Sermon Date 04-28-2013 A New Way of Thinking (Chuck Gohn)
If you have your Bibles with you and would like to open up to Romans 12:1. As you know, we have been going through the four core values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. As I mentioned last week, we are going to be winding down on the focus on these values. For the summer, I want to kick off some sort of a new series yet to be named because I haven’t really thought it completely through yet. But anyway, we are going in a new direction in the summer. Today, what I would like to do is just give one more look at this value of worship. We spent a lot of time on the value of worship, actually eight months. Hopefully, you are beginning to learn and beginning to see that worship is something that is not confined to these four walls or any of the four walls of any church. Rather, worship is something that needs to be carried out into your life. As we see today as we look at the book of Romans, we should have a lifestyle of worship. As Paul describes a living sacrifice. Before reading through the passage I am going to give you a little bit of background.
The book of Romans is a pretty heavy book. It is a really good book. It is actually a letter, but it is a letter that contains a nice summary of all the major core beliefs, the core doctrines of the Christian faith. The apostle Paul does a great job of laying out those beliefs in a very logical and systematic way, covering some of the key areas of what believe today including the sovereignty of God, the righteousness of God, the sinfulness of man, and reality the redemption that comes through Jesus Christ. I would love to be able to spend many weeks on going through the book of Romans. Unfortunately, I can’t spend much time on it today, but it is a good book and worth reading. Today, I want to focus just on the first two verses of Romans 12 because, to me, what those two verses do is they take these deep theological ideas and they put them in some very practical application. What I am going to do is quickly read through those two verses and then we will go back and look at them in detail. Once again, reading from Romans 12:1-2. (Scripture read here.)
The first word I want to consider is the first word there. It is called ‘therefore’. There is a saying around churches that has been around for years that if you come across a passage in the scripture that starts with the word therefore, you need to ask what is it there for. In this case what it is there for is basically to mark a key transition in basically Paul’s letter. A transition from these high doctrinal beliefs to how those beliefs should impact behavior. As I have said before, what we believe should act out somehow in our behavior. Belief should affect behavior. So he is making that connection. This therefore is a transition.
Then he goes on to say “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy”. First I want to focus on these words “I urge you”. What Paul is saying here is I am not commanding you. He is saying kind of like “I strongly encourage you”. Some translations like the KJV actually say beseech. The underlying word there basically has the idea of coming alongside of somebody, in this case coming alongside Paul’s way of thinking. That is what Paul is saying here. I am not commanding you but I strongly encourage you to come along my way of thinking. He says “brothers” which basically gives us an indication of who the letter is directed to. It is directed to the Christian brothers and sisters in Rome.
Then he goes on to say “in view of God’s mercy”. We can’t spend any time going through the first 11 chapters of Romans, but really what Paul is doing here, he is summing up those chapters really by two words: God’s mercy. If there are any two words that seem to summarize those first 11 chapters, it is God’s mercy. If we had the time to look through those 11 chapters, we would see God’s mercy kind of weave its way through all of those chapters. But really, they could be summarized in four key passages in Romans. I am going to put those up here right now. The first passage is Romans 3:23, which is “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” If you have been a Christian for a while you know that this sums up that nobody has it together. We all have some taint of sin within us. Then it goes on to say that “The wages of sin is death.” That is Romans 6:23. Because our sin is an affront to a holy God, it deserves death. Not simply physical death but spiritual death. Then he goes on to say “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That is the part that is the good news. God demonstrates his love for us. While we were still fallen from him, he saw our plight, and he sent Christ who was to die for us. Finally in Romans 10:9 it says “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Those four passages in seminary they used to call them the Romans Road. So if you want to take somebody through the core gospel. If you want to take somebody who has questions about how to become saved, you take them down the Romans Road. Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23, Romans 5:8, and Romans 10:9.
But he goes on to say this is God’s mercy, but what he goes on to say is basically you need to do something in light of it. You need to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is where it is helpful to have a little bit of understanding, a little bit of background on the Jewish sacrificial system. Many of you might know that most ancient religions had some sort of a sacrificial system, rituals, worship that they would do at their temples. The Jewish people were not excluded from that. A lot of these temple worships involved the sacrifice of animals. The difference between the Jewish sacrificial system and the pagan sacrificial system is basically the Jewish system was about reconciliation with God. It was about restoring a broken covenant, a broken relationship. It was about a restoration of the holiness. It was about trying to come back and fix what had been broken in their lives. It was all about holiness. Where the pagan rituals were a lot of times about sexual immorality and depravity and all sorts of crazy things, the Jewish system was all geared around a relationship with a holy God. That is what the system was put into place for. So day after day, month after month, year after year, the people would bring their animals first to the tabernacle and then eventually became the temple. They would bring the animal in and what they would do is lay their hand on the animal and that was symbolic of identity. Because the person didn’t want to be sacrificed on the altar, he said I am putting my sin upon this animal and then the animal would be slaughtered and basically grilled like a nice steak on a Sunday afternoon. What the priest would do is take some of the blood and touch it on various spots of the altar. I know some people have said in the past the Old Testament is just so bloody. The reason is because in the Old Testament, they believed as God taught them the life is in the blood. The life of a person, the life of an animal was in the blood. The only way that you can make up a sin, an affront to a holy God was to give over a life and the life was the blood. So that was going on there. We know that the temple system, as we went through the series of John last year, became really corrupt. It basically began to just breakdown in so many different ways. The priests figured out all sorts of ways to get around all these different regulations. The people learned how to do it, and the whole system basically broke down. Basically, it was a failed attempt at the first attempt of worship. We look at that and say was it God’s failure or was it man’s failure? It was man’s failure but it was God’s success because God knew that the temple system wasn’t going to be a permanent solution. Thankfully, for us it wasn’t going to be a perfect solution. The temple system was meant as a shadow, I think it is in Hebrews it speaks of it as a tutor to point us toward the one true sacrifice which is Jesus Christ. They had this system in place where over and over the people would come and bring the sacrifice to the priest but they could never ever really complete what they needed to have completed which is complete reconciliation back to God. So again Christ came as the one sacrifice. We see that very clearly in the book of Hebrews where he writes “Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties. Again and again he offers the same sacrifices which can never take away sins, but when this priest Jesus is offered for an all-time one sacrifice for sins he sat down at the right hand of God.” They had a sacrificial system in place. All these people were bringing their sacrifices. Then one person came and Christ became the sacrifice and the priest who administered the sacrifice and now sits at the right hand of God. That is what is going on.
When Paul speaks about the whole idea of this becoming a living sacrifice what he is saying is that although the priestly system, the sacrificial system has been shut down, at least the old way, in other words the animals have been taken off the hook, we have been put on the hook. We are the ones now that are supposed to be placed on the altar and be sacrificed. He says “Therefore I urge you brothers in view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship.” So he says you are going to be placed now as a living sacrifice as opposed to a dead sacrifice. I want you alive. I want your entire life to be a sacrifice not to gain the mercy of God, not to gain the approval of God but because you have the approval of God, it is a response to the mercies of God that are outlined again in Romans. When you do those things, when you place yourself on God’s altar, you basically are performing an act of worship. As he defines a spiritual act of worship. This is more than a physical thing. A lot of people come in and that is all they ever get to is a physical thing. He wants a spiritual act of worship. He wants that lifelong connection over and over and over again. Not just behind the four walls here but as part of your entire life. To make your whole life some sort of a spiritual worship based on your responses to his promptings throughout the day. You may be thinking about now that is deep stuff even for a Sunday morning. It is, but the good news is that Paul has a knack for writing. He has a knack for taking the deep theological truths and putting them in a very practical way. He takes those 11 chapters and the last 5 chapters of Romans actually turn out to be a very practical application on how to do this in your life.
But really we don’t have to know all those chapters. Really all we have to know is the one key principle that he talks about in chapter 12. He goes on to say “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Conformed. I think about being shaped into something. “Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world”. Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the culture tries to shape us. The culture does a pretty good job of shaping us. Think about advertisers. All day long they are out there trying to shape us into their habits, into their way of thinking so that we will buy their products. They do a great job at that. We think about the schools. The schools shape us from when we are a child all the way up to teen years and even into the university. The teachers, the professors are shaping us into their way of thinking. We think about politicians. They are trying to shape us. We think about friends. They are trying to shape us. The TV shows, the movies we watch, they are all shaping us. They are trying to get us to conform to their way of viewing life. I have said it before and somebody said this about 20 years ago to me and I never forgot it. He said a person is going to be pretty much the same person five years from now except for the friends they hang around with, the movies they watch, and the books they read. Nowadays you can add the video games they play, the websites they visit, and the situations they get themselves into. All those things determine how you are being shaped. How else are you going to be shaped in life? Again, Paul is warning not to be conformed to the patterns of this world.
The patterns of the world are not all bad, but there are a lot of bad patterns out there. All you have to do is think about patterns. I am hoping to talk about this in the summer with the series. There are a lot of patterns if you pay attention to the world. Wouldn’t you suggest that maybe there is a pattern in the world towards dishonesty? Wouldn’t you like to think everybody is just getting more honest every day in the world? No. Why is that? There is a pattern of dishonesty. It used to be every kid probably cheated in school at one time or another. Now cheating in school has gone high tech. Instead of looking over somebody’s shoulder, you are just sending them a text. It used to be we were worried about somebody breaking into our house and stealing our TV. Now we are afraid of them breaking into our internet and stealing a whole identity. It is a pattern of dishonesty out there. And there is just a pattern of general rudeness and crudeness. Do you ever think that people are just getting more rude out there? They just don’t seem to be nice to each other. It used to be you would come up to a door and there would be a lady there and you would pull the door open or give them a seat or if you went into a building you took off your hat and especially if you came into a church you would take off your hat because why? It was a sign of respect. That has gone out the window. Then people just become more crude. I remember when the F-word that I couldn’t say was the word fruit. I would say that kid is fruit and I would get smacked. That is not the F-word any more as you know. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened, all of a sudden this becomes on everybody’s lips, even the littlest child, male or female it doesn’t matter. You are walking down the street and you hear it blaring through the music. You hear that the world has just become more crude and more rude. Then the world has become more sexually immoral. It used to be that there was a sense of modesty and modesty has been thrown out the window. From a very young age we are encouraged to dress in a certain way or act in a certain way that appeals to the opposite sex. It used to be that when you were a teenager if you wanted to see some pornography you would sneak a peek at the magazine rack when your parents weren’t looking at the local store and you’d see a Playboy or something like that. Now it is available on the internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for every age. Anybody can have it. Another pattern you see is an overall pattern of selfishness. It is all about me. It’s not just one generation. It’s all generations pretty much since the 50s. We are all the Me Generation. It is all about me. It doesn’t matter what I do, what I say. It is none of your business who I talk to, what I do, what I look at. It is all about making me happy. Those again are just simply patterns of the world. If I had time, I would talk about how those patterns unfold into other patterns. Patterns of increased teenage pregnancy. Patterns of divorce. Patterns of bankruptcy. Patterns of addiction. Patterns of suicide. We would see all those patterns of the world.
Again, what Paul is saying is don’t conform to those patterns of the world. He goes on to say “instead what you must be is transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Now transformation is just simply a changing of shape. It is where we get the word metamorphous. What Paul is saying here is don’t be conformed to the world’s ways or if you have been conformed to the ways of the world, it is time to transform your thinking. A new way of thinking about life. Anything that is true about the Christian religion is that it is all about new things. It is about becoming born again, new birth. It is about having a new identity. It is about being a new creature in Christ. It is all about being new. It is actually about having a new mind, a renewed mind. A mind that basically we cannot get to on our own simply by mere willpower like we are going to think ourselves into a particular mindset. It only comes through the power of the Spirit. You see we don’t have the ability to create the mind in ourselves that God wants to give us. He gives us the mind. We are able to work it out by our works, by our obedience. In 2 Corinthians 3:18 Paul writes “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” My point here again is that this transformation that takes place is not something we do. It is something we receive and then we respond to. What is going on with this renewed mind it is the idea that God is giving us this new mind. I think it somewhere in 2 Corinthians it talks about that we have actually been given the mind of Christ, which just blows your mind when you think about it. Our job is to be able to work out that mind within us and we do it simply by acts of obedience. We do it by responding to the promptings of the spirit within it. The spirit gives us these promptings to act in a certain way, to respond to certain situations, and as we respond to them what happens is we start changing patterns. As we respond to the things that he is telling us to do at that moment, that day, that hour, he begins to change something going on in our minds. It begins to replace one pattern of thinking with another pattern of thinking. If we do those things enough, those acts of service or acts of kindness or whatever it is we are called to do at the moment, those actually become acts of worship and then collectively they add up to a lifetime of service, a living sacrifice to God. That is kind of the big picture of it.
I know you still need something a little bit more practical. Let me see if I can bring it on home here. Again, the key is obedience here. I know that most of you, I suspect, are familiar with the bombings at the Boston Marathon a couple weeks ago. It was an awful situation and really what would be the pattern of the world in a situation like that. Revenge. Bitterness. Even President Obama gets on the news and says we will find that person and we will give that person justice. We were at Bible study the other night and there was a passage I don’t know quite what to do with. It is Luke 6:27 “But I tell you: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on the cheek turn the other one also.” He goes on basically just pray for that person. That is not the world’s pattern. That should be our pattern. Again, I am not discounting anything these two individuals did. They deserve to be persecuted to the full extent of the law, but what he is saying here is what should our response be? I suspect that there are very few people in here that said I think I should pray for that boy. You see the guy’s picture all over the place. He is a 19-year-old kid that got in with the wrong crowd. That is the bottom line. Sure he deserves to be prosecuted; sure he deserves death but what about his parents? What about his friends? What about all the other relatives that just say what happened here? Do you ever think about praying for them? They are all hurting. Not that the victims shouldn’t have prayer but what Jesus says is pray for your enemies. That goes against the pattern of the world and becomes something that actually can serve to renew your mind if you act on it because if you do that enough what happens is you are engraining your mind with a new way of thinking.
Now to bring it more down to a simplified or an easier example. You are sitting in a restaurant. The waitress gives you your change and you find out there is an extra $10 there. What do you do? The world’s pattern might say it is your loss my gain. It’s just a big company. They won’t miss the $10. That is the world pattern, right? But you as a Christian filled with the spirit of God hear the prompting of the spirit that says there is a commandment about that. It says don’t steal. What do you do? You call the waitress over and you let her know that she gave you too much change and what you have done is you have actually done a little act of worship. You know why it was worship? Because you were acting in obedience to God’s will, to God’s law. Again, on a typical day, I think if you pay attention, you would encounter dozens of situations where you can perform simple interactions with people into little acts of worship simply by how you respond. That is what I mean about a lifetime of worship. What happens, again, as you begin to respond to these little situations that come across your path every single day, those things become acts of worship. Those things renew your mind that ultimately become acts of worship that ultimately help you become a living sacrifice your entire life. That is all it is.
The interesting thing about this is that you also get kind of a bonus on top of it. He goes on to say “Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing, and perfect will.” One of the questions people are always talking about is what is God’s will for my life? Who should I marry? Where should I travel? Where should I live? What job should I take? I really think that is not an issue. Those are all doing things. What does God want me to do in this situation? God is not interested in what you do. He is interested in who you are. He is not interested in what you do. He is interested in what you are becoming. If you know anything about God’s will, his will is for you to be something. His will is for you to be sanctified. 1 Thessalonians 4:3 “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified.” Do you want to know God’s will? It is right there. Sanctified is just a fancy word for holy. Sanctified just means set apart from the world. That is his Will. How you get there doesn’t really matter. It is how you respond to the various situations that you encounter in life so that when you respond properly you are within God’s Will. When you come across a situation, whether it is the situation in the restaurant or watching the news or whatever it is, and you think about responding and you say I am not sure this will work, I’m not sure I truly buy this thing, but I’m going to test God on it. I am going to try it. So you try it. You actually pray for your enemy or you give change back. You might not see anything right away but do it over and over and over and over again and pretty soon you look back and you say God knows what he is talking about. I approve of that situation. You are able to test and approve and you see that God is pleased by it. Really, in a nutshell, that is all we are talking about here. Living a life of worship. It simply means coming across those situations, allowing God to prompt you towards a certain action that lines up with his will, responding hopefully in an appropriate manner by obedience and allowing those daily interactions, the little bitty ones and the really big ones, to re-carve a place in your brain that is more in line with the ways of God and less in line with the patterns of the world. The author Gene Peterson wrote the book called The Message and I think he sums it up all pretty well in very good plain English. He says “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” Let us pray.
