Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us (I Peter 2:11-12).

One thing that I understand well in this passage is what it means to be a foreigner. I’ve lived overseas for half of my life serving as a missionary. I’ve always enjoyed living in different cultures and found the differences to be fascinating. On the other hand, I’ve also had days where I was in tears because the differences were so frustrating.

My husband is Korean and I am American. During our first years of marriage, we struggled with how different we were. We were also having trouble agreeing on how to live our daily lives since our two cultures didn’t agree on many things. Some conflicts were just preferences such as how to set a table, which language to speak at home, or what to eat for dinner. There were other issues in which we disagreed that were so deeply ingrained into our individual cultures that neither of us wanted to change. 

One day we decided to meet with our pastor to discuss one of the issues where I felt the cultural practice was really in conflict with God’s Word. The pastor agreed and asked us, do you want to have a cultural marriage or a biblical marriage? Because we were both Christians and we both respected God’s Word, we wanted to do the latter. However, this really made us think deeply about our beliefs and whether or not our cultural beliefs conflicted with biblical ones. It’s not always easy to recognize this.

From that point on, my husband and I decided to use Scripture to guide how we should live. We had to start discerning the things that we grew up believing that were cultural, but not necessarily biblical.  Sometimes that meant living in a way that was very different from our cultures. Sometimes this caused conflict with in-laws and others in the community around us. This experience has helped bond us together.

All cultures have positive and negative aspects to them. I’ve learned that culture can’t be our only guide to determine how we live. Being a Christ follower will at times cause us to live counter-culturally.

When our culture conflicts with biblical principles, then we need to choose to follow God’s Word instead.

 Jesus never meant for us to blend in and live like everyone around us. He called us “foreigners”. Our real home isn’t our home country or even the place we currently reside. It is in Heaven and our ultimate authority is Jesus.

Are aspects of your culture, the way you currently live, not biblical? Is there an area of your life that God is prompting you to change so that you can glorify Him?