Audio Transcript
I’m sure some of you have experienced this: watching something on a screen together with friends, maybe on a phone, and suddenly you feel this stomach-dropping sense of isolation coming over you. You realize that your personal convictions are miles away from your friends — the people you call your brothers and sisters in Christ — who are laughing at something you cannot laugh at. You draw back, and now you are the freak, the prude, the weirdo. How do you handle it? That’s today on Ask Pastor John — made lonely by holiness.
Kate in Anchorage, Alaska, writes in with this very story: “Pastor John, I want to ask this humbly, knowing that I am not in God’s place of judgment. When I look at my peers, young Christians, I see such nominal faith. From Scripture, shouldn’t we see believers pursuing personal holiness? And yet I rarely see this. I feel this loneliness in my life when it comes to entertainment. I’m often the only one offended by vulgar pop lyrics or crude video clips, while diversions consume too much of many Christians’ lives anyway. When I see what my supposed brothers and sisters find meaningful, I think, ‘There is nothing for me here.’ How do I handle the isolation I feel when my convictions seem so different from other believers, and when I feel increasingly isolated from friends over this?”
I share Kate’s dismay at how many professing Christians, young and old, embrace as their frequent form of entertainment in movies and television a level of immodesty and immorality, filthy language, gender-leveling feminist ideology, arrogance, revenge, and a whole cluster of empty worldliness. It calls to mind 1 Peter 4:3–4: “The time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you.”
“Live with a view to eternity. Cultivate capacities of pleasure that go deep now and last forever.”
In other words, they ostracize you: “What’s wrong with you? Weirdo. Square. Legalistic. Old-fashioned. Out of step.” The difference is, I suppose, that these professing Christians Kate is talking about would say that they’re not living in those sins; they just enjoy watching them, or at least they don’t mind watching them in order to be able to say, “Well, he’s a very good actor,” or “That plot was very clever,” or “The cinematography was cutting-edge,” or “The action was scintillating” — anything to justify soaking their minds in a visual, verbal, and conceptual world of unbelief and sin.
Passion for Holiness
But whether they’re doing the sin or watching the sin, it’s obvious, as Kate says, that there is very little passion for personal holiness. That’s the problem — little concern with Jesus’s statement “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). Or Peter’s statement “You shall be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). Or Paul’s statement “What fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. . . . Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 6:14–16; 7:1).
Peter makes the same observation, which is very relevant for Kate’s concern, that if you find yourself out of step with worldly entertainment, he says, “They are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you” (1 Peter 4:4). Perhaps in her case, maybe not malign, maybe just ostracize or put down with the accusation of legalism or self-righteousness, or maybe just quietly roll their eyes and drift away.
The first thing for Kate to do, I think, is to settle it in her mind and heart that she’s not going to be carried along like a jellyfish in the current of culture but is going to be like a dolphin that swims with freedom against the current, where necessary, in order to stay on course in the heaven-bound stream of God’s word. That’s what she needs to decide: “In my mind, this is the freedom I’m going to enjoy and pursue.”
Kate, don’t get to the point where you say, as I heard one pastor say about a compromised lifestyle, “Well, if you can’t beat them, join them.” Why would a person say that? Because it’s hard to stand alone; that’s why. But my guess is, Kate, that you’re not alone, not as much as you think you are. I don’t know that for sure but probably not.
Not Alone
It seems to me that the Bible wants us to take heart that when we think we’re just about the only one left, the Bible says, “No, no, no, there are seven thousand people who have not bowed the knee to Baal” (see Romans 11:4).
It’s just an encouragement that very often when we think we’re the only one left, or there are only a few, there are more. Just when you think you’re the only one, there are probably dozens of others who feel the same way you do, and not only that, but among those very ones, those friends, who are involved in the sinful entertainments, perhaps there are some whose consciences are troubling them, and they’re looking for an alternative.
That might imply that you should not only pray that God would lead you to other friends who would love the encouragement of your friendship and your standards, but perhaps you should also propose alternative activities when you get together with those very friends who are watching all those questionable movies. It might be different kinds of leisure, different kinds of recreation, or it might be something more significant that you would lead in forming a band of people who could do some kind of significant ministry together.
Savor the Word
Maybe the most important thing for Kate is to focus on God himself through his word, so that your own mind is so saturated with the spectacular riches of Christ — both now and for eternity — that you actually out-rejoice your worldly friends. I’m thinking of Psalm 4:7: “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.”
“Pray for your friends. Surround yourself with a few who care about spiritual things, eternal things.”
What your friends seem not to realize is that not only are the pleasures of worldly entertainment shallow and short-lived, but they are also forming, shaping the soul so that it is increasingly difficult for the soul to have any taste for deeper and lasting pleasures. That’s a great tragedy. I have felt this in my own life. In those seasons when I have drifted toward a preoccupation with the pleasures offered by this world, I find myself growing not only narrower and shallower and more trivial and artificial but also less able to savor God’s word and less able to feel the wonder of the unsearchable riches of Christ.
This is an extremely dangerous place to be. We should tremble, and I am so thankful that in all these decades God has stepped in and rescued me again and again.
Live for Eternity
Maybe one last suggestion: Be sure to take the long view. Most people live their lives with so little attention to the future decades of their life and the future ages of their life after death that they live their lives out of touch with the greatest realities. They just don’t think about them.
Kate, live with a view to eternity. Cultivate capacities of pleasure that go deep now and last forever. Pray for your friends. Surround yourself with a few who care about spiritual things, eternal things. Be a part of a healthy church that puts a premium on personal holiness, as well as global missions and public justice, and be confident that God is going to work everything together for your joyful likeness to Jesus (Romans 8:28).
