Holiness

As believers we need to reject the world’s thinking and begin to think as Christians. This is what the apostle Paul is writing about in our text from Romans 12:2: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This means that our thinking is not to be determined by the culture of the world around us, but, rather, we are to have a distinctly different and growing Christian worldview.

Where do we start if we want not to conform to this world? There is a sense in which we could begin at any point, since truth is a whole and truth in any area will inevitably lead to truth in every other area. But if the dominant philosophy of our day is secularism (which means viewing all of life only in terms of the visible world), then the best of all possible starting places is the doctrine of God, for God alone is above and beyond the world and is eternal.

To avoid being conformed to the world we must also understand the doctrine of revelation. The God who exists has revealed Himself. Do you remember how Francis Schaeffer put it in the title of one of his books? He called it, He Is There and He Is Not Silent. That is exactly the point. God is there, and He has not kept Himself hidden from us. He has revealed Himself in nature, in history and especially in the Scriptures.

If there is a God and if he has made us to have eternal fellowship with him, then we are going to look at failure, suffering, pain and even death differently. For the Christian these can never be the greatest of all tragedies. They are bad. Death is an enemy (1 Cor. 15:26). But they are overbalanced by eternal matters.

In 1989, Westerners were astounded by the political changes in Eastern Europe. Country after country repudiated its seventy-two-year Communist heritage and replaced its leaders with democratically elected officials. We rejoiced in these changes, rightly. But, though the American media with its blindness to things spiritual will not tell us, the changes in the Eastern bloc have not come about by the will of one person, Mikhail Gorbachev or any other, but by the spiritual vitality of the people.