Following up from last week, there is a problem when our preachers do not teach us how to distinguish the holy from the unholy. One of the central messages of the Bible is to live differently from everyone else. A severe problem with modern evangelicalism is that we are so focused on Jesus dying for our sins, which yes is an absolutely central thing, that we do not look at other central issues. A few months ago, I wrote about other central messages in the Bible. One of them is that we must live differently from the world and its culture. It is not enough to just say, “I believe in Jesus.” We have to live in obedience to Jesus. I’m not calling for legalism nor perfection, nor am I saying that “Jesus started the salvation process, but it is up to us to keep it.” Jesus said that those who He knows are those who obey Him, not those who merely claim His name.
The Sermon on the Mount is considered the most profound and life-changing sermon ever given, especially to the original audience. Jesus corrected many false teachings that the Pharisees had put on the people, and He took the Law and showcased its original purpose. Anyone can hate an enemy, but we are to love them. It’s not enough to restrain yourself from choking the holy snot out of them; even that desire is murder. It’s not enough to refrain from having sex with someone who is not your Biblically married spouse; just the picturing the act in your mind is committing the adultery in your heart. We are not to worry about our food, health, clothing, or shelter. We are instead to focus on God and let Him provide for us. We are also to test what we hear because not all teachers are genuine, and they actually seek to devour us. All of these ideas have one central theme: you are to be different from everyone else around you, not just the worldly peers, but even your religious peers. So many youth in youth groups are totally lost because they compare themselves to those who are just as worldly and ungodly as those outside the church. And before someone says, “Who made you holier than thou?” Well, as my former pastor said once, “We need people who are ‘holier than thou.’”
The more I have read the Bible, the more I see this theme of how we must be different. God told the children of Israel over and over again to drive out the Canaanites because of how readily and easily they would lead Israel astray. Over and over again, God said, “Don’t live like them.” Many people today do not like Leviticus 18 because it shuts down all forms of sexual deviancy. But most who read that chapter tend to miss the last third of it. After God describes the sexual sins, He told Israel that the Canaanites were committing these sins. God was giving Israel the promised land partly because they were special but also because Canaan was wicked. But if Israel committed those sexual sins, God would remove them from the land as well. It wasn’t just the idolatry. Idolatry and sexual sins are often interlinked.
“But that’s Old Testament. We are not under the Law.” Really? Let’s look at the New Testament then. It’s still the same message. Romans 12:2: Do not conform to the world, or to the pattern of this world. James 4:4: Friendship with the world is enmity with God. The book of Acts actually goes into depth on this very issue. Acts 15 is the second “church fight” recorded in church history. The Judaizers wanted the Gentile believers to get circumcised, and the Gentile believers replied that the point of that was for you to be separate, and you aren’t doing it yourselves. The Apostles convened to discuss this. Their decision was that the Gentiles were not to be required to be circumcised because that went with other laws that the Judaizers and the Jewish believers were never able to keep anyway. That said, there still needed to be separation, so they commanded the Gentile believers to have nothing to do with idols, to restrain from blood, to restrain from strangled animals (in their fight for life, animals being strangled would produce adrenaline that would affect the meat, so it was often used in idolatrous practices to get “power”), and to avoid sexual immorality. There still had to be separation from the world. While the Jews were separated from the rest of the world due to their language, culture, laws, etc., and while today we no longer need to follow the ceremonial or Israeli-kingdom laws, the moral laws still apply to us as Gentile believers, and we still need to be different from the world around us.
God’s commands to live differently are accessible. They are understandable. They are clear – so clear that we tend to not like them because they stop our sinful desires from being able to do what they want to do. God’s expectations for us to live are clear. They are not ambiguous; they are not mean-spirited; they are not “limiting”; they are life and life abundant. They are not some distant, vague, and unknowable thing. They are near to us, and to the born-again believer, they are dear to us. Jesus said His yoke is easy, and His burden is light. God commands are not a burden to the believer. They are a joy. God’s word is not some unrelatable book to some distant tribe no one knows anything about, but it is a treasure to our heart that we cherish and love. Yes, it draws some thick lines, but those are for our benefit, to guide us into true freedom and a productivity and action that we could not dream of being without.
Live differently. That will mean you will stand out, stick out, and have a target on your back in a world that loves mediocrity and for no one to rock the boat. But nobody who just mingled in the world ever did anything of any value. God wants us to be different. We are in this world, but we are not of this world. We live here temporarily in enemy territory, seeking to save souls from destruction before God comes to wipe it all out. If we remain attached to this world, when God comes to destroy it, we will go down with it. Do not get attached to it lest they pull you down with them, which is precisely what they desire.
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