Over the years, I’ve grown a lot in my faith and life through moving to very different places. It’s forced me to do something I think every Christian should do – take stock of which of my habits are truly Biblical versus which I’m doing just because they conform to the surrounding culture, whether it’s the church I’m part of or the surrounding society.

As I wrote when I discussed worship, when we moved to Louisiana, the heterogeneity of our new church there made it hard for us to conform to what other church members were doing. This was healthy for us, as it meant we had to wrestle with the Scriptures on our own and think through what God was calling us to do. This was probably further helped by the fact that New Orleans is culturally probably about as far different from far Northern California as one can get in the United States. This culture shock helped us focus on addressing our own core beliefs and testing them against Scripture.

Today, I want to address how all of us are called to test our beliefs against Scripture. Essentially, we’re called to develop a Biblical culture ourselves in our lives, families and churches, rather than conforming to anything external aside from Scripture. We are first Christ-followers, so our lives are to reflect that.

Christ has redeemed us from the flawed culture we inherit

All of us are born sinners, and, even with the best of parents, we grow up parented by sinners. Even if our parents are Christians, they are not perfect. No one is, save Christ. This means that, even if our parents are wonderful by human standards, we grow up with a flawed environment. So 1 Peter 1:17-19 tells the church:

If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth; knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.

This focuses on how, as Christians, we have been redeemed by the blood of Christ. We’ve been redeemed from our sins and the consequences thereof, but also we’ve been redeemed from the “futile way of life inherited from your forefathers”, or, as the NIV puts it, “the empty way of life…”. I don’t believe this is speaking just of sin, but also of a whole way of life, pattern of living, or culture. That is, we grow up with a culture that in some ways needs redemption, too. Here, by “culture” I’m not talking as much about the surrounding society as I am the patterns and habits that come naturally to us personally and as families.

This idea of the effects of our surroundings shows up also in the Bible’s teachings on how parents affect their children, e.g. Numbers 14:18 tells us how the sin of parents affects children in subsequent generations. We see this in our culture even today when we see how children whose parents divorce are more likely to divorce, etc.

Basically, unless God transforms us, we’re likely to follow the path of our family, those closest to us, and our culture – even if it’s a “futile way of life” that will not produce good. Conforming to these will be what tends to come naturally to most of us. And even if we’re transformed by the work of Christ, such conformity will still be our default path. It takes work, and careful comparison of our lives to the Scriptures, to see where we’re headed the wrong way and change.

Let me put this another way. The basic Christian confession is “Jesus is Lord”, Lord of our whole lives. When we become Christians, we’re giving our lives to him and agreeing to follow wherever he leads. But this doesn’t come naturally. What comes naturally is to conform – to our family background, our environment, our friends, the surrounding culture, etc. But this is not what Christ calls us to do. He calls us to follow him. This means we have to ask ourselves where he’s calling us to deviate from the surrounding culture.

Thus it can be good to go through “culture shock” so we have to reassess

Given how important it is to assess our lives in this area so that we can grow in holiness, I think going through a bit of culture shock from time to time can be very helpful for our growth. This certainly has been the case in my own life. I’m certainly not recommending moving or changing churches as a way to grow, but major life changes can help trigger deep self-evaluation and reassessment of whether our culture is Biblical. Some ways in which this can happen include:

  • moving to a different church or a location where the surrounding culture is very different
  • marriage, because now your culture/habits may collide with those of your spouse
  • friends; seeing our friends grow and change, or a change in our circle of friends, can help us examine ourselves. Maybe someone we highly respect has very different habits or beliefs, or chooses to give up something we thought was harmless, so we reassess.
  • personal evaluation: Sometimes we just take a deep look at what we’re doing and why and may be surprised by what we find

It may already be obvious where I’m going with this, but I think the present COVID-19 epidemic ought to serve to help us examine our culture and habits. Many of us are under stay-at-home orders, and have far more time with families or roommates than normal. Socializing looks very different, and most of our old activities are stripped way – even things like going to the gym or going out for a meal or a movie. So it’s certainly a time of culture shock. Much has changed.

Given that, I think we need to spend this time not longing for things to go back to normal, but asking what God wants our NEW normal to look like. What was the good and bad about our old way of life? How should following Christ look different when the current restrictions begin to ease up and we have the option to go back to the way we used to do things? What will come naturally is to fall back into the same old habits; changing will require thought and effort. In what ways was our old way of life “empty” and how does God want us to change?

In my next post, I’ll try to give a few more thoughts on how we might use this time to assess.