“Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him.

The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out—but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.” – 1 John 2:15-17 The Message version

Our sermon series, “Adapt and Adore” concludes this Sunday. It has been a series of word and deed as  COVID cases have affect the church office, the preschool, and the campus facilities. As a society we’ve

had to adjust in many ways to the virus. But we’ve been adjusting and adapting long before COVID and it has not always been for the better.

On September 1, 1967 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to speak at a gathering of the American Psychological Association. During his remarks, Rev. King discussed his idea for creative maladjustment. Hear his provocative, spirit-filled, and wise words below.

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“You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. [In its use]…the word implies [a] destructive maladjustment [that] should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid [neurosis].

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted…We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination…We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to

economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

…Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream’… And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

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There is another way of saying what he so artfully expressed. That is, “Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”