Recently, on a Wednesday night, I shared some thoughts about our responsibility as Christians to engage culture. Al Mohler has defined our (American) culture using seven characteristics, each of which begin with the word self.
- Self-fulfillment. We are a culture that seeks to satisfy ourselves, seen primarily in the triumph of the therapeutic culture. Self-help books and self-therapy books abound.
- Self-sufficiency. We actually brag about this one. I did it my way all by myself. This is American, but this is not necessarily godly.
- Self-definition. We define what it means to be human (the abortion debate, the cloning debate, and even the designer birth debate), what it means to be male and female (the gay marriage debate), what it means to be _______ (insert your own).
- Self-absorption. We are totally focused on ourselves. We have back decks and back yards, no longer do we value front porches and neighbors. We regularly see divorce because “I wasn’t happy…I needed to do this for me.”
- Self-transcendence. This suggests that we can pick up bits and pieces of religion from where ever we want and that will be good enough. We recognize the inherit spirituality within ourselves, but we fool ourselves into believing that we can define and dictate God.
- Self-enhancement. This is the idea that we can actually make ourselves better than God did. This abounds with the ideas that we can extend life, with parents who give breast augmentation to their kids for graduation gifts, with liposuction, and botox.
- Self-Security. We believe ourselves to be relatively secure. Though we say things like “You aren’t promised tomorrow,” few of us rarely believe that to the very core of our beings. We are pretty confident that tomorrow will come and that it will be pretty good (nearly half of all Americans).
As Christian people, we are called to live in our culture, but to do so with the intention of changing our culture. We are not supposed to look like our culture. The Christian life is a counter-cultural life. As we seek to live out the gospel and share the gospel with our friends, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors, let me encourage you to be different. We are to be defined less by “self” and more by Christ. He is our ultimate judge. All that we do should be to bring glory to him, not to satisfy ourselves. If simply take Christ at his word to love him with all of our hearts and to love our neighbors as our selves, then we will see that our culture has lost its bearing.
As the summer draws to a close and as we look forward to the fall, look for your fulfillment in Christ. Do not buy the lies of our culture, instead, accept the truths of God’s word and seek to honor him with your life. Focus on Him and others, and watch as God uses you to transform your world with the gospel.
Mohler’s complete chapter can be found in Preaching the Cross.
