Pastor Michael Dirrim

Romans 12 and the Call to Living Sacrifice

Pretty heavy amount of doctrine that we've read through. Significant turn now as he begins to say why all of this matters. It's the thus that I talked about this morning. Therefore, I urge you brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

For through the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.

For just as we have many members in one body, and all the members do not have the same function, so we who are many are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly.

If prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith, if service, in his serving, or he who exhorts in his exhortation, he who gives with liberality, he who leads with diligence, he who shows mercy with cheerfulness.

Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Give preference to one another in honor, not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality.

There's a lot of punchy commands, exhortations there, but as you back up, before you get to the list, remember God has allotted to each a measure of faith. God has given to us this faith that we have in Christ.

He has given us these gifts according to the grace given to us. He's given us faith. He's given us grace so that all of this is made possible by his power, by his strength. We may do these things in variety and in abundance for each other.

Well let love be without hypocrisy. So let's do that right now. Let's spend some time together in fellowship. Ten times in a row, that may seem silly, but just read it out loud. You'll do triple work.

Reading it with your eyes, you are cogitating it to say it out loud, and your ears hear.

It.

That's three times the impact with the same amount of effort. Just read it out loud to yourself over and over and over again, and then close your Bible and see if you can do it. You could peek, but do it ten times from memory, and the next day do it again, and do it again.

It takes hardly any time at all, and all of a sudden you're memorizing Scripture. Before we go to Genesis 4, does anybody have any questions from their Bible study, or maybe a question maybe they have from an encounter they've had with someone this last week?

Yes, Miss Loretta.

Jephthah’s Vow, Human Sacrifice, and God’s Sovereign Purposes

Mm-hmm.

It should. If it doesn't bother you, something's wrong with you. It's designed to be disturbing on so many different levels. So, Jephthah has all manner of assurance, all reason to be confident that he will be able to win the battle.

He is in the same vein as Gideon in verse 29 of chapter 11. Now, the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah so that he passed through Gilead and Manasseh. He passed through Mitzvah of Gilead, from Mitzvah of Gilead he went on to the sons of Ammon.

And all that passing through, what he's doing in the middle of it is he's recruiting an.

Army.

Okay, this is exactly what Gideon did. The Spirit of the Lord came upon him and he went through and he gathered all these people.

For battle.

We'll hear similar stories about whoever God anoints to do his will. But then Jephthah makes a vow. And when we look at the ways in which he makes the vow, it is rash. Whatever comes out of the doors of my house.

Now, the bottom floor, usually a couple of floors if you were a person of substance. But on the bottom floor, animals and people live together on the bottom floor of the house. Okay, and it was the upper floor where only people were allowed.

So, probably in his mind, he's thinking whatever comes out. You know, if it's a goat, if it's a ram or whatever. Okay, well, when he comes back from victory, his one and only child, his daughter, comes out of the house.

And you have to, it's hard to understand, but if you've been reading all of Judges up to this point, and reading it very, very closely, you will have discovered that by this point, and there are all sorts of indicators, the people of Israel, the tribes of Israel, have become so paganized, so canonized, that human sacrifice is on the table.

It's an option. This is how far gone they are from where they ought to be. Through the different cycles of leaving the one true God, Yahweh. And so, Jephthah understands that there is the Lord, he understands that there is God, and yet he is not immune from the canonizing effects of the compromises that have been generationally instilled in the life of Israel.

So, it was the understanding of the church throughout the generations, throughout the centuries, that Jephthah did indeed sacrifice his daughter as a human sacrifice. It was later on that other interpreters began to find a way to soften it, and come up with a different option.

But that's the newer reading, and I don't trust it. I think it was as bad as all that. You know, the tendency is, we do find that God uses these very, very fallen men to accomplish his will, and it really is the story of Judges.

Despite all of the wickedness and depravity and brokenness of Israel, even this would not thwart God's plan to bring about the Savior of the world through this people. They came so close to simply dissolving into absolute chaos and wickedness and becoming just totally lost and intermingled with the Canaanites, came so close to losing the lineage of the Messiah.

But God won't let that happen, right? So God is in charge, he's sovereign, and despite all the brokenness and the mess, God is triumphant throughout the book of Judges. So we are meant to be disturbed by it.

It's not meant to sit well with us at all. So that's the right instinct to have. See, Jephthah thought God would. That's the problem. When he doesn't understand that God wouldn't, that's how bad things are in the book of Judges.

Yeah, good question. Anything else in the book of Ezra? So let's go take a look at that. Of course, Ezra was a time where they were trying to reestablish what was lost, having been in exile in Babylon for 70 years.

Okay, so let's take a look at the New Moon Festival. Is that somewhere near the middle of the book?

Okay.

I don't actually know the distinctiveness of the New Moon Festival. I do know that in Ezra, the main theme is this idea of returning back to Jerusalem, of reestablishing life as the people of God in this city.

The need to rebuild the temple is symbolic and important for them. Notice that Ezra comes before Nehemiah. They go back and rebuild the temple before they build the walls. Yeah, this is total reverse from the logic of the ancient Near East.

You build the walls first.

Make sure you're safe.

Then you can worry about religion and worshiping a god. No, they build the temple first. It's about reestablishing the faithfulness of the people to worship the one God, the one true God, only one God.

He is the strong, almighty, sovereign God who will protect them from all of the threats that may arise in a tumultuous empire such as Persia. The locals don't like them. Leadership changes at the top.

There's all this ebb and flow in the world. But the point is, will they be faithful to God? And so the New Moon Festival, along with the Passover, along with the rites of circumcision and everything else, as you read about that in Ezra and the emphasis placed on the religious life of Israel coming back to life amongst his people, the emphasis is they're establishing the worship of God as the center of their life.

It hasn't been that way, and they're reestablishing that, and they are going to be faithful to God. Now, that's why you get to the end of Ezra, and they have begun to intermarry with the Canaanites again.

Think of judges.

Go back to judges.

This is exactly what God said, do not do.

And it brought all sorts of trouble, and Ezra finds that they're doing it again, which means idolatry, which means just like Solomon bringing all these foreign wives into his palace brought all of these gods into the land.

And this is why Ezra is so upset with the people, because Ezra is really about returning to the faithfulness that they're supposed to have to the one true God. I think the New Moon Festival is going to be part of that theme of returning to the feast, returning to the religious life that God had ordained.

Someone at the back table?

Okay.

Yeah.

Taking Up the Cross, Suffering, and Union with Christ

Well, it's an interesting thing about the language of taking up the cross. This is a symbol of suffering, but it's suffering that terminates in death, it's execution. And that's the symbol of the cross for everyone who lived in Jesus' time, for everyone living in the New Testament time.

They were still using crucifixion as a means of executing rabble rousers, threats to the.

State.

Many Christians were crucified as a form of persecution. So the cross was a horrific symbol. We don't actually see the cross being used in Christian symbology until 6th century AD. When you find the cross used in symbology in the church, the early church period, it dates back to pretty close to the time after the apostles had just died.

And there's a picture of a cross with a man with the head of a donkey on the cross and someone bowing down before it. And it says, Alexa Minos worships his God. It's graffiti. It's mocking Christianity.

But we have to understand the cross was a horrific symbol. It was not a celebrated image for the early church. When we deal with the cross, we're dealing with terrible suffering that terminates in death by way of execution.

When Jesus says, take up your cross and follow me, he is saying to die. You're taking up the cross, willing to go to whatever lengths to die. As Paul would say, the old man must die, the new man may live.

What's the connection to our suffering today? One of the things that perhaps should have been clearer this morning is that when we take up our crosses to follow Jesus, we actually die to any right we have to use our suffering for ourselves.

In a very interesting way, taking up our cross means I deny myself the right to use my suffering for my own gain. I will not turn my suffering into an excuse to hide myself from responsibility. I will not use my suffering as a shield to keep me from helping others.

I will not use my suffering as a boast to say I've been through more than all of you all, so get off my back. When you take up the cross to follow Christ, now your sufferings are in Christ. It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.

So if I suffer, my sufferings are sharing with Christ, and it's not about me anymore. It's not about me anymore. The sufferings that I have are now about Christ. They do impact me. They do change me. They are a challenge.

They affect me. But they're not about me anymore. They're about Christ. If I die to myself and live to Christ, then even my sufferings are about Christ. My blessings are about Christ. My life decisions are about Christ.

You see?

So I think that's, people talk about a cross to bear. I don't know if that's, I don't know how accurate that is if we use that expression. I don't know. Well, and there's suffering because of sin, the indirect effects of sin that impact everybody, because of the curse, because of the fall.

Peter also identifies a kind of suffering for doing wrong. If you're rude and obnoxious to your neighbors and they persecute you, you're not really getting persecuted. If they retaliate against you, it's not because you're a Christian.

It's because you're obnoxious. And there are some people that are really good at generating persecution. There are people who are obnoxious and uncaring and unloving in the name of Jesus. And they'll go out there and make a scene, and then people get upset with them and they're like, I'm just being persecuted.

No, Peter says you're suffering because you're obnoxious. And then Peter goes on to say there's a suffering that is suffering for Christ, that if you love Jesus. And Paul says all who desire to live godly will suffer persecution.

So there is a suffering that comes precisely because we follow Jesus. If we are of the seed of the woman, there is enmity between the seed, capital S, and the seed of the serpent. There's enmity. There's opposition.

There is war. Therefore, if we're living for Christ, there's going to be persecution. There's going to be animosity and enmity. That's going to happen. But in any case, I think what Paul says in Philippians 3 is, I think, an explanation of more of what Jesus was saying when he said, take up your cross and follow me.

Paul puts it this way in Philippians 3 .7. Whatever things were gained to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. In other words, I've taken up my cross. I've died to that old self boasting in my works and my status.

More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. What I used to think of as life, I now think of as death. And when I look to my Savior, this is life.

This is life. For whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish, which is a polite way of talking about dung, so that I may gain Christ and may be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.

It is, as Luther said, an alien righteousness. It is a righteousness outside of ourselves, foreign to ourselves, a righteousness that we have not created, but it is the righteousness of God given to us, imputed to us by faith.

And he continues, that I may know him, that I may know the power of his resurrection, and that I may know the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

The fellowship of his sufferings. Paul would say elsewhere that I may fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, not in the redemptive offering up of himself, but in the fact that there is tribulations yet to be completed, that there is more suffering for Christ in his body on the earth, and these have not yet been filled up.

There is a very robust theme of suffering as Christians throughout the scriptures. As Americans, we're not really great at that. I was reading A Call to Joy and Pain by Ahith Fernando. It's an excellent little book written by a man who has done a lot of ministry in Sri Lanka in the middle of the Civil War, and that there is a much more highly developed insight into suffering, sharing in the sufferings of Christ among Christians who live in these difficult places.

One of the blind spots that we have as Americans is that we're not really forced into thinking about those things as often and at the same level. We're just not, and therefore we have a blind spot, and we should listen to our brothers and sisters in Christ in those other contexts as they share from the scriptures what they have learned by fire when it comes to suffering.

So yes, there's suffering because of the curse that is in general, but for the Christian, if we take up the cross, then all that suffering now is about Jesus, and God uses that for our sanctification, and there's suffering we have because we are following Christ's persecution.

And Paul says ultimately this is about being in the fellowship of his sufferings. My sufferings are his sufferings as his sufferings are my sufferings because we're united to Christ. It's a starting point at least to get away from talking about our personal cross to bear.

The Gospel as the Punchline to Life’s Setup

Well to quote a very non-theologian, Michael Jr. is a Christian comedian, talks about the science of humor in terms of the setup and the punchline, and he talks about humor, the science of humor is the setup, you're moving everybody this direction, and then the part that makes you laugh is then when you go off in another direction that just, you weren't, you know, it's absurdity and it makes you laugh.

And so in his way of talking to folks, he talks about what's your setup, meaning what have you been through, what has God brought you through in your life, what are the things that he has taught you, and all of that is used for the punchline.

And the punchline for Christians is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so everything that happens to us in God's sovereign providence, as we interpret it through scripture, is our setup. All of it. Whatever it is that's happening.

And we use that setup as we engage with folks for the express purpose of the punchline. He was giving a TEDx talk, I forget where it was, but anyway, so he started off the thing by doing a setup for a joke, and then he kind of, he did the whole setup and then kind of went off to other things, and everyone's sitting there waiting for the punchline that never comes till the end of the talk, and he says, how many out there are you still thinking about this first story, and everyone's like raising their hand, like yeah, what's supposed to, he's like, see, that's your life.

If you're all about the setup, setup, setup, setup, setup, and only thinking about that, only thinking about your situation, and you never know your punchline. Right? It's incomplete.

It's incomplete.

So I thought that's a pretty good illustration. I think it's because they're satanic. Good questions. That's something that I was thinking about when I was talking with Junior, who's, Miss Clara lives right behind us, please pray for Miss Clara, I promised her that we would.

She's elderly, lots of health problems, hard to get around. I think she has some sort of religious background, but it's unclear. Her nephew was over there helping her as she was having some surgeries, and she keeps kind of looking after her.

His name was Junior. So I was talking about Junior earlier, but it just occurred to me as I was talking with Junior, and we're just sharing a little bit about our background and our lives together, that the setup was there for the punchline.

Right? We're talking about life. We're just talking about life.

Right?

He's talking about his life, I'm talking about my life. His life, he has his setup, I have my setup, but he has no punchline. He has no answer. He has no significance or meaning ultimately for it. But I do.

So I need to share that with him before we leave, before we're done. Otherwise, we're just kind of left wondering about, well, what was the point of that? You know, what was the significance of that? So there's a lot of different ways to evangelize, and I'm grateful for things like Way of the Master and the Roman Road and EE and those kinds of things that are very, very helpful.

But one way, one simple way to evangelize is simply to talk about your life with someone. As you have reflected by the grace of God in the Scriptures and thought about what God has done in your life, to share with somebody from your life, your own personal testimony, the story that you know best, and then follow up with that punchline about what this is actually all about.

So I've got really great stuff about Genesis 4, so come back next week. About Lamech. Everybody knows about Lamech, right? Lamech and Enoch. There's two guys named Enoch and two guys named Lamech in Genesis 4 and 5.

So read about it, and we'll talk about it next week, okay? Let's close by singing the doxology.