I once worked at a company where no one felt comfortable wearing blue jeans to work. There was no rule or policy against it and quite the opposite in that the company prided itself on having a casual dress policy. But it would be the very rare day when you would see a senior executive or anyone in management wearing a pair of jeans in the office. Recently I saw a video of an internal meeting of the same company and I commented that all of the senior team were wearing blue jeans. The person who was showing me the video said, “yeah, we all wears jeans these days, almost every day.” What was the difference? When I was at the organization the CEO then never wore jeans to work and if someone did, he wouldn’t say anything, but he would give them the once over look and would look at what pants they were wearing just long enough that it would let them know that he was frowning inside. Today, the same company has a different CEO and he is known for wearing jeans to work all the time, even though he never did back in the day when he was number two in the company. The point of all of this is that we very easily become the products of our environment. Just like chameleons we can quickly change based on the landscape and the backdrop around us and if we are not careful we will have changed and not even known it. It’s nothing new to any of us that we change over time in small increments that begin to add up. It’s like gaining weight. Few people just wake up one morning and find that they are overweight. It’s the pound here and the pound there that leaves us with 20 extra pounds that has to be taken back off more diligently than how it was put on. So are the things in life that can cause us issues regarding being in but not of this world. Our “IBNO Status” must constantly be monitored. There are many traits and characteristics of others that are fine to take on, but there are others that we have to monitor and not just do because everyone else does them or the person at the top of the company does it that way. Not knowing or recognizing how we have changed is the first sign that our IBNO status needs to be checked.

Reference: Romans 12:2 (New Living Testament)