Breath in me, O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may all be holy. Act in me, O Holy Spirit, that my work, too, may be holy. Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, that I love but what is holy. Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit, to defend all that is holy. Guard me, then, O Holy Spirit, that I always may be holy.
~ Saint Augustine of Hippo
Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
Oh surely, beloved, we live in a fallen, wretched, corrupted and corrupting world. The fetid mess that piles in around us seeks to pull us down into a mire from which there is no escape. The world is a place of desperate evil, desperate loneliness, and desperate sadness.
And He reaches down to some of us and says Joyfully: Come away beloved. Come away and dance in the Light of my Presence. Everything, in a moment, changes for the very much better. We realize that everything is now, and will ever be, well in Him.
But there is something strange. We are in the same physical location.
We have not gone anywhere. But, it is most surely true that we are in a very different place. Heaven has opened. Time becomes irrelevant, and He begins to reveal the more full dimensionality of the new creation we are, to us. We begin to see that we do indeed, in Him, Live and move and have our being.
We do indeed, though, come away from the fallen, wretched, fetidness of the world. We cannot play there. Well, actually we can, but why would we? The only reasonable choice in life now is to reckon it true that we are in the near Presence of our precious Savior. Ours can now be lives of profound righteousness, Joy and peace in the power of His Spirit.
As those one with Him, we are not irrelevant to the world. We are just separate from it. We, like Paul may speak to those things in the world that may resemble that which is true, noble, just, pure, lovely, virtuous, honorable, and of good report. However, we also like Paul, feel no need to take part in, or reference, fallen culture, temple prostitution or idol worship practices as shadows of the truth.
Said simply: There are some good created and crafted things in this world. But they are fewer than we would wish. Basically, anything made by man will indeed pull us away from our primary purpose and fulfillment in real Life – The Glorification of G_d.
So separation does not mean irrelevance in our world. Far from it. However, rather than diving into our culture, we are those singing the same song to which we awoke Alive: Come away beloved, come away in this place – and into His Presence!
