Conforming Your Culture

This week I have been thinking a lot about Romans 12:1-2

1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. 2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

I looked it up in various translations and really loved the Message Bible paraphrase of this scripture. It really drives the message home.

1 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. 2 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.

I loved that line...Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. WOW!!! If that is not what conforming means. So often teens and adults just go along in life an without event thinking they find theirselves fitting in. I think we sould all take a solid look at our selves and see just what and where we are. Are we fitting in to the culture around us or are we changing it? Become a positive and radical change in this world.