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Don Filcek; Romans 12:1-2 Is This Acceptable?
Of the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack preaches from his series in the Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in.
Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. As Dave said, I'm Don Filsack, I'm the lead pastor here. And I'm really glad that we have the opportunity to gather together to grow in faith. I hope that's one of the reasons, really one of the primary reasons that you're here sitting in a seat this morning is because you want to grow in your faith.
You wanna trust God more, you wanna take in his word more. And so, just to clarify something that I think most of us know, but it's good to keep in front of us, and that's our name is a little bit strange.
I get that out in the community. I'm a pastor, what church do you pastor?
I pastor Recast Church.
I've had people actually make the mistake and say, Re-cash Church? I'm like, no, it's not all about money. So the name is a little bit different,.
But it's an acronym for our core values.
It is for replication, community, authenticity, simplicity, and truth. And the one that holds them all together, I like to really keep in front of us, is the conviction that God has revealed his capital T absolute truth to us through the holy scriptures.
And that if we study those and we really understand what they're saying to us, then they have the right to call the shots in our lives. We believe that this book that we study together as we gather together, and that we ought to be studying on our own throughout the week, that this book is the very revelation of our God.
And what it says then is powerful when we believe it and we go out and we live our lives according to what we find in it. And so that's what we're all about here. And my hope and prayer every Sunday is for more than just a good message.
I'd like it to be a good message, but I hope it's more than that. I'm praying for more than education, although I certainly include points in parts of the message that are educational. But the goal of our gathering is not to make your heads more full of knowledge so that you can win Bible trivia.
That's not the purpose. My prayer for us each week, all throughout the process of preparing a sermon to speak to you, and really that God would speak to me, is a prayer for deep conviction for us. That we would go out and live the gospel that we encounter in the scriptures in our day-to-day lives.
And more importantly, that we'd walk with God according to the truth. Living according to the way that he is and the way that he has revealed we are. And our text this morning is gonna get right down to the heart of how we are supposed to be living for God.
We are looking at a very short, very well-known, and very powerful passage. My hunch is that some of you in this room have even memorized this short passage. But the reality is, I point out that this is a unique passage and I wanna also say that all scripture is powerful.
But there are some passages that pack a punch in terms of content. They're concise, they're all together in one small spot. And very few passages are as clear and concise about the way that those who have received God's mercy ought to now live than Romans chapter 12, verses one and two.
You see, what's happening here is that we're looking at a hinge this morning. We're looking at a hinge between what we ought to believe and how we ought to live, and the way that those two things come together, and so it's a vital passage.
A very, very important, impactful passage here, and what it even functions, the way that it functions in the book of Romans. You see, we've spent the last umpteen, really, since the beginning of the year, going through the book of Romans, and Paul has spent 11 chapters of Romans explaining the good news, that we can receive a righteousness from God.
Did you hear that?
That we can receive a righteousness that's given to us from God as a gift through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. A righteousness that we can't earn, but a righteousness that is freely available to anybody who would come to him and trust in the sacrifice that his son has made on our behalf, and I just want to point out that it's not that this hinge, all of a sudden, is a shift in topics.
Oh, this is how you're saved. Now let's talk about how to live. It's not that he's shifting topics. Instead, the subject remains the same all throughout the book of Romans. It's the same subject, but he's now interested in explaining the other side of it, and that is how the gospel impacts our lives now that we believe it.
It isn't like Paul is done with the gospel and is now moving on to practical matters. He has proclaimed what we ought to believe in 11 chapters, and now he will spend the remainder of the book explaining the way that that, what we should believe, changes us.
And let me just encourage you, therefore, what I'm trying to say here at the outset before we read the passaging, and then the band comes up to lead us in worship, is don't graduate from the gospel. Don't graduate from the gospel.
Don't get over, don't get past the gospel. The gospel is the, I'm a one-trick pony here. All I have to offer to the world is the gospel. All I have to offer you that is of value is the good news that Jesus came to do it for you, and now has a claim on your life through grace.
Don't graduate from the gospel. The mercy of God given to us at the cross of Jesus Christ is everything, it is everything, everything in the Christian life. Everything that comes from chapters 12 through 16 of the book of Romans that we're looking at forward, it looks like a lot of rules, it looks like a lot of way to live, and it is indeed important, but it all begins with the therefore in our text.
Therefore, a word that tells you that what came before matters to what we're talking about now. Therefore, in light of his amazing, glorious, majestic mercy, now Paul will appeal to us to live a life of living sacrifices.
So open your Bibles if you're not already there to Romans chapter 12, verses one and two. It's gonna be a shorter passage, but let's jump in and navigate in your device, grab your own Bible or the Bible that's under the seat in front of you if you don't have one.
It's gonna be a short, like I said, it's a short read, but again, recast as I say every Sunday. This is God's word to us. The most valuable thing we do in the gathering of God's people is hear from him, and that's what we're about to do when we hear the words of God.
Romans 12, one and two. I appeal to you. 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.
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.
Let's pray.
Father, I thank you so much for your word that is so clear all throughout the New Testament, so clear that it has a claim on our lives, that it has a claim on the pathway, the way that we are saved through the gospel and through the good news, that Paul spent so much time in the book of Romans going over from so many different angles the gospel, the good news by which we are saved, the way that we are given a righteousness and that you've made a way for us, that your mercies have flowed down, yes, even to us.
And so, Father, I pray that now in light of those amazing and glorious and immaculate mercies that we've been studying for weeks and months, Father, that now you would turn the direction over toward our thoughts about how we now live in you.
And Father, that today we would just contemplate and consider this idea that even our worship and the time that we spend singing songs to you would be rendered as living sacrifices to you. We are living, but we are indeed seeking to put our own selves to death and allow you to reign and rule in and through us.
And so, Father, I pray that that would be a reality. Even in this worship time that we have now, Father, speak to us and meet everybody where they're at. I know that some people are distracted. Some people are coming from very difficult weeks.
Some people are coming from high points this week. And so, Father, I pray that you would remove all of those distractions and help us to focus on you.
In Jesus' name.
You can go ahead and be seated, but I do ask if you could do me a favor and please reopen your Bibles or your Bible app or whatever you use to navigate to the Bible to Romans 12, one and two. We read that earlier, but you may have lost your place and it's good to have that in front of you so that you can reference it and see that the things that I'm saying are, I'm drawing from that text and we're gonna be working through it.
But if at any time during the message you need to get more coffee or juice or donuts while supplies last, if you need to use the restroom, they're out the barn doors down the hallway on the left-hand side.
You're not gonna distract me, but again, our goal is for the remainder of our time to keep our focus on God's word and what he has to say to us. I wanna start off by saying I think there's two types of people in this room.
There are those who like to be categorized and those who don't, just kidding. Really, there's two types of people in this room, though, and some of you love making plans. Some of you love making plans even if you're not gonna do anything with them.
You just like to plan things. How many of you, raise your hand if you're a planner. You like to sit down and you like to plan things out in advance. You spend time, you're probably likely the kind of person who spends time in your head and it's likely that you maybe struggle a bit to put everything that you plan into practice.
But some of you are like the kind of people.
That tend to be a little bit more like me.
Why are we sitting around talking about this? We should go do something. Let's go do something.
How many of you are doers?
You're just like, can we just do something about it? Why are we sitting around talking about it? Well, the cool thing is, the funny thing is, even if you don't know what the goal is, sometimes you're just going out and doing stuff, right?
Like, we know that, but fortunately, the scripture brings balance here to both sides in a sense. Paul has taken a lot of time to clarify the foundation for doing, the foundation for the life change that he is calling us all to.
Notice, though, that he's been very concerned that we get right belief ahead of right living. If we skip everything that came before chapter 12 and we just dive into the book at chapter 12, we would get something very fundamental wrong.
The gospel. We would miss the good news if we jumped in at chapter 12 and we just went and began to apply these things. Okay, I guess I just have to go out and live like a living sacrifice. I guess I just have to go out and renew my own mind.
I have to work to try to not be conformed to this world, and we would miss the bulk of the message, chapters one through 11. We would make no, we would start off with confusion in verse one, because verse one says, by the mercies of God, go do these things.
What mercies? If we hadn't read what came before, what mercies?
Well, certainly he's talking about all.
Of the amazing and glorious mercies that came in the preceding 11 chapters. And so I set the text up this way because it's so important that we check in on what we believe, that we understand the foundations, and that we come in at the foundation level before we begin the process of remodeling.
Imagine a builder that takes on a project to remodel a house. He's never been in the basement, he's never seen the foundation, but he jumps in on day one, removing old cabinets and installing new ones.
He puts tens of thousands of dollars into new fixtures, new molding, new kitchen, new bathrooms, new flooring. But the foundation, he finds later, is completely busted. The house is cracked and is settling.
Further, there's a black mold issue and the basement is underwater with standing water in it. He never went down there to check the foundation first. He didn't think to test it for mold. He never even set foot down there.
He just set out to get busy making the changes that he thought the house needed. That is like a man or a woman who comes to chapter 12, who comes to a life of reform, who comes to a life of change without coming through the gospel.
A person who doesn't have the right foundation, but is ready to get to work. That's not the good news. And so with that analogy in mind, ask yourself a fundamental question. I think this is so vital before we jump into everything that's gonna come after this, because we've been looking in this entire scope, we've been following an outline that I received in Bible college, an outline for the book of Romans is discussion on sin, that moves into a discussion on salvation, that moves into a discussion of sanctification, that is the way that we live, that then moves into a discussion of God's sovereignty, and now we're getting into that very last section of the book of Romans, starting in chapter 12, of service.
How do we now serve God in light of this good news? And so ask yourself, we're arriving here at chapter 12, verse one,.
Have I come through that pattern?
Have I recognized my sin? Have my feet been set on a pathway of, have I understood the gospel and am I saved? That therefore now I'm on a pathway of sanctification so that I can serve God with a pure foundation, with a pure heart?
How have you, this is a question for all of us, how have you arrived at chapter 12, verse one? Where are you at in your own heart? Have you come to him by his mercies? That's what we're talking about here in chapter 12, verse one, by the mercies of God, therefore by the mercies of God go and do something.
And mercy is a loaded word. Mercy is a very important word. Mercy is not synonymous with grace. Grace is a gift to you, but mercy implies a position of guilt. You did deserve something.
What did you deserve?
Eternal punishment.
Mercy means that you know that you have received something.
That you did not deserve.
You deserved a bad result. And in all of our cases, according to scripture, we all deserved a really, really bad result, like eternal condemnation, but instead we have been given good, and not just good, but something really, really good, forgiveness and eternal life through Jesus Christ.
And so Paul is gonna begin our text, by the way, every word in this just drips, I would encourage you, by the way, I'm not gonna be able to scratch the surface.
Of the depth of this text this morning.
It's two verses, I almost broke it into two sermons, a sermon on one and a sermon on two, because there's so much here, and I would encourage you maybe to just go back and even look at it this next week, since it's such a short passage, look at it this next week word by word.
Even the first word is freighted, I.
Who's I?
Paul.
Who's Paul?
How did he come into the faith? And you could just spend a lot of time.
Looking at that one word, I,.
But then it goes on to appeal. Appeal, a really interesting word. There's so much depth, and right from the beginning, the word appeal falls between, semantically, in terms of the word, it falls between a request and a command.
I can be like, hey, can you come over next Friday?
That's a request.
You can say yes or no to that. But there's a difference between saying, hey, can you come over next Friday, and say, man, I really would love for you to come over next Friday.
Could you please? Pretty please, I really need a favor,.
And I really need some help, and there's an urging and an appeal that comes in there. Are you seeing the difference? But it's not a command. You must come over next Friday. It's shy of that, right? It's not a command.
So there's something that's going on here, even in the way that Paul uses the word, I'm appealing to you. I'm urging you. So there's just a lot of depth to this. I'd encourage you to go through it this next week, and highlight some of the things that stick out to you, even as I'm gonna do that this morning for us, and it's not gonna hit the whole thing.
We're not gonna be able to take in all the depth of this this morning. But Paul falls short here of issuing a command. Instead, he is urging us to change our behavior because of the mercies of God. You see, he has no interest in us just obeying verses one and two because Paul told us to.
He doesn't want that to motivate you. He doesn't want you to present yourself as a living sacrifice to God because Paul said so, so I guess I have to do this. He doesn't want you to be motivated like that.
Instead, what he's calling for,.
A pleading, an urging,.
Because he wants us to willingly, willingly present ourselves. He wants us to willingly shun conformity to this world. He wants us to willingly have renewed minds and be committed to the process of a renewed mind because, not because Paul said so, but because of God's great mercies toward you and me.
He's issuing an appeal based on nothing less than the gospel itself. Because you have been so loved, because you have been bought by the blood of Jesus, because God turned your destiny from eternal punishment to eternal life, now live this way because you know how much he loves you.
You know how much he's given to you. And further, by the word brother, it's just very clear in the text that Paul is appealing to the church here. He uses the word brother there in reference to the real common term that was used in the ancient world for brothers and sisters in Christ.
And what he wants us to do as the first step in this remodeling job of our lives is now that we have established that our foundation is the glorious good news of mercy through faith in God and faith in his son Jesus, the first step then is to offer our bodies.
As living sacrifices.
Presenting ourselves to God is a willful choice. The first step, the issue, the thing that he's urging us to do is to present, to give. To give ourselves to God, that's a willful choice. Nobody can do that for you.
Nobody can present you. Nobody else can offer up your hands and feet to God. Nobody can offer your eyes and ears to the Almighty. No one can give your mind and your heart to God. Only you can do that.
And it certainly requires an act of the will to do this. But the way this ties in with the mercies of God is more direct than we might first notice at the first reading of this text. Because the very nature of the gospel explicitly states that we were purchased by the blood of Christ.
You're not giving him a gift when you give yourself to him. You're giving him what he bought.
You ever thought about it that way?
When you yield yourself up to God day in and day out, you're giving him what he purchased. To present ourselves to God as a living sacrifice is only really to give God what he already owns by the purchase of his son.
And you've come into it by faith. Earlier in Romans chapter seven, Paul wrote this. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another.
So that you may belong to another.
You belong to somebody else. And going on with the quote from Romans seven. To him who, belong to another. To him who has been raised from the dead.
Who is that? Church, who is that?
Jesus Christ, absolutely. The one who is, who do you belong to? That didn't sound like you were that emphatic about it. Who do you belong to?
We belong to Jesus.
We are his. Because he bought us with his blood.
We belong to another.
To him who has been raised from the dead. In order that, here's the reason you belong to Jesus. In order that we may bear fruit for God. That's what Romans seven four said. We belong to another so that we may bear fruit to the very son of God.
And so we are to present our bodies as God's, as living sacrifices. We're to present ourselves to him. And Paul uses the word body here with intention. He could have said present yourself, present all of yourself, present.
But he uses the word body. That's the Greek word there. Different translations translate it differently. It is a very physical and earthy word, body. And I've heard people, somebody told me this week that they heard a message on this and the whole message was centered on tattoos.
I was like how do you, there's a little bit more depth.
To this than just talking about tattoos or something like that. He's not just talking about the external or the body or render your hairstyle unto God or something weird like that. There's something more that's going on here.
He uses the word body intentionally. And after a lot of study this week, I'm convinced that he uses the word body as a way of placing the focus of our offering day by day, moment by moment, offering our bodies.
It's that which interacts with the world around us. The way that we interact with the world around us. Our body, you think about it, it's logical. I don't know if you think about it this way. Your body is your only interface with the world.
It's the only way in which the world experiences you. It's the only way in which you experience the world. It's our interface. Hands that serve the poor can also be balled up into a fist to strike a spouse.
Feet that rush to the need of a friend in crisis can also rush into a strip club. The very same tongues that praise God can be used to curse that jerk that cut you off in traffic, maybe even this morning.
The very brain that is responsible for outbursts of joy and gladness can produce raging, emotional outbursts that strike the fear in the hearts of those we love. Our bodies are tied to everything we have ever done.
And in this way, God is saying, render up your way in this world to me. Sacrifice that to me. All of it. The way you interact with everybody that you interact with. The way that you interact with everything you interact with.
Let that be worship to me. Let that be offered up. Like a sacrifice, a pleasing aroma to the one who bought you. So in calling us to present our bodies to God, the body is saying, take everything you do and offer it up as a sacrifice to God.
What we speak, where we go, how we work, our entertainment, our wealth, our all given to God in worship. So don't for a minute think that Paul, by using the word body, is segregating the life of the body from the mind and the heart or some immaterial part.
He's talking about it all. All of it. Not just the way you treat this body, not how often you shower or whether or not you have tattoos or whether you pierce things or don't pierce things. None of that business.
I mean, at the end of the day, all of that, of course, has to be brought. I mean, everything that we do. All of it has to be brought somehow into an understanding of who God is and what can and can't be offered into worship.
And that's gonna be the part of the next verse about not conforming to this world but being transformed by the renewing of our minds and understanding what that is implying for us. In that next verse, he's gonna get more into the remodeling instructions for us that clarify what this sacrifice looks like.
But so much is written about the very creative phrase, living sacrifices. How many of you have heard a message or read a book or something about this text? It's a pretty common thing and it's a pretty common text.
And I heard things, I think it might be Max Lucado who said something about the problem with living sacrifices is they keep crawling off the altar. How many of you ever heard that phrase? And I think it's kind of funny and it's cliche.
Kind of heads a little bit in the wrong direction. But the interesting thing is that he uses the word living sacrifice and there's something intentional here. This is a new twist on an old theme. And here's the problem with us today.
It's not our fault. But how many of you ever seen a literal bloody animal sacrifice? A couple people, maybe in Indonesia. Okay, I expected nobody but I got a couple. So we don't experience that, do we?
It's not a common part of your upbringing. But the interesting thing is in that time and in that era to who Paul was originally writing to, everyone had. Whether you were a Jew who had experienced that and studied that and knew that from your childhood or whether you were a Gentile who had watched people sacrifice to Zeus and to Athena and to all the gods and goddesses of their, everybody.
It was the way of worship in their ancient mind. And so when he says the phrase living sacrifice, that's like, that's radical. A living sacrifice, what could he, I mean that would grab attention. That's something that's speaking directly into their culture that's strange.
Making every moment of our days a yielding unto God. And I suggest to you that that very concept of living sacrifice, moment by moment, day by day, yielding unto God and his will and his desire, that's missing from our contemporary understanding of spirituality.
And increasingly going away at a rapid pace. You see what's happening in the church at large is the thought that God is here for our own self-fulfillment, that at the end of the day he is here to make our lives happy, to make us wealthy, to make us healthy, to give us good things.
But God is appealing to us here to live differently. Live a different life than what comes naturally to you. God is not here to fulfill your natural urges and desires. Live a life as owned by the almighty God.
Live a life as an offering of thanks for what he has done for you, for the great mercies he has bestowed on you. And I would suggest to you,.
How many of you would agree with me,.
This is a pretty heavy topic, this is a tough thing. Moment by moment, day by day, trying to determine what is and isn't sin and trying to walk the right path, and let alone the gray areas, right? I want to make sure that you understand, when we're talking about rendering your life as a sacrifice, we're talking about cutting off sin, we're not talking about all the specifics of the gray area, like God's got a college I need to go to, and if I don't go find that college I'm in trouble, or God's got somebody for me to marry, and if I don't marry that person my life is gonna blow up, or we're not talking about those gray areas, we're talking about the known sins here when we're talking about this.
And even at that, even limiting it to the known will of God, how many of you got your work cut out for you in here? To do this is tough enough, right? And then you tack on top of that all the gray area, like what movies do I watch?
What shows should I watch? What is becoming of a Christian? What is the way that I talk with my coworkers? So all of that gray area mixes in, but what we're talking about here when we're talking about living is living sacrifices.
This is where we begin to know what it is that we live. This is where we're gonna get our minds renewed. That's, I'm stealing my own thunder for my next point. But it's a tough calling. It's a hard road to moment by moment say, God, what do you want of me here and now?
To live a moment by moment sacrifice.
Of our actions and behaviors to God.
Is an act of worship according to this text. But I wanna share a little bit of a story and I'm gonna kinda give you a little bit of history here just to set up a conversation I had recently with one of my best friends.
I moved to South Carolina in this, like at the end of the summer of 1991, I had just graduated from high school and I went down there for Bible college and when my parents dropped me off, I didn't know a single soul, I didn't know anybody who lived in South Carolina.
So I put that in perspective.
And I was really glad to get a fresh start. Anybody of you move a little bit a ways away for college.
And kinda glad to?
I was just looking for a fresh start and a little bit of distance. I loved it. My personality's a little bit more extroverted and outgoing. One of the first weekends I was there, I went, there was a little sign in the dorm, said something about pick up basketball.
So I went to play basketball and I ran into this other guy. He was wearing, he was wearing a Michigan hat. I was like, bonus, okay? So we're two guys down there in South Carolina surrounded by a bunch of North Carolina fans, UNC fans and we hit it off right away.
He was from DeWitt.
Any of you know where DeWitt is?
Just on the north side of Lansing there. And so we struck up a friendship and ended up playing basketball together and prayed together and really developed really a best friend relationship. And then he's the guy who actually introduced me to Camp Barrichell, which is where I met Linda and then he was the best man in our wedding.
So while I was on sabbatical, I went over to church with him in Lansing and we had a conversation about the old times.
It was a lot of fun.
And the interesting thing is, Bible college students are weird, okay? Any of you ever meet a Bible college student? Some of you were Bible college students. I was one, so I can say that they're weird.
They don't sit around and talk about drinking as much as they talk about things like,.
Wouldn't it be cool to be a martyr? Wouldn't it be cool to die for Jesus?
You know, that's the kind of stuff that I talked with this guy about. I mean, we talked extensively about, he wanted to, he was studying missions. I was studying missions. We thought we were gonna be missionaries for the rest of our lives and, you know, not even, I mean, he's even going, you know, like, maybe I shouldn't even get married because I plan on dying anyways, you know?
I mean, we're having these kinds of conversations,.
You know, it's this weird conversation.
Over the dinner table and stuff and, you know, we're talking with a girl at the end of the table and like, hey, what do you think about dying with us? You know, or something like that. So, just strange conversations, okay?
So, it was interesting because we talked a little bit about this and just about the way that we thought about that and we talked about this over the years a little bit on the phone and stuff and we set our sights too low when we set our sights at dying for Jesus.
You know what I'm saying? We set our sights way too low compared to the high calling of living for him. Hear the difference? I actually believe that being a martyr for Jesus is easy. It's just said, yep, I believe in Jesus, bang, it's over.
Right, there might be some torture in there and some difficulty and some pain that goes on.
And then it's over.
But how many of you know what I'm saying?
It's a tough life of day by day, moment by moment, dying for Christ and you're still alive. And that's the calling that is being placed on us here to yield our wants, to yield our wishes, to yield our, the things that our culture is telling us are central to us.
How many of you know that your culture is saying.
That your sexuality is number one in your life? Did you know that?
Is that what our culture is saying right now?
You must have a fulfilled sexual life, period. And that's, I don't see that in here. I see sacrificing all things to God, all things to his way, all things to his wishes, all things to the way that he desires things to go.
And so we talked and we had a great conversation and we came to the conclusion that yeah, we had set our minds and our sights way too low because living for Jesus is so much harder.
Than dying for him.
The standard, by the way, of what our lives ought to look like in terms of this living sacrifice is found near the end of the verse, verse one, because of God's mercy, we are called to lovingly and willingly sacrifice the deeds of our body in a holy, here's the standard, holy and acceptable way to God.
Holy is a word that can be very fuzzy in our minds but it's a very specific and laser-like word. It means set apart for God's purposes. And acceptable means a life lived in a way that is offered as worship that is pleasing to him.
A life that is acceptable to him is one that is received by him, acceptable to him as worship. And so that's the standard of a life lived for God, holy and acceptable. In all things day by day, in all things moment by moment, we are called as followers of Christ who have received his mercy to be set apart for him and to live in a way that is pleasing to him.
And of course that requires that we actually know what is and is not pleasing to him. And that's, again, explicitly the point of the next verse, not being conformed to this world but being transformed by the renewing of our minds.
So those of you who have been around recasts for a while, you may notice that I like to shy away from black and white language. I don't like to talk in terms of do's and don'ts. I don't like the notion of having a list of approved movies to go see.
I don't like to have a banned books list here or musicians you shouldn't listen to. I really do firmly believe that the spirit is gonna guide you and direct you into the right pathway for you if you're a student of the word.
But I wanna point out and bring us back a step before I just launch out to throw you out there into the world and kind of go, well, what do I do next? Hear me carefully, recasts. This text is unashamedly saying, there is indeed acceptable and unacceptable.
The text is saying that.
There is acceptable and unacceptable. And although I have a hard time defining that line in your life or where you're at, know that it's there. Live like it's there. Believe that it is there. God has a way that is acceptable to him and he has a way that is unacceptable to him.
And again, a message that our culture does not want to hear. There is an acceptable way of living and an unacceptable way of living. And I encourage you to work that out in relationship to him through his word.
And if you get stymied, which I expect that some of you will, if you get to the point where you're at an impasse and you're struggling to know if something is acceptable or unacceptable, I would love to talk with you and work through that with you.
Let me be clear that when we're talking about holy and acceptable lives, we are talking about sin or not sin. We're not talking about what Dr. Whitmer was saying a few weeks ago about a diaphora of things, a Greek word that means neither here nor there, neutral things, things in the gray area.
Please don't come to me and ask me if you should drink Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper. I mean, I'd just say both of them.
Are gonna rot your teeth,.
But I mean, Mountain Dew's pretty delicious. So I got a little bit of an issue I gotta get over with that. But are you getting what I'm saying? I mean, I'd be willing to talk with you about anything, but I'm not gonna be able to give you any definitive answers.
We're talking about things that the word.
Is gonna speak into.
I'm trying to figure that out. Certainly eating healthy and things like that. I mean, there's things that you kind of, just kind of know from scripture, you know, treating this body well, that type of stuff, but we can get really caught up in the weeds when the biggest thing is knowing his will and living according to his will, his known will.
It's true that God leaves us plenty of gray area in our lives, right?
You guys knew that already?
Lots of gray area.
And we do have genuine freedom in that gray area in Christ. But let me say also when it comes to acceptable and unacceptable, that freedom is so that we can live in a joyful way that is acceptable to him, not so that we can get away with sin.
So we must ask the question over all behaviors, is this acceptable to God? And I wanna distinguish that from the whole craze at the late 90s, early 2000s. How many of you wore a WWJD bracelet? I did, I had one and talked about it a lot and stuff.
And then the guy who was the best man at my wedding spoke at a, I was a youth intern and spoke at a senior banquet, and he said DJWW, and he had bracelets made up for that because he was talking about Daniel and he said Daniel just wouldn't waver.
I thought that was creative.
But what would Jesus do is not the best question we can ask, and here's the reason why. How many of you are Jesus? Jesus might walk across the lake and head to Chicago tomorrow, but I'm just not there, right?
So not every option that was open to Jesus is open to me in the sense of my decisions and my choosing, but the great question, I think, what we ought to wear is bracelets that say ITA, ITA. Is this acceptable?
That's the standard that's being given to us.
In scripture here.
Is this acceptable? Is this holy? Can I render this as worship unto God? Can this thing that I do be pleasing to him? And I would suggest to you that that's a big, it's a broad spectrum of things that can be pleasing to God.
Your work for your employer can be pleasing to God. Your relationship with your spouse can be pleasing to God. The way you handle and work and play in sports.
Can be pleasing to God.
Do you understand what I'm saying? So don't think that pleasing to God is asking what is the holy and spiritual thing. What is pleasing to God is that you actually are rendering this as acceptable, holy to him.
And just a clarification, because the word acceptable, sounds like a pretty lame standard, doesn't it? I mean, don't try this when your spouse cooks dinner. How's dinner, honey?
Acceptable.
Yeah, you're gonna end up wearing it.
Not a good idea. So why is this a standard for the Almighty? Why would this be worthy of putting on a bracelet and living your life according to that which is acceptable to the holy, Almighty God? Remember that this is in the context of a sacrifice.
Sacrifices are either acceptable or they're not. There's no real middle ground. Sacrifices all throughout the Old Testament, of course, were categorized as acceptable or not acceptable. There is no super acceptable.
There is no mega acceptable. If his injunction for a specific sin was to bring a sacrifice of a year old lamb to the altar, then what you needed to bring was a year old lamb to the altar.
You didn't need to bring two. You didn't need to bring three.
You weren't gonna get extra brownie points for bringing five or your whole herd. Acceptable was one.
And that's okay.
That's what he had said, so you do it his way. That's what's acceptable. So how many of you would say that the acceptance of the Almighty God is enough for you?
That is enough for me.
If he would look at my life and say, acceptable, I'm going, yes, praise God. That's a beautiful and a glorious thing. And all of us presenting ourselves as living sacrifices here at the end of verse one is declared as spiritual worship.
This passage makes clear that we give glory to God more through the way we live than the way we sing. Our worship is fundamentally about the way we live. Praise music is just a crazy small slice of the pie.
The way we live, sacrificing the way our feet walk, sacrificing the things we let our mouth say, sacrificing what we allow our eyes to feast upon, sacrificing what we allow our ears to take in, sacrificing the way we pursue pleasure, sacrificing or even risking our fame, our wealth, our social status.
All of these are worship when they are pursued by the mercies of God in obedience to this call to present our bodies as living sacrifices. When you do that intentionally, you are worshiping God. This is truly spirit-driven worship, and it's possible for you to do so.
With your life day by day.
This removes worship, by the way, from a specific place like this. It removes it from a specific set of routines at a certain time of the morning. It removes it from a specific time of the week on Sundays or specific days of the year and holidays and festivals, and it makes every moment of our lives, every activity a potential for worship when it is done with a heart and a mind to sacrifice to the God who has given us mercy.
We can offer an acceptable basketball game to God, an acceptable sales pitch, yes, even an acceptable romp in the hay with our spouse. When we offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice with a heart to be set apart to live for his ways and not our own, we are worshiping him.
And in verse two now, Paul is gonna fill out more of the question we might have on our mind. How do we know, then, what is holy and acceptable?
How do we know that?
And he contrasts two things in this verse. On the one hand is conformity to the world, and on the other hand is being transformed by an ongoing process of a renewal of our minds. And the goal at the end is so that we can know the content of our sacrifice.
How do I know, then, what is acceptable and holy to God?
By a renewed mind.
Well, first, we do not conform to this world, and just as Dr. Whitmer clarified a few weeks ago, the word world that Paul is worried about isn't about this material world. Now, you might disagree with that, and some of you might have been challenged by that.
I'd love to talk with you. I'd love to even get you a copy of Dr. Whitmer's book. He's got a couple of them, but Worldly Saints is his most recent one, and that one really dives down into this notion that we have of God being the cosmic killjoy.
He doesn't like our pleasure. He doesn't like us to have fun. And at the end of the day, if it's the miserable choice, then it's the sacrifice choice, then that's God's choice, right? And how many of you have been guilty of thinking that over the course of your lives?
The miserable way is God's way. The way that is uncomfortable is God's way. So, of course he wouldn't call me to a good job. He'd call me to Africa or someplace, and I'm gonna be miserable, and that's probably more likely his calling on my life.
But I think common sense knows that this isn't talking about the material world. He isn't warning us about pie. He isn't warning us about couches or sunrises or music. You are already, by the way, significantly conformed to this physical world.
Good luck trying to not be, okay?
You are confirmed to the,.
You are already conformed to the pattern of needing oxygen. How many of you are a little bit dependent on oxygen this morning? Just, I've got a dependency problem. I really need oxygen, okay?
You're getting what I'm saying?
You are so conformed to this world that you're breathing it in right this second, and you can't not.
You cease to live.
How many of you would say that you've got a food thing? Like, you need some sustenance. You're conformed to the need to eat regularly, right? You've got all kinds of things that you're conformed to.
And he's not at all saying,.
Don't be conformed to the external patterns of life on planet Earth. I mean, God forbid that we would take this so literally that we don't conform to anything because Christians wouldn't wear clothes.
That's conforming to the pattern of this world that we even wear clothes here. So the world system is what we're talking about here. We are a people who are not being conformed to the systems and the sinful systems of this world.
He's concerned that we don't conform to that. And so the world system, by the way, is things like self-centeredness. The world system is an unashamed survival of the fittest. The world system is a greedy grab for all the good stuff for myself.
We're being called to be transformed, not to be conformed in that way to those systems and those sinful patterns, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And this is a process, by the way it's written.
You can see it in the text. The mind needs ongoing renewal. When you became a follower of Christ, your destiny changed, your allegiance changed, your affections changed, and to some degree, even your mind has changed.
But we need an ongoing renewal of our mind. Our thoughts need to be taken captive. They will run in the natural direction of conformity. The slide is well-watered and there's a true sense in which life in this world is full of genuine slippery slopes.
And although that's just kind of like a cliche, at the end of the day, it's true. There are tons of slippery slopes and at the risk of sounding my age, I will still say unashamedly that marijuana is a gateway drug.
A little porn can carry you down a slope leading all the way to where you find yourself in prison for child pornography. Gluttony can lead to heart attacks and does regularly. Entertaining your doubts about the faith and really pursuing doubt can lead you to forsaking Christ.
We need an ongoing commitment to a renewal of our minds in his word. You are either swimming upstream toward transformation or you are bobbing downstream in conformity. And by the way, I'm talking about ethically and morally and in terms of your relationship to sin here.
And where do we turn to renew our minds? All of the scholars that I read this week point back to the word of God as the main source for where we find the will of God. Where do you find how to live? Where do you find what he wants of you?
In his word.
We need minds that are saturated with his word in order to know what sacrifices need to be made. How do I offer this moment to God if I don't know what he wants of me? But the woman who pours over God's word, who seeks to know him through the truth he has revealed about himself, that's gonna be a woman who is ready to test what she encounters in every post on Facebook.
That's a woman who knows how to not pass along gossip. That is a woman who will discern what God wants of her in the moment and she will be prepared to sacrifice herself for the good, for that which is acceptable, for that which is perfect.
But do you want a good life?
Do you want a life that's pleasing to God? Do you want a life that reflects his perfections? Let me just suggest to you three potential applications. Our time is just about up here, but I wanna give this a little bit of time.
Please bear with me.
But three potential things that we need to take on in applying this text. And by the way, just to interrupt myself for just a second, there's only one application for anyone here who has not yet accepted Jesus Christ.
As your Lord and Savior.
If Jesus is not your Savior, he has not forgiven your sins, you have not asked him to be your king.
Or to forgive you,.
Then take step one, admit you're a sinner incapable of saving yourself, believe what Jesus did on the cross to cover your sins, and ask him to save you and to be your king. And he will set you free and put your feet on a pathway of a life of mercy.
But if you already asked Jesus to save you, then consider these three ways you could put this text into practice this week. The first, offer yourself to him this morning. Let today be a day of rededicating of sorts.
Present yourself as his servant and as a living sacrifice to him. Consider his great mercy toward you and let the love he has given fuel your commitment to living for him even this week. Even as we come to communion this morning, let the juice and the cracker remind you of his body broken for us and his blood shed for us.
And let this communion be a type of rededication for you. Saying, I am his and he is mine. And I am a living sacrifice being daily, moment by moment, offered up to him. The second thing, take some time to consider the ways that you're conforming to the sinful patterns of this present age.
It could be in the media you choose for entertainment. What are you filling your mind with? It could be in the way that you placed yourself at the center of your family, making demands and making everybody else conform to you.
It could be the way that you respond to coworkers. It could be the way that you are sinning just to fit in with your school friends. In what ways are you pulled to conform to this world system? And confess that and seek change by laying yourself on the altar once again.
And lastly, the most powerful weapon in the battle to honor God is his word. It has the power to transform the way that we think. To think in terms of, I mean, some of our biggest problems are about the way that we even think about ourselves.
So we run on the gamut of being very proud and then being very self-effacing. And the word tells us we are loved.
We are not worthless.
Because the word tells us that he sent his son to die for us. So I'm not the center of the universe because the word tells me that I was a wretched sinner that caused the crucifixion of the Lord. So it corrects us, it fixes us.
And I'm just using this as an example, but I'm loved. There's no room for self-loathing. But I'm saved only by grace.
So there's no room for pride. And the more we dig into God's word,.
The more we will be equipped to discern his good, acceptable, and perfect will for us. And we will begin to think in biblical, God-honoring patterns that will be there when the moment-by-moment decisions of life come at us.
I think you'll find that, naturally, the more that you're saturated in this, the more you'll find yourself making good decisions. The more that this is just gonna creep its way out, it's gonna ooze out of you in those moments.
But without this, you're gonna go, why is my life a wreck? Why am I not connected? And I just ask, are you connected here? I believe that if you're connected here, and you're still struggling,.
Then there might be another issue.
That we need to talk through, but step one. I mean, before, I can give you your counsel before you show up in my office.
Go here first.
Get in this, dig in.
Let this saturate your heart and mind, and then we can come and talk if we've got things that are still not working out. But as we come to communion and launch out from here into a new week, let's present our bodies as living sacrifices.
Let's not be conformed to this world, but let's be transformed by the renewal of our minds. This is the good life that God desires.
For all of his children. Let's pray.
Father, I thank you for your grace. I thank you for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that has bought us hope, and I thank you for his sacrifice that gives us the opportunity to then lay our lives down in a pattern like his,.
So we can be living sacrifices,.
And I pray that that would be a reality in our lives. Even now, I pray for rededication for all of us as we have an opportunity to take the cracker that represents his body broken for us, and the juice that reminds us of his blood shed for us.
Father, go with us throughout this week with power.
In Jesus' name, amen.