Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is - his good, pleasing, and perfect will. (Romans 12:2)
In yesterday’s podcast, I shared the story of my wife’s butterfly tattoo. That tattoo is a reminder to her and our entire family that we are called to a life of becoming - stretching, growing, and learning how to live life in the fulness that Jesus promises each of us as his disciples.
If you had a chance to listen to the podcast, then you know that the image of change through the renewing of our minds or thinking, if you will, is found in the word “transformation” in Romans 12:2. We get our English word, “metamorphosis,” from the Greek word in this passage.
The caterpillar spins his cocoon and, from within, hidden from the eyes of all others, a radical transformation takes place, and a beautiful butterfly emerges. Unlike the lowly caterpillar whose world was seen from his limited perspective crawling around avoiding predators (including people like me who collect the wooly buggers for fish bait), the butterfly sees things from an entirely different perspective. The cocoon becomes the catalyst for change.
Sadly, there is another cocoon prevalent in the lives of all too many Christians today. In his book, The Culturally Savvy Christian, Dick Staub describes this cocoon, like this—
“Religious cocooning proceeds from the view that devoutly religious people are pure, holy seekers of righteousness and that everyone outside of their specific group is suspect.” (See Dick Staub, The Culturally Savvy Christian, p.30)
An example of this kind of cocooning is found just down the road from where I live. A rigidly conservative Christian college is known for the strict rules imposed on its students. While in Seoul, I experienced firsthand the damage this isolationist, protectionist rule-based Christianity did to a young man and his family from Nigeria.
A member of our church leadership team asked me to write a letter of recommendation for his son to attend this local school. (I had no idea at the time that I would ever be living in Pensacola.) I wrote his son a glowing recommendation. It was easy to do. I knew the young man well, and I knew what a godly servant of Christ he was.
But within a year of beginning his studies, this young Nigerian follower of Christ was expelled from the school. Were his grades bad? Was he guilty of gross immoral or unethical conduct? No, but he did run across another student in town, and they were seen together and reported to the “Defenders of the Faith” in charge of school discipline.
And because the other student was female, this young Nigerian student was booted out of the college. In Jesus Name, of course. And I know I shouldn’t say this, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the color of his skin had something to do with the harshness of the discipline meted out on him.
Anyway, his father came to me heartbroken and asking for help. I did everything I could, but neither my letters nor phone calls were returned. The decision of the school would not be reconsidered under any circumstances.
I pass by this Christian college often. It is surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence with pointed spikes on top. It is, for me, a picture of the prisons in which so many Christians are incarcerated today. Prisons of fear, self-righteousness, exclusivity, and judgementalism.
The biblical image of cocooning described in Romans 12:2 is quite different. While it warns us not to be conformed to the world’s ways of thinking, it does not imply withdrawal. Jesus instructed his disciples to be in the world but not of the world. Our Lord, himself, was known as a “friend of sinners,” although I don’t think that he would have ever described himself in this fashion - it was a criticism of him by the isolationist religious leaders of his day.
Jesus, I believe, would have referred to himself as a “friend of people, all people.” In today’s world, those friends would include an entire cast of society’s so-called deplorables.
The cocooning that Christ seeks for his people is not one that circles the wagons or constructs walls to keep the world out. The cocooning Jesus wants to see in your life and mine gives birth to butterflies, who, in all their beauty, see their world and the people in it through the eyes of their Lord.
Let’s not live out our lives as Christian caterpillars incarcerated in cocoons from which we never emerge. It’s time we broke free of our fearful, frozen faith. Then and only then will we be able, in the words of Romans 12:2, to experience God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will in our lives, our churches, and our world.
In Christ,
Dan