Living God's Truth in Today's Culture
by Frank Po Ching - We have all seen the increased conflict between believers on fundamental topics like the war in the Middle East, global warming now known as climate change, gender-and-tr@nsgenderisms, abortion, or even questions whether homos*xual men or women should be ministry leaders let alone being ordained Ministers of a Christian Church.
The list of topics would fit on several pages but pick any of the above-mentioned topics and you’ll have a field day discovering the origin of these ideas or making sense of it all. We’ve seen believers searching for truth not from scripture but from google.com. Even worse, the mainstream-legacy media both here at home and international networks have been invading our homes, and the people have been drinking the Kool-Aid in the comfort of their recliners.
What is cultural compliance? One very simplified answer is, “conforming to ideological framework and belief structures to avoid conflict and, or, to gain acceptance.” To simplify it even more, the idiom, “your truth is not my truth” is simply the framework known as postmodernism from the mid-1900’s, which simply says your reality and my reality are subjective and there is no absolute truth.
I don’t like to waste time talking about cultural compliance and what it all means. But it’s important to be aware and be discerning of how the enemy can creep into our lives; into our children’s lives; into our marriage; and especially the Church. Furthermore, becoming an expert on these things means very little if we are not grounded in God’s Word and His truth. This is a true measure of one’s knowledge and wisdom. In other words, being knowledgeable in the counterfeit doesn’t make a person an expert. Rather it is being grounded in the knowledge of the Truth of who God is, from which then comes wisdom.
I liken it to the old story of a blind man whose job it was to determine genuine currency from counterfeit. He was asked one day how he could tell the difference. He answered by saying that he just needs to know the real thing really well and the rest is easy.
Putting a drop of ink into a pure glass of water is the beginning of cultural compliance. If you foster that tiny bit of pollution, it will gradually take over. It has been the reality with secularism creeping into the Church but not in mere drops, but in bucket loads of filth for the family of God to blindly accept.
But don’t be disheartened. Jesus is alive and He is interceding for you and me. Let’s take courage and imitate Nehemiah’s courage. He refused to negotiate his God given mandate to rebuild the wall whilst the leaders and people mocked him and said he was divisive, and that the work is too big and he’ll never finish it. The history tells us that he put his trust in his God and got the job done. (Nehemiah 4 and 6).
The Apostles refused to stop preaching when demanded by the religious leaders to stop preaching in the name of Jesus. (Acts 4). What did they do? They continued to preach across Jerusalem, telling the leaders that they would rather, “… obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5). The gospel of Jesus spread because they cared not about complying to the demands of the cultural leaders of the day.
My encouragement for us is to stand firm like Daniel who refused to eat the King’s delicious food nor drink his wine. Instead, he kept himself from being defiled by not touching the food or the wine. (Daniel 1).
Let us stay alert and pray lest we fall into temptation like Jesus warned His disciples. “Then He came to the disciples and found them asleep, and said to Peter, “What? Could you not watch with Me one hour? Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation.”” (Matthew 26:40-41).
Finally, let us be men of biblical truth, unbendable to the demands of cultural compliance.
In His richest blessings,
Frank Po Ching