What norms do you live by?

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. (Romanns 12:1-2 MSG)

Many of us attempt to 'blend in' with the culture around us, forgetting that God actually calls us to 'stick out' - not like a sore thumb, but in such a way that our lives make an impact on the world around us. It is through the living of our 'ordinary lives' that we become witnesses of his grace and transformational power. We don't need to have a pulpit to give a testimony of grace, my friends. We just need an obedient heart and desire for the things God has prepared for us.

It is easy to become 'well-adjusted' to our culture, isn't it? We kind of 'settle in', allowing societal norms to become our measure of how well we are doing rather than God's instructions for living. The only issue with using societal norms as our measurement tool is that they are constantly changing and they rarely measure up to the 'norms' of behavior God outlines are 'right' or 'correct' for his children! The norms of society are often focused on what one gets out of life rather than what one gives within this life.

God's mission is to change us from the inside out - so that we will be living testimonies of what he desires to do within each of us. Whenever we try to 'fit in', we find we 'stick out'. That can be frightening to some because it is hard to stand up for what we believe when everyone else is standing up for something else. While I am not saying we need to be rude in the face of an offer to compromise our values, we can be wise in our response to such offers. When we learn to respond quicker to God's voice than we do the voice of this world, we are on the right track.

God's plan is to bring each of us into the maturity of spiritual growth that he has prepared for us before we even said yes to him. What this world wants to do is keep us living for ourselves - focused on what will give us pleasure for the moment. God's plan is to give us pleasure in the things that will last for eternity, not just for this moment. The world's goals for us are fleeting - they will change quicker than we realize because the world is always looking for the 'next great thing'. God's call is to focus on the only one thing that matters - Jesus and his love for us.

We won't always recognize when compromise is offered, but the more we choose to keep our eyes on Jesus, learning what his instructions say about how we are to live, the less likely we will be to 'buy into' the values of this world. Societal norms will not draw us in because we know that God calls us to live by a higher standard - his Word, truth at all times. Just sayin!