Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  1 John 2:15

“What is culture?” asks an article in National Geographic magazine.  Answering the question, the writer says, “Even anthropologists struggle to define the word. Food, dress, tools, dwellings, laws, manners, art, myths–culture can be described as the manifestations of human existence that are transmitted from one generation to the next, a pool of the collective intellect and memory.”

I think of culture as the background and frame of a painting, the subject of which is your life and family.  Culture is powerful.  It is a vast network of threads, and colors, ideas, and thoughts which are never static.  Some anthropologists believe that our world is experiencing a “mass extinction” of cultures, a crisis they believe to be as profound as the loss of biological diversities.

Since the end of World War 2 our world has experienced cross-pollination of cultures as the result of the emerging media which has reduced our world to a global village, using the term Marshall McLuhan made popular. Art, music, films, fashions, and languages have blended.  If you question that, notice how the French have fought unsuccessfully to inoculate their language against English expressions and idioms, yet English has succeeded as the lingua franca of science, commerce, diplomacy, and pop culture.  In every language, today, there are hundreds of cross-over expressions which are now accepted in every day use–hence, the blending of cultures into a kind of pastel sameness.

It is this powerful backdrop of culture in which you find yourself often asking, “Is this right or wrong?”  One painting with a background of brilliant white stands out in stark contrast to ninety-nine with dark backgrounds.  That expression “everybody’s doing it” may well describe the ninety-nine which make you different, even odd, and certainly unique.

Is culture right or wrong?  It is righteous or sinful?  Or do those terms even apply?  I’m convinced that culture is amoral, neither right nor wrong in itself apart from its relationship to what God has revealed in His Word.  And it is at this point that we have a sure measure by which we evaluate our cultures, and then come down on one side or the other of the issue.

In a sense you are like the actor on the stage, and the lights and backdrop are the culture which changes, and as it does it makes you appear in a different light entirely.

If God has not revealed His will for your personal life, then you should go with the flow of culture in that your sexuality, your business ethics, your personal expression as to what clothing you wear or what body art may adorn your exterior are all reflections of your culture.

If, however, culture is part of that broader context of “the world”–the one which John said we are not to love nor be part of, then how we live as the children of God must, of necessity, contradict the culture in which we live.

From the days of Lot, Abraham’s nephew who lived in the ancient city of Sodom, to the present, the person who seeks to please God will constantly wage war with his culture, and feel that he walks out of synch with the vast majority of his contemporaries.

If your back is to God, then the dark shadow of culture won’t bother you much, but if you walk towards the light, you must put aspects of our culture strictly behind you and separate yourself from them.  This requires decisions which may be out of vogue, tough ones which make you stand apart from the crowd.

Ours is a changing culture, but presiding over the changes is a changeless God who still speaks to His children saying, “This is the way; walk ye in it.”  Think about it.

Resource reading: Genesis 19:1-29