Recently I was in heavy traffic when a man sped by me and flipped me off. I confess, my response was inappropriate—I erupted in a fit of laughter. I wasn’t attempting to provoke the man. I’ve read numerous news reports about road-raged lunatics shooting innocent drivers on the interstate. It’s just that his “gesture” struck me as so ridiculous that my natural impulse was to laugh. As a culture, we’ve become outrageously rude. Tempers simmer just below the boiling point, and the slightest offense sends them boiling over. I risk sounding like an old geezer when I say this, but things were not always this way. There was a time not that long ago when society possessed greater civility. Good manners were a thing.
I’ve been spending time in the book of Ephesians, and if you’ve read it, you know that it’s a theological juggernaut. The apostle Paul spends the first three chapters unpacking the spiritual blessings we have in Christ, and they are doozies. And then, halfway through the book, Paul pivots and spends the rest of the book instructing Christ-followers on how to live in light of the truths revealed in the previous chapters. According to Paul, our union with Christ is supposed to impact how we carry out day-to-day business. I’ve been thinking about how this relates to living in a hostile culture, and Paul’s words point us in the right direction:
Let all bitterness, anger and wrath, shouting and slander be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ (Eph. 4:31-32).
Undoubtedly, all of us are influenced by our surroundings. Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” What he meant by that is—for better or worse—the people we spend time with, the places we go, and the culture we live in dramatically impact us, so we need to be mindful of those things.
So, how do Christ-followers live above the fray in an increasingly hostile society?
Foremost, we’ve got to prioritize time in the Scriptures. If we don’t, we’ll succumb to our surroundings. Apart from the Scriptures we slip into default mode and forget how we’re supposed to live. I want to say this as gently as I know how; Some of us are spending more time reading the comment sections on social media than we are reading the Scriptures. If that’s the case, we’ll inevitably be sucked in the undertow. We cannot spend hours each day reading hostile garbage and come away with our attitudes unscathed. We’ll wind up being the guy on the interstate flipping off other drivers—with a fish bumper sticker on our car. So let’s stay in the Scriptures, do what they say, and try a little kindness.
