Romans 12 1 thru 2

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“Be Transformed,” Romans 12:1-2 (May 15, 2016) I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. PRAY We are in week two of what I hope will be a five-week series on Romans 12, where each week we will look at Paul’s instructions on how to live the Christian life. This chapter contains as much or more instruction on this topic, word-for-word, than any other part of the Bible. We’re only going to look at verse 2 this morning, just as last week we studied only verse one. Now, I can imagine some of you thinking, “Wow, that’s really slow - one sermon per verse? How are you ever going to finish this series?” We will pick up the pace beginning next week, but just know that the great Welsh pastor in London in the twentieth century, Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, preached five sermons on verse two. And I read them last week to get ready for this sermon today, and if you read them you would see like I did that actually there’s more material than that just in verse two. Three things Paul tells us here that we must do in order to truly live as followers of Jesus: do not conform, be transformed, and prove the will of God. First, Christians do not conform. Do not conform to what? We are not to conform in any way, shape, or form to the world, or as some translations have it “the pattern of this world,” literally, “this age.” If you want to follow Jesus, you cannot conform to the world. What does that mean? A lot of Christians over the years have said that not conforming to the world is a matter of behavior. And to aid in that, pastors, churches, youth groups, and college ministries have come up with lots of rules to help Christians know when they are conforming to the pattern of this world and when they are not. One of my favorite examples comes from a good, honest Sunday school teacher I had the pleasure of knowing once. He said that when his kids and their friends in church were young and playing a lot of tennis, they sat down to try to figure out what exclamation they could use to express displeasure when they made a bad shot. Of course, since they were Christians, you could not shout an actual cuss word. They were out of the question. And even words like “shoot” could be misinterpreted as a cuss word three courts over. So what he said he and the kids came up with, the only appropriate word to use, was “oops.” If you shouted “oops,” that would be ok. All the other exclamations were off limits. That was one of the rules.

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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Now if you’ve spent a lot of time around churches and youth groups and college ministries and pastors, especially in our part of the country, that sounds familiar to you. You’ve had all kinds of different and, frankly, often weird rules for regulating behavior like that thrown at you over the years so that you would not conform to the pattern of this world. You’ve had lots of rules thrown at you about dating, and “how far is too far” when it comes to physical contact with someone of the opposite sex. Lots of rules about what kinds of movies you can watch. Lots of rules about tithing and do you tithe on your gross or net income and do you break it up and give it every week or can you just give on the weeks you get paid. On and on it goes, and it can make it seem like the Christian life is mainly about, or even only about, keeping those rules. But it’s not, because the Christian life is not mainly a matter of behavior. Certainly, if you follow Jesus, then the Lord does care about how you behave. The Christian life is not less than behavior, but it involves more than behavior. Any mindset that says you can legislate your way through the Christian life is still conforming to the pattern of this world. When Paul says, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world,” he’s not talking just about behavior, but about how you think, how through your thought life you approach everything. He must mean that, because he sets the phrase “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” in apposition to “do not conform to the world.” If you follow Christ, then your behavior will change, but it won’t be because you are keeping the rules. It will be through thinking God’s thoughts after him. “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ …” 2 Corinthians 10:5. Now what is it about the world’s way of thinking that is so bad that Paul warns those who belong to Jesus not to be conformed to it? Martyn Lloyd-Jones puts it perfectly in one of his sermons that I read last week. He says that originally, when God first created man and woman, Adam and Eve, they thought perfectly. They thought rationally. They thought God’s thoughts after him. They could see the big picture in the universe, and live according to it. But then the Fall occurred – man ate the forbidden fruit. And this is what Lloyd-Jones says: “The whole trouble with humanity is that it has lost its true mind, it has become insane.” The world’s thinking is insane. So if you find yourself thinking about death, and specifically thinking about what will happen to you after you die, the world only says to you, “Hey, don’t think about that – it’s not healthy. That’s morbid. You need to focus on life and enjoying yourself and having fun. You’ll make yourself crazy if you think about death.” Now, given the irrefutable fact that death comes for all of us and no one in this world can even speculate what will happen to us beyond death, the only proper and fitting way to characterize that advice, that pattern of the world’s thinking, is insane. Of course you should think about death, of course you should wonder what will happen to you after death – what could be a more important topic?

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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Another way the world is insane in its thinking it when it comes to what will make us most happy and satisfied in this life. Now the world has thought differently when it comes to what will bring us satisfaction depending on which decade or century or place in the world we live, but currently the world says the way to happiness and fulfillment is through unlimited sexual expression. Twice already this year I’ve heard someone say this: “Sex is a fundamental human right.” You would have never heard that sixty years ago, even fifteen years ago. But today the world thinks that’s the path to happiness, and if you aren’t having lots of sex in any manner you see fit you are being denied your civil rights. If you aren’t allowed as a sixth grader to use to use the bathroom of your current gender identity, regardless of your biological gender, that’s a violation of your civil rights. If you don’t view Caitlyn Jenner as a woman, while that may not be a violation of her civil rights (and I use the pronoun “her” there out of respect, not agreement), it is at the very least evidence of your bigotry. But that is insane thinking, and as followers of Jesus we cannot conform to it. For most of us in a church in Oxford, Mississippi, admittedly, it’s easy to look at those examples I’ve just given and say, “Those are insane thoughts.” But if we are not careful we will not actually be renewed in our minds, but instead only adopt the thinking of conservative, Republican-voting non-believers. Because you can be culturally very conservative (like me), you can agree in principle with everything the Bible says about sex and death and heaven and hell, and still be insane in your thinking. Addison Leitch was a professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell up in Massachusetts, and one day two students came up to him and said, “Professor Leitch, we believe God is calling us to the mission field. But then we told our parents – and they blew us off. They said, ‘You’ve had a religious experience – how wonderful! But first you need to get some security: get a masters degree, then get a job and a couple of years of experience behind you, get some savings, and then you’ll have real security and then you can do whatever you want to do.’” And the students asked Dr. Leitch, “What do we tell our parents?” And Leitch said, “Go home and tell your parents that we all live on this ball of rock called earth, and it’s spinning around the sun at 67,000 m.p.h., and our solar system is spinning around the center of the Milky Way galaxy even faster than that. And one day a trapdoor is going to open under all our feet, and you are going to fall into the everlasting arms or nothing at all. And you think a masters degree will give you security?” At first, it sounds so reasonable – just get your masters degree and save some money. It sounds so sane. But when you look at it in the light of eternity, when you look at it in the light of how fragile life is and how no amount of money can ever bring you security in any ultimate sense – death can strike no matter how well-off you are – when you look at it in terms of how glorious God is and worthy of everything we could ever offer him, even those parents’ seemingly reasonable argument is absolutely insane.

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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Now, what is it, really, that is behind this kind of thinking that conforms to the world? It is our natural, fallen belief that God is the enemy. “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” Romans 8:7. And so our thinking is, therefore, corrupted. “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18 They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.” Ephesians 4:17-18 (NIV 1984). We all naturally think that if we factor God too much into our thinking, if we get too spiritual or too religious, we will wind up miserable because deep down God doesn’t like us. So we don’t want to think about death, but only how to enjoy this life, because if we start thinking about death and existence after death, we’ll have to think about how God wants us to live on earth we’ll certainly be miserable, because he doesn’t like us. We have to reject what God says about human sexuality, because there’s no way what he says about sex can never make me happy. We refuse to think about God in terms of what to do with our lives, because if we get too religious God will ship us off to a jungle somewhere, poor, alone, our lives ruined because God doesn’t like us. That’s the world’s way of thinking – and we must not conform to it. Instead, second, we must be transformed. Let’s re-read the first half of Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind …” And the Greek word translated as “transformed” is metamorphaoo, which of course we get our word “metamorphosis” from. The transformation signified by this word is a huge deal. A complete, powerful, lifealtering transformation is what Paul has in mind. To illustrate, I’ll show you the only two other times metamorphaoo occurs in the New Testament. One is in 2 Corinthians 3:18. There Paul talks about what happened to Moses on Mount Sinai when he received the law from God and came into close contact with his presence. The Bible says that, as a result, Moses’ face shined, it radiated the glory of God. Moses’ shining face understandably terrified the Israelites, so Moses covered it with a veil to calm them down. So Paul compares what happened to Moses to what happens to Christians ansd writes, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” The other instance can be found in Matthew 17, the famous account of the Transfiguration of Jesus. You remember the story: Peter, James, and John go up a mountain with Jesus, and in verse two we read this: “And he [Jesus] was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.” I love Mark’s little detail in his account: Jesus’ clothes became whiter than anyone on earth could bleach them. Don’t try this at home with Clorox; it won’t work. What had happened? For just a moment Jesus’ human nature is pulled back, and the glory of Jesus’ divine nature is revealed to the disciples.

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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Paul is telling us in Romans 12 that spiritually this kind of transformation, a spiritual transfiguration, can be ours through the renewal of our minds. But how can our minds be renewed? Two things must happen. Not one or the other, but both. First, the Holy Spirit must come into our lives and work from the inside-out. Friends, do you believe the gospel of Jesus Christ? Do you believe that you are a sinner? Do you as the old prayer book puts it, “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against God’s divine majesty, provoking most justly God’s wrath and indignation against us?” Is that true of you, and are you earnestly and genuinely sorry for your sins and want nothing more than to be rid of them? And do you believe that in Jesus Christ God has forgiven you for all those sins, and made you his child so that you can know and enjoy and love and be loved by and glorify God forever? Do you believe that gospel? If so, it’s because the Holy Spirit has come into your life and done a supernatural work in your soul by grace. Not because you’ve earned it, not because you’re so smart or so spiritual, but because God had mercy on you and gave you his Spirit, who broke your hard heart wide open, so that you could see your sin and hate it, and run to Christ for his salvation. If the Holy Spirit does not come into your life and work from the inside-out like that, you’ll never be transformed. You say, “How can I know that inside-our work happened to me?” The answer: when you believe and, more so, love the gospel of Jesus Christ. But that’s only one of the things that must happen. Second, if you want to find yourself transformed, the Holy Spirit must work on you from the outside-in. Note that Paul says “do not be conformed … but be transformed.” You know what that is? It’s a command! That means that some part of this transformation is under our control, it is within our ability to do, else Paul would not command it. Now Paul cannot command the inside-out part of transformation. The work of the Holy Spirit is a work of sovereign grace. But he can command that the second part, the outside-in part, which takes place when we come into contact with the Holy Spirit reading, memorizing, and meditating on the Scriptures. Ephesians 5:25-27: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” Now we read that and think the whole thing about an earthly marriage, but that’s only because we aren’t in the habit of reading this passage carefully. After the first four words (a command for husbands to love their wives), Paul is telling the church at Ephesus how they will be transformed. It’s through the repeated washing of the church with the word, with the Scriptures, with the Bible.

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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And, friends, that’s the only way transformation will ever happen among those who claim to follow Jesus – we must be washed, immersed, showered, inundated with Scripture. There is no substitute if you want metamorphosis. If all you ever consume is the world’s media – movies, news, sports, social media, if all you’re watching are shows like House of Cards and Catastrophe and Scandal and Big Bang Theory then of course you will be conformed to the world. I’m not picking on those shows or saying necessarily Christians cannot watch them. But if that’s all you consume, then of course you’ll be conformed to the world and think its thoughts after it. You must, rather, be washed with the Word. Now, this washing can take several forms: you can read the Bible for yourself, you can listen to sermons in person or online, you can read books, you can enroll in a seminary class and learn get the Word that way, you can do one of those inductive Bible studies with the workbooks where you have to do homework by hand. You don’t have to do them all – I don’t. I can’t stand the Bible studies where you have to write out the homework – I’m much too lazy for that. But are you doing something? Are you, friends, being worked on by the Holy Spirit, inside out and outside in? That’s how your mind is renewed, that’s how you think God’s thoughts after him, and that’s how transformation, a spiritual transfiguration, takes place. Now, third, the result of a renewed mind, of this transformation, is that we will prove God’s will. Let’s read all of verse 2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern [or you can translate that word as “approve” or “prove,” as the NIV and NASB do] what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” When Paul says here “the will of God,” he means God’s plans and purposes and what he allows to happen in the world. And the way we “discern,” “approve,” and “prove” God’s will can be understood in two ways: first, we can be so transformed by the renewing of our minds that we become incredibly wise. Today obviously is graduation Sunday at Ole Miss, and if you just graduated imagine that later today you meet someone who this fall will be a freshman at Ole Miss. And you say, “Oh, great – you’ll love Ole Miss,” but then this eighteen year old proceeds to tell you his plans: what he’s going to major in and what Greek organization he’s going to be a part of and where he’s going to live after he graduates, and how he and his girlfriend are going to get married before they start graduate school. You hear all that and what do you do? You try not to laugh in the kid’s face, because you know there’s no way things are going to work out precisely as he has planned. You think, “Oh, this kid doesn’t know anything yet. He has so much to learn.” And of course that’s how all of us who have been out of college for twenty years feel about you when you talk about your plans. But here’s the thing: if you are washed totally in the Word, if your mind has been thoroughly renewed, then while you’ll never be able to plan out your life years down the road, it is possible that you get to the point where almost instinctively you know what God’s will for you in each and every situation you face – what the right thing to do the

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next time you must do something. You can know how to act and react in virtually every circumstance. Generally, the older someone is the wiser they are, because they have more life experience. But if you have a thoroughly renewed mind you can skip ahead of even those much older than you, with much more experience than you. “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. 100 I understand more than the aged, for I keep your precepts.” Psalm 119:99-100. The renewed mind means wisdom. Second, and just as importantly, proving God’s will means that no matter what happens you always trust God. You will trust, even in times of pain and suffering and sorrow, that God’s will is, as verse two puts it, always “good and acceptable [or “pleasing,” as the NIV has it] and perfect.” So God’s will is good – you no longer think that God is out to get you, you no longer think he’s out to make you miserable, but you know that he is good and his will is for good. But it’s not just that it’s good, it’s pleasing. A trip to the dentist for a root canal is good, but it’s not pleasing. The promise here though is that through the renewed mind God’s will becomes pleasing to you. You rejoice in God’s will for your life and the lives of those around you. And finally, you see that it’s perfect. You would not change a thing. You’re like Joseph in the book of Genesis, when he’s second in command of Egypt, and God has used him to save many, many lives through a famine, and he’s standing before his brothers, the same brothers who sold him into slavery twenty years earlier, and he can say, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Genesis 50:20. God always means it for good, and so Joseph can say, “I wouldn’t change a thing.” The other day I listened to the testimony of a woman who is now about forty years old. She grew up in Alabama and lived in Mississippi for a short while, and she is a Christian. She married her college sweetheart three days after graduation, he was Mr. Everything in college and had a great job as a drug rep, but after three years of marriage he had an aneurism while playing a pickup game of basketball, and in the fall that resulted his spinal cord was severed and he died instantly. Of course, she was devastated, but she was young and after a few years she married again. This time she married an Air Force pilot instructor. And they used to joke about how he had to be absolutely safe, no way anything could happen to him because there’s no way God would make her become a widow a second time. But after four years of marriage, and two children, he died along with one of his students in a plane crash just after takeoff at Columbus Air Force Base. And she said that when she got home and met the chaplain and the wing commander, a couple of things happened: first, she said a switch flipped in her heart and she felt herself wrapped up in the shelter of God’s love; she felt his wings around her. Second, Genesis 50:20 came to

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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mind, and she knew that no matter how much pain she and her kids were about to go through, God would mean it for good. I’m hearing this testimony some five or six years after the death of her second husband, and she says that as crazy as it sounds she would not change a thing. God’s will has been tested and proven and she has indeed seen that it’s perfect, because God has worked and she his glory and lives have been changed in ways that could never have happened any other way. And now she’s married a third time, but she does not joke with this husband about his safety. Can you say that about God’s will? “I wouldn't change a thing”? Can you sing with the hymnwriter: “Whatever my God ordains is right, He never will deceive me; He leads me by the proper path, I know He will not leave me; I take, content, what he hath sent … sweet comfort shall yet fill my heart, and pain and sorrow will depart.” Can you say that? Some might say, “That’s fatalism.” No, it’s not, because fate is not in control. A personal God who loves you so much that he sent his son to die for you and is absolutely determined to bring about your good is directing this process, and he will not fail. Friends, what if you could live your life free from worry about how things will turn out because you don’t just know that everything will be ok, but things will in fact wind up far better than you can even dream? You can, if you will be transformed by the renewing of your minds. “I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.” Psalm 119:32 (NIV 1984). That’s the freedom that comes from proving God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will. May it be true of us. Amen.

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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