The Common Culture Crisis

            Living in the age of mass media and consent message bombardment, the modern Christian faces a battle that has been going on for ages. Understanding who Christ truly is and what He really does for us. This is a crisis of identity.

            We were designed to mirror and emulate the things we are around or do the most. When God formed man from the mud, His intentions were for Adam to walk with God in the cool of the day. Meaning, God designed man to spend time with Him and prune man into His own likeness. Our intended initial design was to be beaming reflections of our time with God.

            Needless to say upon the fall of man, our susceptibility to the “world” obviously increased. Our times began to consist of the affaires of man and the worries that come along with it. Our identity then became rooted in ourselves, our time, our ambitions, and our desires. The culture we created is a culture of self. As the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “There is nothing new under the sun”.  (Ecc. 1:9) Therefor the same culture that glorifies the advancement and fulfilment of the sinful nature we have inherited has been around, well for awhile.

            Even today, we all face the same issues. Our society feeds off of a “be a better you” mentality. We are indoctrinated with the idea that we have to fit in to the big picture, that we should “embrace” our true selves, who we are matters only by what we have, that we are identified by our body image, and that we will never be/amount to anything. These messages cause us to buy into whatever new trend the world is selling. Just thinking about all the times I have allowed myself to be identified by what the culture tells me is exhausting.

            But how awesome is God, that He would provide a way out of it all. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” (Ephesians 2:4-6 ESV). Christ’s blood covering for sin took the identities the world was giving us and hung them on a cross.

           

            Christ took His identity and imparted it to us along with His righteousness. The Bible goes on and on about our new identity in Christ and every one of them is true. We become loved by God, delivered from sin, conquerors of death, chosen for salvation, heirs to the kingdom, found blameless and so many other things! We can find sermons for days about our identity in Christ. Though the war has been won, the everyday battle for believers rage on. As believers, we must remember daily that because of Christ, we are more than conquerors.