Modern Martyrdom?

“It may seem an extreme assertion at first, but I believe that the challengeof living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plaques were for the saints of earlier centuries. Being thrown to the lions or living in the shadow of gruesome death are fairly straightforward if unattractive threats. Enemies that come loudly andvisibly are usually much easier to fight than those that are undetectable.”
-Ken Myers

Co-exisiting with today’s popular culture is certainly a challenge for Christians and Christianity itself.
Amazingly, most modern believers are advocating following popular culture and pursuing the world, using it and its ways as a model!

But the Bible bodly says the exact opposite! Ro 12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
Believers are to be "in the world, not of the world." The Bible is clear on the subject, and is in fact almost unsettling as it says: 1John 2:15"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."

Temptations to follow the world and its ways are certainly strong. Can these really compare with the ones of saints under persecution in the past? Not to the same extent, but I think the point certainly deserves attention and awareness.

Christians, especially those who are parents of young children and teenagers, are being attacked by snipers on all fronts, often ignorant that they are even being fire d upon until they take more than one direct hit. When dealing with active persecution, it is easier to see the enemy. It is when the enemy is concealed that the fighting becomes more difficult.

Never before has culture been so pervasive and even a necessary for communication. Aside from language and politics ( Government), it used to be in America and the world that one was able to raise their family within clearly defined moral exposure. Unless war called people away to foreign ports (and exposure to foreign substances and social mores) a person who did not want to be exposed to certain things, or whodidnot want his children exposed, could control this.

No longer.

Unless one literally lives in a cave (without electricity) they and their children know who Britney Spears, Anna Nicole and Monica Lewisky are and why they are (ahem) "Famous”.

For two years my wife and I did not have a TV and still heard about all these things.
Children suffer the most.

To take a laxidacal attitude is to say “Okay I recant”

Read Foxes book of Martyrs lately?

If you do- it will remind you of your responsibility in such matters even though it deals with fire and Sword, something (or someone) inside us is stirred by such.

Coincidence?............. Or conscience?

Are you being burned? Or are you already assimilated and unaware?

More Myers....

"...popular culture's greatest influence is in the way it shapes how we think and feel (more than what we think and feel) and how we think and feel about thinking and feeling."

"Popular culture is in many ways a very trivial matter...but its triviality , while making it seem innocuous, also enables it to be extremely pervasive, and that is its most toxic quality"