This excerpt from John MacArthur's radio brodcast today - www.gty.org

Back to Romans 12 again, "Be not conformed to this world." Back to James 1:27, if...he says, "Friendship with the world is enmity against God." Back to 1 John 2:15, "Love not the world neither the things that are in the world." You've got to resist the pressure of the system because the system is what put the cracks in our life, we succumb to it. It happens so subtly.

Can I give you just a little sequence of steps how it happens? This is how you get..this is how you get sort of engulfed by the system. The world sucks you in, sucks me in, here's how. First step, accommodation...accommodation. We just tolerate the world, sinister values, sin, wickedness. What do you mean by that? Well we stop being shocked by it, we're not shocked by it anymore. We just...we accommodate ourselves to it. We may think it's wrong, we may say it's wrong, but it really doesn't shock us, that's accommodation.

The second word is legitimation. We legitimize it. How? Well we finally accept it as normal. "Oh, that's normal...that's just part of our culture."

The third word is assimilation. Now we're in real danger. We personally begin to cooperate with these skewed values by saying nothing. First we recognized it, accommodation, but we weren't shocked by it. Secondly, we recognized it, we weren't shocked by it and we just sort of accept it as normal, that's legitimation. And now assimilation, we cooperate with it by never saying anything about it. It just passes off the scene, it's not even an issue anymore, we don't even discuss it. I mean, to put it simply, when's the last time you heard a preacher preach against bikini bathing suits? The culture has just assimilated that.

The fourth word is participation. That's when you go out and buy one. What does that mean? Well that's personal involvement in attitudes and actions. Now you don't mind, you're not only not shocked by it, you not only think it's a part of your culture, you not only don't say anything against it, you go to the movies and watch it, or you turn on your television and watch it, or you read books about it, or whatever. You participate.

The fifth word is amalgamation, and that's where the worldly values are so fused with your values that you can't tell the difference. Amalgamation, the worldly values are so fused with your values you can't tell the difference. And the last word is identification and there is no difference, you've identified with it.

You see, that's the process of the world sucking you in. First you accommodate yourself to it by tolerating it, not being shocked by it. You legitimize it by accepting it as a part of culture. You assimilate it by never saying anything. You participate in it in your attitudes, even if if they're at arm's length. Finally you're amalgamated with it, it's fused into your own values until you're so identified with the world you can't tell the difference. You've got to stop it at the start...way back at the beginning.

When John Wesley went away to school to Oxford, his mother wrote him a letter, probably wrote him a lot of letters but I only read one. This is what she said. Great wisdom she wrote to her son with these words, "Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God or takes off the delight for spiritual things, whatever increases the authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin," end quote. Great advice...great advice.

The world is so subtle. Compromise is so subtle that it takes us in before we even realize what is happening. You see, it's just like the old story of the frog in the pan of water. The frog sits in the pan of water, you slowly turn up the heat and it will fry before it will jump because it's so gradual. Before it knows it, it's dead. That's the process of accommodation, legitimation, and all the rest until finally you come to identification and you don't anymore what worldliness is and what it isn't, right? So we don't want to succumb to that kind of pressure. We don't want to get engulfed in that kind of thing so we've got to deal with integrity. And that's what Paul is saying, back to verse 10. You want to make sure that you're genuine in your life and you have integrity and that you have integrity in all your relationships which means you don't fall prey to the compromises of society.