fresh out of original material, I thought I’d pick the brain of one C. S. Lewis and see if he has anything worthwhile to say. I found this in an email and thought it worthy enough to share with you. Plus, it uses words like solecism, which I’m going to have to look up now because I have no idea what it means. Here goes:

“If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.”

I looked up solecism. According to my handy-dandy Merriam-Webster dictionary, it means “an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence.” In other words, to experience the love of God in an illusory form is basically to go against the very fabric of our existence. Or something like that.

The fact that God created us and redeemed us and loves us for no other reason than He chooses to do so blows my mind. God didn’t– and still doesn’t– need me but He still wants me. He still wants you, even when it seems nobody else does.

That’s a good thought to take with you as you drift into dreamland tonight.

 

Untitled Blog #1,623

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“Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you” (C. S. Lewis)

One of the reasons I write this little daily blog is to tell you that it’s okay to be you. You don’t have to conform to anybody else’s expectations of who you should be because no one else has to live your life or walk in your shoes but you.

I sincerely hope that you will do what you like, not what society or fashion trends say. Especially not what the current hipster movement says. If you want to grow a beard, then grow one (unless you’re female, which might make it a bit awkward). If you don’t, then be clean-shaven. Or scruffy. It’s really up to you.

Never be ashamed of who God made you to be. You are the one God dreamed up in His infinite mind long before anyone existed. You are the one God fashioned out of the dirt with His very own hands and with the very breath from His mouth giving you life and spirit. You are the one Jesus, the very incarnation of God in human form, died for. And He would have gone through all the torture and death if it had been only you that needed saving.

So go ahead. Wear black socks with those sandals if that’s what makes you happy. Wear those Christmas-y t-shirts in July. You can even wear plaids with stripes if you fancy, but I will disavow any knowledge of you if you do.

Just you be you, because what the world needs more than anything is to see you loving who you are and who you’re becoming. Nothing delights God more than a man comfortable in his masculinity and a woman who is in love with her femininity.

That’s all. You can go back to your pink fuzzy bunny slippers now.