But notice also that the default setting is conformation, not transformation. Meaning, if we don’t take our discipleship to Jesus seriously, the odds are very high that we will become less like Jesus over time and more like “Rome” (or L.A., or London, or Lagos, and so on). The novelist Flannery O’Connor once advised, “Push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”[49] We have to push back on the forces that seek to deform us, to keep us from reaching our potential in Jesus.
