Brown's Daily Word 8-20-13

Praise the Lord for this new day.  Our Lord is upon His throne.  He in control.  We need to be praying for the devastating situation in Egypt, praying for Christians that Lord would grant them courage and boldness to witness for Christ in the midst of chaos  and destruction.  We are called to be the salt of the earth and light of the world.  May Jesus continue to send His Light  and His grace on all of us.  May He empower us to be His witnesses in the cultures and countries where we live and serve. 

    In his book Culture Making, Andy Crouch addresses the idea that Christians are to be transformational agents of cultural change when he says, "It is not enough to condemn culture.  Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture.  The only way to change culture is to create culture."  We must be about transformation, and we must be about creating culture.  We are to be transformational agents in our culture and in the world.

    In one of his leadership webinars, John Maxwell defined transformational leadership this way: "Transformational leadership influences people to think, speak and act in such a way that it makes a positive difference in their life and in the lives of others."  It is easy to see the Christian call to transformation in this definition of transformational leadership.  As a man of deep faith, Maxwell is clearly picking up on the biblical call to purposeful living for the benefit of transforming others in this definition of  transformational leadership.

    Transformation is at the heart of Christianity, and it is at the heart of what our Lord teaches, what He models and what He does in Scripture.  Paul also emphasized transformation in Romans 12:2 when he said, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."  Here, Paul directed us away from conformity and toward transformation.  The Message version of Romans 12:2 says, "Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking."  In other words, we all will be shaped by something, and how we are shaped will affect the world around us for better or for worse.  We always should be mindful of how we are being shaped and how we are affecting the world.
   
 "Fix your attention on God.  You'll be changed from the inside out.  Readily recognize what He wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you" (Romans 12:2).  The Lord of the New Creation and the New Birth, desires to change us from the inside out.  We are changed by learning what God wants from us and by responding to it in obedience to His will.  While the culture and the sinful world around us attempts to stunt our growth and keep us in sinful patterns of immaturity, the Lord desires for us to be transformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ, bringing out the very best in us.

 In Christ,

   Brown

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