Shade Tree Wisdom 1/31/09

Olaf got the sort of reaction I really expected. He should not have done it, though you all admired his ingenuity. But several suggested the correct solution for that out-dated commode, find a place that disposes such stuff and take it there.

Now look again at Romans 12, 1.2. Here is the way The Message translates it:
1 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.
2 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.“

That is often the problem, we become so “well adjusted to our culture that we fit into it without thinking.” J B Phillips has this as “don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold”.

It means to quit aping the system of thought that surrounds you, or use its methods of operation, its style and techniques. How, why by the transforming that goes on in the heart when authentic godliness appears. A life that lives like that starts with a mind that is changed. St. Paul writes, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” Phil. 2,5.

Such truth is alien to our sinful nature and we resist it. And so it is easy subconsciously to use the worlds methods and think, “Why, they work ok”. So we often rationalize and justify our actions. As the principles of the Scriptures are applied and become clear, our mind finds in our pride other “lofty things” to offset these truths. See 2 Cor. 10,5.

Before our Baptism, we were serving secular thinking. We were victims of our ‘flesh’. Now we have been freed, and Paul again says it best, “taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” (2 Cor. 10,5). When that happens, the 'renewed mind' is at work. At that moment, we freely do what He wills. Then the world does not “squeeze us into its mold,” for Christ guides and directs us. May He ever bless thus.
GPD 1/31/09