“And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the Lord thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the Lord destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 8:19, 20 KJV)

Have you ever seen the “Coexist” bumper stickers on cars? The church has not been redeemed by the blood of The Lamb and filled with the Holy Spirit in order that we might peacefully co-exist with sin or the fallen world system. One of the reasons why we are not being as effective as we should be is because we are afraid to be holy, or different than the world. We are either afraid or ashamed at the consequences of not fitting in with the world. God’s desires and dealings with the Old Testament nation of Israel serves as a picture of God’s desires and dealings with the church. Just as He brought Israel out of Egypt (a type of the world system), the church had been redeemed from this present evil world.

The Christian church lives in a world of tension. There is that personal battle between the desires of the flesh and holy desires of the Spirit. And there is that corporate battle of the church as a whole: being salt and light in the midst of a world that is governed by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. When the nation Israel “got comfortable” living amongst the nations who worshipped false gods, they gradually began to assimilate to the “standards” of those false gods. Other than with their lips, they were no longer worshipping Jehovah. Eventually, they  began to adopt the image of the gods of these nations, rather than being holy image of The God Who redeemed them. The lines of clean and unclean were blurred. Truth was a relative term, no longer an absolute.

Beloved, the grace of Calvary had not diminished the standards of God at all.  Being holy demands that we be different. Not cool. Not hip. Not “relative.” Early Christians were not martyred for being relative. The grace of God is not a free pass for compromise. Jesus Christ redeemed us to set us free from the bondage to sin and the world, not to peacefully coexist with it. Sin is the monster that pinned Christ to His cross. The world system has an agenda to steal, kill,and destroy everything and anything God has established. Which is why John command us to not love it.

This does not mean that we walk around with long faces and finger pointing at everything and everyone. It means that we live out and speak out our God- given convictions with the same ease as everyone else does theirs. The world system is run by the devil and it is set up to intimidate, shut up and belittle the child of God. The parable of the sower shows us that 3 out of the 4 soils were compromised and unfruitful. They caved in under pressure. They were choked by a love for the things that they were redeemed from. They forgot God and the real meaning of the cross.

Beloved, walk in the love of God today. Love what He loves and hate what He hates.  Never forget the price that Jesus Christ paid for your sin. Never forget His plea with us to never be ashamed of Him or His words in this evil generation. The path of apostasy is strewn with the seeds of compromise and coexistence.