The The ball We've all heard the saying when in Rome do as the Romans do. It's a praise that's used

to encourage us to blend in, to go along with the surrounding culture.

Today on Truth for Life, Alice Tereg points out why the Bible teaches us

to do exactly the opposite at times. At times. Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17.

Now this, I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds.

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.

They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to

practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learn Christ, assuming that you have heard of him and were taught in

him as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires

and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Amen.

We turn again to God in prayer, Father, as we come now to the Bible, we earnestly pray for the help of the Holy Spirit to reveal Christ to us, to reveal ourselves, to show us who and what we are outside of Christ

and in Christ. Help us Lord to think, to believe, to obey.

For we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well you know when we come to the Bible not only as we

come to it now in this public forum but as we turn to our Bibles on a daily basis, we turn to a book

that understands the world in which we live. Indeed, there's a very real sense in which when we open up our

Bibles we're reading them in a world that has been aptly and strikingly described for us in verses 17, 18 and 19,

the verses to which we paid attention last time. And if you recall you know that we read

them in light of Paul's opening section of his letter to the Romans and we were suggesting to one another that between

them we really have the locus classicas of humanity outside of Christ.

Here is if you like, a succinct and dreadful, but equally clear understanding of humanity

turned away from God and we noted that it is marked by futility, by darkness, by alienation,

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