We close out the week on the Ask Pastor John podcast with a question from a female listener who writes in and asks this, "Good morning Pastor John. I'm reading your powerful book, Don't Waste Your Life. In chapter seven, living to prove he is more precious than life, under the section titled Consumed with Clothes, you write this, "My plea is that you be more like a dolphin and less like a jellyfish in the sea of fashion and of contra-fashion, which is just as tyrannizing." Could you explain more of what you are saying in this sentence?

Thank you, Pastor John. Well, let's do it in two parts, the dolphin part and the fashion, contra-fashion part. First, I love the dolphin, jellyfish analogy. The assumption is that oceans of culture have very powerful tides, and these cultural tides almost always pull us away from deep allegiance to Jesus.

So if you're going to swim in the cultural oceans and be a Christian, you better be a dolphin, not a jellyfish, because a jellyfish just goes with the flow, and dolphins can cut through the tidal currents and swim toward the truth and swim toward holiness and toward heaven in spite of cultural tides.

And of course, there's no if about it. If we're going to live in these cultural tides, no, there's no if about it. We don't have any choice. We do swim in the cultural oceans of this planet. To be alive is to be in a culture shaped by the world.

So Jesus prayed in John 17, 15, "I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one." So he was very aware, "My disciples are stuck there, and they need help. They need protection. They need to be able to swim like a dolphin." The New Testament calls us to dolphin-like countercultural efforts over and over again.

Here are a few examples. Romans 12, 2, "Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Ephesians 4, 17, "You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds." James 4, 4, "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

For whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." First Peter 1, 18, "You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers." First John 2, 15, "Do not love the world or the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." And so on.

So that's what I mean by being a dolphin, being so full of Holy Spirit joy, Holy Spirit courage, Holy Spirit wisdom, that you have the strength and the wherewithal to swim against the current of the culture. That's what it takes to be a Christian. Another name for dolphin in the New Testament is exile and sojourner.

Beloved, this is First Peter 2, 11, "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles, dolphins, to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul." That tide is taking you down there to be eaten by the sharks if you don't swim against this tide heavenward.

We have a homing device within us called new birth and the Holy Spirit against these cultural tides taking us home. Now there is another side to this, namely Christianity does not destroy earthly culture even when it is rightly being embedded in it. It transforms it but doesn't destroy it.

So it adapts to a hundred things in the culture. Most real Christians in the West drive cars, use cell phones, live in houses, wear the clothes that look more or less like everybody else around them, and so on. We fit in in that sense. And the New Testament makes clear that this is so, and this is right, and it does it in several ways.

One is the great battle over circumcision. Is circumcision going to be required as these Gentiles with their pagan uncircumcision going to fit into this largely Jewish church? Has the decision was finally made? No. That cultural demand is not going to be made. Paul said, "I become all things to all people that I might save some." So those are a couple of pointers.

The fact that we are a people who always have two impulses at work, like Andrew Wall says. There's the pilgrim principle, that's like exiles and aliens here, and indigenous principle, which means we do adapt. We don't require neutral things to be shifted around in order to be a part of the Christian community.

Now, the other part that this listener may have been talking about is what I meant by fashion and contra-fashion. And I'm not sure that's what they wanted me to talk about, or whether it was just the dolphin. I don't know, but I'm going to make a go at it anyway.

They said, "My plea is that you," they're quoting me, "My plea is that you would be more like a dolphin, less like a jellyfish in the sea of fashion and of contra-fashion," which is just as tyrannizing. And they want to know, "What do you mean by that?" I think.

And I simply mean both men and women today are pressured in dozens of ways to conform to the way the world dresses and thinks about dressing or about makeup or about hair. It's becoming even stronger and stronger for men. I was jogging this morning on Washington Avenue at five o'clock in the morning, and I passed this big glass front of the new building called Men's Spa.

And the title is "Ultimate Male Grooming." I thought, "Really? Sounds like a dog." I'm just saying that to say we usually think about women when it's pressured to dress a certain way, but more and more I think male grooming is a pressured thing. So can a woman find, here's the kind of pressure she might be under.

Can a woman find a fashion in stores that she feels comfortable with on some items? I've talked to mothers who find it difficult shopping with their young daughters because there's scarcely a choice out there for one that she or the mom or both would feel good about in terms of modesty.

And what I mean by contra-fashion is that a person can be driven by what is so popular or can be driven by what is not popular. There's a whole culture luring people to conform to non-conformity. How else can you explain the manufacture of jeans with holes in them? I mean, the manufacture of jeans that are tattered with holes.

What is that? This is the mainstreaming of contra-fashion, which of course will lead to a contra-contra fashion and so on. The point that I was trying to get at was you can be a jellyfish by craving to look preppy or you can be a jellyfish by craving to look anti-preppy.

Either way, I mean, you're not free when you conform to all your grunge friends. It's not freedom. It's just rebellion in a new conformity. So thumbing your nose at culture may feel like a dolphin, but you may wake up and find you're just a jellyfish like all the others floating with a million others not so radical grunge lovers.

So I think the best text for men and women, men and women, even though it's written for women in the New Testament is 1 Peter 3, 4, and 5. I've been memorizing 1 Peter and this is really powerful for men, for me, as well as women. It says, "Do not let your adorning," these men can say grooming, "Do not let your grooming or your adorning be external.

The braiding of hair, the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear." Now pause there and note, he cannot mean braids per se are wrong, jewelry per se is wrong because if he did, he'd have to mean clothing per se is wrong because the last one is just clothing.

Don't let your adorning be clothing. Oh, really? Well, what do you mean by that? It means what he says in the next line. He says, "But let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious." In other words, for men and women, the focus and the drive and the craving shouldn't be, "I want to look a certain way, I want to look a certain way, but I want to be a certain way.

I want to be beautiful in my spirit of humility and kindness and love and gentleness and meekness and self-control." So for men and women, put your energy, let's put our energy into becoming a holy, wise, loving, courageous, Christ-exalting people on the inside, a dolphin from the inside. And the fashion, I think, will take its appropriate secondary place.

Wonderful Pastor John, thank you. And the book mentioned earlier, Don't Waste Your Life, can be downloaded free of charge online right now at DesiringGod.org/books. Look for the title, Don't Waste Your Life. We were talking about what is written in that book on page 126, if you want to find it.

Well, this is another great week of questions from you. Please continue to send me your questions via email at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org, or you can send your questions to us through our podcast landing page at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And there at the landing page, you can also catch up on episodes from the week that you may have missed.

I'm your host Tony Reinke. Have a wonderful weekend. I'll see you on Monday.