Brain Washed By God

Romans 12:1-2 (Message Bible)
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.

Good words to live by....
"Don't fit into the culture around you without even thinking."
Don't allow the culture to influence you and form the basis for your beliefs and moral standards.
We are a nation of culture...
Actually we are a nation of many cultures. I think you would call them "Sub-cultures". Each one has a language of its own. Takes on collective habits and rituals....looks at other cultures with a jaded eye. Funny part in all of this, we find ourselves fitting in without giving one thought to what is happening to us spiritually, mentally and morally.

Take the drug culture.
If you are in addiction or coming out of it through recovery, did you not adjust your beliefs to fit the culture you were trying to be a part of? Of course you did.  You hung around others who were cut from the same pattern. You viewed life and those outside your culture with skeptical eyes...with judgmental opinions and with disdain. You may have hated what you were doing, but you allowed yourself to be shaped and formed by the culture you had chose to be a part of. 

Did this drug culture you chose to embrace...did it not affect you and change your moral belief's? Of course it did. You began to take part in activities that were foreign to you before you gave yourself to the addiction. And the longer you stayed in that culture, the more you spiraled downward in what you were willing to do. The battle cry of most addicts exist in a line that they swore they would never cross. No matter how hard life became, this was a point that  was drawn in the sand...a line that was not going to be crossed...."I'll never use a needle." Somehow in the mind, we had determined that those who used needles in their addiction were somehow the most terrible of the terrible. You even tried to justify your own using by saying..."Yeah, I know I have problems, but at least I'm not a junkie shooting up with needles." How many have I seen cross that line because of the influence of the drug and the voices of the people caught in that culture. We allowed ourselves to be conformed and shaped by the cultural voice that told us..."Go ahead...it's not that bad."

The Romans 12:2 passage states that we are to be transformed. Transformed means to be changed from the inside out. To have an experience with a Power greater than ourselves that changes our heart. Change of heart produces a change of mind. Change the mind and the will becomes affected. Change the will and the behavior changes. All of this because we come to believe in a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, or the ability to make sound decisions. So, we are to be transformed, not conformed. Conform means obedience through simply behaving to what ever the standard or rule is. That means we allow outside influence to press us into acting a certain way. No change on the inside. Just a decision to go with the flow, even if the flow is taking us down the toilet, so to speak. Transformed by God, not conformed by the culture and people around us.
Transformed in every way to become the person God intends us to be.
Not a cookie-cutter, religious shaped individual...
But the one-of-a-kind-special person of infinite worth, because of Christ's redemption.
Think on these things...

God on you...

Don't forget...we will not be meeting this week for Vineyard Recovery due to the worship conference at Gadsden Vineyard. We will be back next week, May 25th.

if you would like to attend the conference, you can register when you arrive. Cost is $55.00. It is a three day event featuring worship leaders/teachers Danny Daniels, John and Marie Barnett and Chris Lizotte.