What do you expect a preacher to say about living holy?
I assume you know I have a high view of holiness, and that I whole-heartedly believe that’s our full calling. When people ask me what it means to be a United Methodist Christian, for example, I say it means holiness of heart and life. I can’t encourage people to live any other way.
That’s what’s intriguing to me about what we read in Ephesians 4. Presumably, the apostle Paul is speaking. It’s thought the letter’s audience went beyond the Ephesian Christians. Still, there was a particular audience for whom these words first meant something. Would they have expected Paul to say anything else about living faith-filled lives?
Paul insists to them that they must change the way they live.
What else would a preacher say? He surely wouldn’t affirm how some believers were denying Christ. He wouldn’t have thought it was alright to live as they once did.
Instead, his insistence is that they change.
Now, I’d like to suggest to you that the church has lost the culture wars. That is, the part of the American church that thought it was supposed to fight the culture wars has lost. That seems like a shift in conversation. So, stay with me.
For years, many Christians have taken a posture against culture. We’ve set our battle lines and went to war. In the process, hoping to win, I suppose, we lost our own way.
Our critique of culture morphed into bitterness and rancor. Christians aren’t always so Christ-like. And that’s a problem. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I do not affirm a lot of our larger culture’s values. But my job isn’t to condemn people for who they are right now.
And that’s not an escape from some hard task of engaging culture. It’s actually a choice focus.
You see, when culture lives into its values, greed, violence, consumerism, etc, I can’t blame it. That’s culture. My concern is when the church allows those values to take root within itself. And they do! Sometimes they do with ease. That’s a problem.
We can’t change the culture if we haven’t changed ourselves. I’m not even sure we’re supposed to change anyone else but ourselves anyway. Transformation is God’s doing. Plus, how hypocritical it is of us to demand culture bow to the standards we neglect. That’s part of what Paul is telling us in Ephesians 4. His words are not to the larger culture, the outsiders or the non saved. He is speaking to the church. You and I.
As we clothe ourselves with the new self, our witness speaks for itself. We need renewal and transformation just as much as anyone else.
Stay blessed…john
