Stop conforming to the pattern of this world…(Rom. 12:2)
Once you have “presented yourself” to God, you are beginning to get positioned to be a reflector of God’s glory. But Paul goes on in this passage to tell his readers that there is something more they need to do. He tells them they are to “stop conforming”. This is the second critical phrase in the Romans text.
In our moon illustration, what Paul tells us to stop here would be comparable to a normal monthly cycle where the light of the moon is obscured over every thirty-day period. These are the things that block the sun and move us back to being a dark rock in the sky.
The way the exhortation is stated infers that “conforming to the pattern of this world” was taking place among the believers in Rome. I imagine trying to follow Christ in Rome in the first century was every bit as challenging as living for Christ in the modern western world in the twenty-first. Literally, the text tells us to stop conforming “to this age”. The Greek word used here, “aion”, would carry the same sense as the German word “zeitgeist”. It is not speaking about the physical world here. It is a reference to the moral, cultural, and spiritual climate that surrounds us every moment of the day.
Unless you were raised by perfect parents, and were never exposed to the influences of a fallen culture, to some degree I can promise that you are conformed to the spirit of the age. For most of your life you did not even know it was happening and you had very little control over it. You probably didn’t have perfect parents, and to some degree, from the time you were born till the day you left for kindergarten, you were shaped by the way your parents were conformed to the world. To the degree that they bought into the cultural norms they grew up with, they probably raised you with a mind-set that shaped your worldview with the same influences. Then you headed off to school.
Now you are part of a peer group that will have tremendous influence on your way of viewing the world, an educational system that in all probability is itself a product of a godless society, and the constant bombardment of media that influences everything you think, feel, and do. By about the age of 18, without heroic spiritual intervention, you are pretty well “conformed”!
From 18 on, your thinking and living is shaped by your perception of reality as it is reinforced by your experience, ideological misinformation, maybe false religion, and perhaps even bad theology. You have become a “new moon” that reflects nothing. You’ve gone dark. You desperately need to get into position to get some sun!
In my own life, this element of spiritual reality has been much tougher to battle than laying it all on the altar. I really want to be God’s man. But even after all the years of living in relationship with Jesus, I still feel horribly conformed to the patterns of this age. Because the Holy Spirit is working in me, and has been working in me, I know I am better than I used to be. But, I’m running out of time and still have light years to go.
“Stop conforming”. It is a simple phrase that requires a lot of work. It means I have to recognize that everything I’ve ever believed (before Christ) could be wrong. Worldly success might not make me happy. Observing those who have achieved it makes me think the opposite is true. I have to humble myself and become radically committed to an openness to change. I have to let the Spirit search my heart and my mind and show me where I’m still conforming, and then tap into what Paul talks about in the third and final phrase of this passage. I need to be transformed by the renewing of my mind. It is interesting that the way the grammatical structures of the passage are set up, stopping is an action I take in relationship to myself. But transforming has to come from another source. I become the object, not the subject. But that is what my next post will tackle.
The more you challenge the spirit of this age, and learn to live according the Spirit of Christ, the more you will reflect his glory. The more you remain conformed, the less you reflect. This is critical stuff!
If you would like to hear a more exhaustive message on the first two phrases of Romans 12, go to: http://highlinecc.org/?page_id=196&paged=2 and drop down to Romans Session 14