Living on God's Altar - Brandon Scalf

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Romans 12:1-2 MAIN POINTS:

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If I were to ask you why you are here, that is, why you are living on this earth right now, what would you say?
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What is your purpose? Or we could say it this way, what do you believe the will of God is for your life?
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Now, this is a very important and very probing question for a myriad of different reasons, but primarily because a lot of us ask these types of questions.
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What am I here for? Some of us grow up from the time we're little to the time that we're older, thinking that we are going to be policemen or firemen or IT guys, that is somebody who works with computers.
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Maybe some of you little girls from the time that you're just a little girl, you want it to be a mother, you want it to be a wife, maybe you want it to be a chef.
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There are many things that we desire to do when we are younger. And as we age, we fall into our profession or our desired life outcome, or it happens to us, and we might define ourselves by those things.
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I'm here to be a mother, I'm here to be a father, I'm here to be a policeman.
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But might I suggest to you that the scriptures plainly, clearly, emphatically, and explicitly teach that the reason that you are here on this earth now primarily is to be conformed to the image of the son.
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That is to be made holy, to look more like Jesus. In fact, the scriptures teach that this is the will of God for your life, comma, your sanctification.
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But as you know, this pilgrimage, this walk with God is one that can be hard.
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It's one that can be tiresome. It's one where we wish we were more holy than we are, or it's one that we keep moving forward, thinking
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I don't need to care about holiness or sanctification at all. And the question becomes, when we get weary or we have the wrong attitude, what is the balm that's going to help us to pursue holiness with all our might?
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To care more than just loving some words on a page, but loving with our life.
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Well, in order for us to find the right type of motivation, in other words, we need to get to the heart of the matter.
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And the heart of the matter is the problem of the heart. And what
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I mean by that is, many of us don't just have a not striving for holiness problem, we have a worship problem.
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That is, we misunderstand, misapply, and misconstrue what it means to worship
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God. And as our text is going to show us, worshiping God is far more than coming to church on Sunday.
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It's far more than coming to church on Sunday morning and Sunday evening. It's far more than coming to church on Sunday morning,
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Sunday evening, and coming to fellowship group on Wednesday. It's far more than anything that you think.
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True and biblical worship requires all of you all the time for the glory of God and the good of his people.
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In other words, it requires you to give your whole life to God.
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And we're going to see, first and foremost, why that is, and how we can better understand worship in light of the reason that we're here, namely to pursue holiness.
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So if you would please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy and fallible and all sufficient word.
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And as I said, I will be looking at Romans chapter 12, verses one and two. Paul begins, therefore,
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I exhort you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice, living, holy, and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
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And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good and pleasing and perfect.
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The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. Amen? Amen. Go ahead and have a seat.
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As you well see, the thrust of this text, or the thing that Paul is wanting his audience to do is to present your bodies as a sacrifice.
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But of course, you also notice that we are in the middle of an argument.
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And we know that because of this word, therefore. And so as we look at this passage, there are quite a few different things that I want you to know.
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The first one is the movement. And what I mean by the movement is the linguistic movement away from something he has been talking about to something that he is now going to talk about.
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And they do in fact differ, and yet they are absolutely connected.
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And we know that because of this word, therefore.
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So we're going to get to a command and exhortation, but we have to understand what came before the therefore.
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Now, when I teach hermeneutics here at Heritage, or if I'm talking to the children,
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I want them to memorize a cliche, but helpful question to get at what is going on.
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And that question is this. When I see a therefore, I have to ask why it's therefore.
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We don't get to, in other words, just skip past this word. Now, when we're reading, we oftentimes see words that seem inconsequential, and we just keep moving.
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But we see here, among many other things, that Paul does not flippantly or carelessly bark orders.
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He is methodical in the way that he does what he does. And here, there is a division happening between, essentially,
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Christ's work and how to use it, as the
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Puritans would say, how to apply it. In other words, truth in and of itself is only as good as what you do with it.
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It's the reason that the other scriptures can say that knowledge puffs up. Well, you can be filled with information, but you might not be transformed.
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And so this therefore is here to answer the question, so what? So what?
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Who cares, or rather, what do I do with the information that you have presented?
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Well, as we have seen, if we've looked at the book of Romans in any sort of detail, the book of Romans is split right down the middle, as it were, much like many of Paul's letters.
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We've been walking as a family through the book of Ephesians, and we see that Ephesians, after chapter three, we get done with the doctrine, then we move on to how to apply it.
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The same thing is here in Pauline fashion. He is wax eloquent about sin, about the deadly nature of it, and what it has done to ravage the people of the world, and how not one of us is devoid of needing his atoning work.
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And what he has done is he has laid out, essentially, in the best way possible, many consider this to be
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Paul's magnum opus, the gospel itself, that Jesus lived the perfect life, died the death that we deserve to die, and that he resurrected on the third day, and ascended into heaven, and now sits as mediator.
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His atoning sacrifice having been one that was pleasing and acceptable to the Lord, and those who trust in the
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Lord by faith have that balm of Jesus' finished work applied to their account, so to speak.
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And here in Romans chapter 12, he transitions to the so what.
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And every good sermon, every good letter written by an apostle is going to have this so what piece.
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That is, what does this mean for my life? So Paul here is transitioning from doctrine to duty.
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That is, he's transitioning from what you should know to what you should do. And what you need to know about these first two verses is this is the first command that the apostle
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Paul lays forth in the book of Romans. Here's what this means, here's the big payoff for paying attention to that reality.
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It really matters. In fact, it might matter more than any other command that he's about to give.
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It's the first thing that his pen writes. After all of this treasure has been thrust into the lap of God's children.
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And so if we are going to get any further in understanding this, we need to understand that it's not enough to know truth.
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You have to know what to do with it. And what you need to know is that knowledge, which is the possession of truth and applying it is not simply the end.
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What do I mean by that? I mean, having information that tells you who
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Christ is, is not the end of the road.
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Now, sometimes the application, as you've heard me say many times, is behold your
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God, acceptable application. But other times, it's the road to helping us do what it is that we're supposed to do.
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Maybe another way to say this is, the indicatives of the Bible often empower the imperatives.
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That is the truth contained in the Bible, the beauties and glories of Jesus Christ, help us to fulfill what he has commanded of us to do.
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So if we're going to understand this text, we need to understand why the therefore is therefore, and it is to connect
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Christ's finished work with the work that you now, as a Christian, are called to do, which is why he goes on to say,
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I exhort you, brothers, brothers. Brothers is important here because he's speaking to Christians.
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He's not speaking to non -Christians because non -Christians, when they hear, you're going to have to give yourself up, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, are going to think that's complete and utter nonsense.
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It's those who have had their spiritual eyes opened and their spiritual ears opened and are attentive to what
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Christ has for them are the only ones that are going to desire to live in such a manner.
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And he doesn't just present information, even as he's applying it, he exhorts them, right?
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Therefore, I exhort you, brothers, I exhort you.
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Now, this word exhort is an important word because this word exhort means call for a verdict, to urge, to plead, to beg, or my favorite definition, to summon one to action.
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Here's what this means. It means that Paul was not content with giving his preference. He wasn't content with just giving a little bit of information or even a little two -fact sheet on what it is that you are to do.
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No, he was laying out the matters of life and eternal death with the authority that he had as an apostle.
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He was representing almighty God and he did not have a take it or leave it attitude.
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What he was saying to these people and what he is saying to us by extension and what I am hoping to do with you today is this.
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He's trying to say, you must hear me, you must believe me, you must obey what
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I am saying because Jesus is that good. And this is the heart posture that every
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Christian should have for every brother and sister in Christ that they have. That they live unto the glory of God for the glory of God and the good of his people.
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And that they would live in such a way to show off the beauties and glories of who Jesus Christ is. Anything less is unacceptable.
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Lukewarmness is unacceptable. Jesus in the book of Revelation talks about lukewarm Christianity in such a way that it would put non -Christians above those who would gauge in lukewarmness.
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He would say there's no use to it. Those who are hot, at least serve a purpose.
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They're kindling for the fire. And those who are cold in the positive sense, quench thirst.
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And the question becomes, are you quenching thirst or kindling for the fire? The middle ground is no way at all.
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The middle way is no way at all. There are two paths according to Matthew chapter seven.
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There is the broad path and the narrow path. There's not a detour. And Paul's aim here is to exhort, to bring to bear the truth in such a way that he is begging his people to listen because he knows that it means the difference between spiritual maturity or damnation.
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And he understands that doctrine is dead until it is applied. The Puritans used to say it like this, that doctrine is kind of like loading an arrow into a bow.
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And the sermon is not preached until that arrow is let go from the bow and it flies into the heart of the target.
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Or you can consider the words of Jonathan Edwards who it was often said of him for the first half of his sermon, he was laying out the doctrine and people would say, oh, that's amazing.
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And then they might want to stand up and leave. But all he was doing was loading the barrel for the second half of the sermon, which was to cause shrapnel to rain down upon them from that device so that they might actually live a life worthy of the calling that they have them.
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So what do we do? He's moving from doctrine to duty and he's doing it in such a way as to implore the brothers and sisters in his sphere in the
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Church of Rome to take seriously what he's saying, pleading with the very heart that he has for them.
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This is someone who cared and lived what he preached. The second thing that I want you to see after looking at this movement linguistically from what came before to what is here now is this motivation.
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The motivation. The reality is a simple exhortation is not going to motivate you to live as a sacrifice, which is what
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Paul is after here. Whips and chains and fear and terror are not going to get the job done.
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Now, of course, along the way in the Bible, as you read it, there are many motivations for why we should live holy and godly lives.
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For instance, there is oftentimes kind of a reward reaping motivation.
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For instance, in Galatians 6 ,8, Paul says, for the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but of the one who sows to the spirit will from the spirit reap eternal life.
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So you see here, Paul is trying to motivate the church in Galatia to consider the two paths, saying that you will either reap death or life.
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Or oftentimes in the Bible, there are ways of motivating individuals by talking about how judgment awaits them.
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Second Corinthians 5, verse 10, for example, says, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body according to what he has done, whether good or bad.
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Sometimes the Bible says, pay attention to how you live because you're going to have to answer for it someday.
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You may think you're getting off light now, but you're not, ultimately. Or another way that is motivated, which is not unlike the first two, is people are often motivated by the idea of being rejected by Jesus for their false worship and faith.
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For example, in Matthew 7, 22, Jesus says, many will come say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, in your name, did we not prophesy?
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And in your name, cast out demons. And in your name, do many miracles. And I will declare to them, I never knew you.
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Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. As helpful as these motivations might be, as often as they appear in the
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Bible, they still are not motivating enough.
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The law, we can add that to the list. Thou shall do such and such.
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But the reality is, according to this text, there's one motivator that stands atop the rest.
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Look with me at our theme verse, verse one. Therefore, I exhort you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice.
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So what will best motivate us to live a life of godliness that ultimately results in worship?
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What will motivate us the best? Not all of these things. Not your do better, try harder attitude, but the mercies of Almighty.
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And so the question becomes, well, what does he mean by mercy? Well, first and foremostly, he means everything that he has talked about from verses one of chapter one to verse 36, chapter 11.
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He's laid them out in great detail in the person and work of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, when he's saying that the mercies of God ought to be motivating you, he is saying that every drop of saving grace that is found in Jesus ought to motivate you to live this way.
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His life, his substitutionary death, his resurrection, his ascension, and his current mediation should cause you to strive after holiness, to strive after the
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Lord Jesus. Now, if we look, of course, at the Greek, we get a little bit more of a nuance, or even if you look in an
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English dictionary, I'm not trying to remove your faith in the text that's here, but what does mercy mean?
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Well, to display mercy or to show someone mercy means they display a concern over another's misfortune, to pity them, to lavish love upon them and compassion.
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Or more pointedly, to show mercy means that one is concerned about someone's misery and they do something about it.
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So when you are sinning, when you are falling on your face in whatever area that might be, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, trying harder, making new resolutions, it's not going to cut it.
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You need to look at God. You need to quit navel -gazing and you need to look at the love of God and the person in work of Jesus Christ, the
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God -man. And you need to realize that you are in a place of needing to be pitied, that you are in the place of someone who was manifesting misery, someone who had misfortune.
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Now, a misfortune that you took upon yourself, a misfortune that I took upon myself, namely the rebellious nature that we all possess, that we hate
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God, and that apart from his working might, he stands at odds with us.
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But you see, while we were dead in our transgressions and sins, when we were unable to respond to spiritual stimuli because of our self -made blindness, he reached in with the heavenly defibrillator, namely the
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Holy Spirit, and he caused us to be alive.
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Do you get that? When you hated him, he loved you and gave himself up for you so that you could, as Ephesians chapter two says in verse four, you could be begotted.
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He could step in the way and reconcile you to God and to others because of the great love with which he loved us.
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Friends, the mercy, the love, the compassion of God rooted in the person of Jesus Christ for you is a far better motivator than any chain or whip, a far better motivator than any energy drink, a far better motivator than anything that you have.
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So why can't you get motivated enough? Plainly, explicitly, you don't love
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God enough and you don't appreciate what God has done for you.
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The mercy of God is greater fuel than your desire to be more holy.
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The love of God, as it is reflected upon, contemplated, will move you forward before you think to do it.
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Children, would you look at me? I want you to think about what I'm saying right now. I know some of this might be going over your head, but here's what
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I mean. When I say that the mercy of God is a great motivator for living a holy life, what
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I'm trying to do is get you to see maybe like if there's something you really wanna do.
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For instance, if you wanna go to the park and play, or maybe you want a certain toy you've been asking your parents for, or a certain dessert, and your parents say something to the effect of, well, if you just hold on a minute, and if you just calm down, we'll be able to get to that in a minute, or if you behave yourself in this situation, we'll make sure that you get it, and you really buckle down, and you do what mom and dad say, and you're really well -behaved, and you do what you need to do so that you can get that thing that you want, well, that just motivated you to do something that maybe you wouldn't have done had you been motivated to do so.
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And so as we think about when we sin, and we mess up, and we do something we shouldn't have done, we remember that Romans 8 tells us that there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus that means that there is no punishment because we've been saved by Jesus if we love
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Jesus, but that his love, even in that, will help us not to do that again.
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Does that make sense? And so we know us to look to God in his mercy because that will spur us on.
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That will help us, as Hebrews chapter 12 says, run the race, run the race.
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And running a race haphazardly or lukewarmly is no way to run a race at all.
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So now that we've looked at the movement, now that we've looked at the motivation, what I want you to see here is the mandate, and this is really where it all lands.
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This is the thrust of the passage. This is the climax. This is what Paul wants all of us to do in light of what he has already said, right?
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Everything up to this point has just been prefacing this sentence, and this sentence is a hard sentence, and it's a sentence that if you're paying attention to should either offend you or convict you.
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If it's encouraging you, you might not be reading it correctly because nobody's doing it perfectly, not even the guy with the
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Bible and the pulpit. He says, by the mercies of God, present your bodies as a sacrifice.
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Well, that sounds pretty harsh. Does he really mean that? Is this poetic language? Yes, he really means that.
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He really means that, and yes, it's poetic language, but it's rooted in reality.
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So let's take this phrase one at a time. This word present here is a very important word.
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This word is borrowed from his own background, namely, as a
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Pharisee. Old Testament Israel had a sacrificial system that typified the coming of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. It was a shadow of the atonement that would come, where sheep and rams were slaughtered to cleanse the sins of God's people as they looked to him in faith, and so it is a technical term specifically for priests placing an offering on the altar.
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So in other words, what Paul is doing here is telling his people that they are to live a life as if they were living on God's altar.
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It's weighty, it's very weighty.
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In 1 Peter 2 .5, what's interesting is, we are called a kingdom of priests, says the new covenant people of God, when he says, you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, and the reality is, we as Christians also must consider ourselves spiritual priests who make spiritual sacrifices, because that is the thrust of what
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Peter is saying, and so what is that sacrifice? That we would present our bodies as a sacrifice on God's altar, namely our lives, but instead of a ram, we're going to be called to kill our evil passions.
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Instead of slaughtering goats, we're gonna be called to kill unclean affections.
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Instead of offering up fowls, we will kill idle thoughts, and on and on and on and on.
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But the reality is, Paul was not speaking here to the Jewish people, and so though he was using imagery, and though he was using language, the
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Jewish people that he understood that fit into his sacrificial system,
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I don't believe that's actually what he was getting at, and commentators are kind of split on this, but the reality is, if he would have just used his
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Jewish imagery, speaking to a bunch of people inside of the Roman pagan system, they wouldn't have understood what he was talking about fully, because they didn't, well, they weren't
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Israel, they weren't Jews, but one of the things that the
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Romans were aware of, though they may not have understood all of everything that the sacrificial system of the
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Old Testament or the Old Covenant entailed, they understood sacrifice because they did it all the time.
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As a matter of fact, they arguably did it much more than the people of Israel did, because they had far more altars and far more gods.
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Right? When Paul goes up in Acts 17, he looks at all of these altars that are set up to have sacrifices thrown on them for their foreign gods, and he very wisely points out the one to the unknown god, because here's the thing about Rome, they understood there to be many gods.
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Now, they were wrong, but that's the way that they thought, and what's more than that is they were okay with you adding yours.
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That's what that was for, the altar to the unknown god. They were fine with that. In fact, they were fine with Christianity being added.
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Despite what you may have heard or read, that's the truth. They were welcoming of Christianity until they said, no, there's one
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God. So the problem wasn't the addition of Christianity, it was the exclusion of everything else, because how do you have a pluralistic society when you stand on the truth of one
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God? You can't, according to Rome. And so Christians being dubbed the first atheists, by the way, if you didn't know that, atheist is a term that was created for Christians, though now we use it the other way because we won for a little while and we get to pick the dates and flip turns, but what he's doing is he's looking around, he's saying, look, all these altars that you see around you where all this blood is pouring down and all these fowls and all these different types of animals are being cut open and all of these sorts of things and presented to their gods.
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You see that all the time when you go to the public place. I want you to pay attention to this, guys.
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Paul's speaking to a people who would have saw this every single day. It wasn't a theological concept.
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It wasn't something heavy that was in an encyclopedia somewhere that talked about history past. This was right in front of their eyes.
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And Paul leans into it and what does he do? He says,
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I want you to be that. I want you to present your bodies as a sacrifice, as if you were on God's altar.
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Now, what does this mean? Does it mean that we are to do good works on the outside so that people would see how great a
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Christian we are? Talking about our bodies or is it talking about asceticism which the early church at times engaged in, especially by the time you get to the
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Roman Catholic Church where they would beat them and give themselves the wounds of Christ because it says that we need to sacrifice our bodies.
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Does it mean to be martyrs, give ourselves over to be burned? Well, if it comes to that, sure.
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But what's actually being said here in this word body is that we are to give our whole being over to God.
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Not part of you, but all of you. And not one time, but for all time.
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It's not enough to offer just work and wages. It's not enough to serve the church as it were and give tithes and offerings as we saw with Cain and Abel.
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You have to give. That means your mind, your eyes, your ears, your mouth, your hands, your feet, your fill in the blank.
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They belong to Christ and you live as a sacrifice unto Christ. What you think about,
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Christ's. What you look at, governed by Christ.
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What you listen to, Christ. What you say, governed by Christ.
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What you do with your hands and your feet, Christ. In other words, it is your head, your heart and your hands, your intellect, your affection and your will.
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So you're to present all of yourself, all of the time as a sacrifice.
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Now, this one is not easy. We like other people to sacrifice for us, but we don't like to sacrifice for others.
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But friends, the reality is the sum of Christianity can be summed up in this word sacrifice.
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Christ sacrificed for us. We live as a sacrifice unto him and for his glory and for other people.
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Even and up to our own death. It's going to cost you to be a
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Christian. It's going to cost you to live for God. It's going to cost you to be something else other than Luke Warren.
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I was over at my brother and sister -in -law's house the other day and she was listening to somebody that really pumps her up.
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And this guy was running down the street and somebody yelled at him, why are you running?
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And he said, because you aren't. And the idea here that he was trying to get across, at least from what
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I took of it, is he's willing to do the hard things that not anybody else is willing to do.
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And the reality is God is calling you to do the hard thing even if nobody else is willing to do it. It's going to cost you something.
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And if it doesn't cost you anything, it's not biblical Christianity. One of my favorites around here, you know the name,
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Martin Lloyd -Jones says it like this. He said, Christianity has not been tried and found wanting.
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It has been found difficult and not tried. The reality is there are far less
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Christians than you think there are because there are far less people living unto God. There are far less people living as a living in sacrifice though they're willing to receive the sacrifice of many.
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They're totally fine with other people living unto God, but they don't want to live unto God themselves. So he says, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, give yourself, bleed for it, die for it.
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Do you get it? Like, do you get the thrust? It's not an intellectual game, it's an exhorting to reality.
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And the only way you can get there, the only way that you can say, yes, I will give myself as a sacrifice every time
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I open my eyes, is if you are motivated by the mercies of God and the truth found in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
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Everything else is worthless. So what does it mean to live as a sacrifice?
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Because I bet if you're paying attention, or at least you're trying to pay attention, you'll say, okay, but how do I do that?
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Or what does it mean to live as a sacrifice? Well, it gives us three adjectives to explain what it actually looks like to live, which
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I'm kind of giving it away a little, to present our bodies as a sacrifice. Namely, that we are to be, look at me, a theme verse here, living, holy, and pleasing to God.
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Now, the reason I keep saying living is because that's a holdover from an old translation that I used to use that puts a living in front of sacrifice.
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It says to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. As a matter of fact, many translations do that, but there is no exegetical warrant.
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There is no, once you get underneath the Greek, reason as to why that is.
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These are all adjectives that come after explaining sacrifice. So why do they do that in translations?
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I don't know. They didn't ask me to be a part of their committee, but they shouldn't. My guess is probably that they're trying to lessen the blow, right?
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They're probably trying to say, well, don't think about this like actually presenting yourself as a sacrifice.
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Like present yourself as a living sacrifice. Like don't do the die thing. But you see what that does when you start flipping words around like that?
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It takes away that punch. It takes away what you need the most, which is to hear sometimes the hard things, right?
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Because hard things produce soft people and soft things produce hard people. That's just the reality of it.
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But let's say these one at a time. The first adjective used is living. What does that mean? Firstly, it means not dead.
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Very simply. Like old sacrifices, lifeless sacrifices, you are to be one that is not like them dead or lukewarm, but one that's living and on fire for God.
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One that takes him seriously in everything that you do. One that is willing to at great cost to himself promote the goodness, graciousness and goodness of their
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Lord in his time now and until he breathes his last breath.
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And if you're not doing that, why not? That's a good question to ask.
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If I'm not being that type of person, why am I not being that type of person? Is my motivations upside down?
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Do I not actually believe? Because actually that's what I believe this is saying more pointedly, right?
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The other one is good homiletically. This one is good exegetically, namely that it is those who are regenerated.
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To be alive means to be spiritually awakened, to have a spiritual resurrection from spiritual death.
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This is not the first time that Paul has talked like this. He has been talking about how
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Christ has made it possible for those who are dead and sinned to be alive to God in him. For instance, in Romans chapter six, verse 11,
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Paul says, even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive in Christ Jesus.
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And in Romans 6, 13, he says, and do not go on presenting, familiar word in light of our passage, your members or you could say body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.
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So in order for you to present your bodies as a sacrifice, you must be alive to God and you must be on fire for God.
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You must be regenerated by the Holy Spirit and you must be propelled by the Holy Spirit. Second, holy.
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Now this word here, holy, interestingly enough, is not a word that is a Christian word. It is a word that has been adapted to mean what it means.
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Like if I say holy, you think purify. You think righteous.
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And that's good, that's right. But the word is actually used even of prostitutes, for example, in the temple in Ephesus.
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And the reason that they were called holy is because holy literally means to chop up and set apart for a specific purpose, a special purpose.
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And so as those women were given for the special purpose of temple worship, God's people are cut and pushed aside for a very special purpose, namely to honor
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God with their holiness, right? They're to be clean, not defiled by the things of this world, by our own sins, much like the
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Old Testament sacrifices. And of course, now it has this meaning of symbolizing spiritual and moral purity because that's how the
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New Testament writers expanded upon it and placed it. And this is why, for instance, we start out our worship service doing confession of sin and assurance of pardon because we cannot be living in holy sacrifices.
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We cannot be true worshipers of God unless what? We have clean hands and a pure hearts.
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And we don't just say that because we thought it was cool to come up with. Psalm 24, four makes that argument for us.
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So we are to be holy, set apart for God's special purposes.
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Here's what this means. It means that you might be an IT guy.
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You might be a window builder. You might be, you name it.
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You might be a concrete layer. You might work for PSO.
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There are so many things that you might do, but you just do that on the side. You just do that on the side.
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Your whole life is to be one lived unto God under the power of God, by the power of God, for the glory of God and the good of his people.
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Everything else is just something that gives you another avenue to make much of Christ.
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Lastly, pleasing to God, pleasing to God. So you're to be living, you're to be holy, and you're to be pleasing.
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What does it mean to be pleasing to God? Well, firstly, what it doesn't mean is that you are to be self -pleasers.
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You are not to live your life to make yourself happy. You're not to live your life to make your family happy.
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You're not to live your life to make your church happy. You're not to live your life, and you see, I keep going on and on and on and on.
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You're to denomination happy, you're to live to make
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God happy, to be pleasing to him, not pleasing to yourself.
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Secondly, it means not to be a man pleaser. So not only are you not to strive to please yourself, you're not to strive to please other people.
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But here's what that also doesn't mean, to do it based on your desires. Because if it's not governed by the word of God, then you've just turned your non -man pleasing into self -pleasing, because it's really your desires that you're after.
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And so you need to be governed by the word of God. You need to seek God's approval. In other words, you need to please
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God. Your life should be one lived out, trying to please
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God, not man. Why?
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Because it is your worship. It is your worship.
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Look with me here at our theme verse again, how it finishes, verse one, all of this, presenting your bodies as a living, holy, and pleasing, presenting your bodies as a sacrifice, one that is living, holy, and pleasing to God, is your spiritual service of worship.
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In other words, this is how you worship God. Not just by coming on Sundays and singing songs and listening to the preached word.
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So you need to do that. But the way you live your life is worship. The way you live your life praises
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God, if you are seeking to do just that.
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Now, I wanna pause here for a second, because there's some interesting things going on in these last couple words.
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I think we're gonna have to wind up cutting this sermon in half, but that is the way it goes. He says that this is your spiritual service of worship.
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Well, what in the world does it mean, spiritual? So like there's a non -spiritual way to worship?
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No. As much as I love the Legacy Standard Bible, and as much as I just sang its praises just a few lines earlier, when it's breaking out the adjectives correctly, here it translates this word, and I'm gonna say it because you'll hear the word that it sounds like when
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I say it, logokos. It translates logokos, spiritual.
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But what does that sound like? Now, that's not how you do Greek work, but I'm just asking, what does that sound like?
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Logic, right? Logical. So what it's saying here is that it is not only worship to give yourself, but it's logical.
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It's reasonable, as other translations have said, or rational.
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Now, if you don't believe me, every translation should, in theory, if you're holding one that's different than the one that I'm preaching from, have a little number above that word.
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That number signifies a footnote, and in that footnote, it should say reasonable, or it should say logical or rational.
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I think most of them often say rational. And that's important, because what it means is it's not stupid, right?
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That seems simple, but it's profound. And what
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I mean by that is this. From the time that you are born till depending on how much your parents love you or the people around you love you, you hear this would be the most wise decision, to do this, that, or the other.
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You know what would be the most wise decision to get good grades? You know what would be the best decision that you go to college?
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A really good decision would be you go to the military. A really good, wise decision would be to save a lot of money before you get married, so therefore, you can be set up financially and ready to go once that honeymoon is over.
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It would be really wise and logical and rational for you to make sure that the woman or the man that you're about to marry loves you and loves
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Jesus with all their heart. That'd be very rational. It's rational to put gas in your car.
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It's rational to put air in the tires when they're flat.
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But when was the last time you heard someone say, the most rational thing that you could ever do is to give your life as a sacrifice to Jesus, living on God's altar?
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Not only is this something you should do because of the mercies of God, not only is this something that you could be propelled to because of the mercies of God, it is completely and utterly reasonable to give your life to this
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Jesus completely and utterly. And nobody else can make this claim except Christ himself.
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Everybody else who makes that claim is a cult leader. But God says,
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I'm better than your dreams. I'm better than all of the other rational things that you think are rational.
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I'm better. You giving, in other words, pouring yourself out as a drink offering, which we talked about last time
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I was here, is not only something you should do, it's something that is very wise and rational and logical to do.
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You're not losing anything and you're gaining everything. See, we don't like to give ourselves fully and completely to God or fully and completely to God's people because we think, well, there's better for us out there or it would be better if it went this way or we're gonna give too much of our time or it would be illogical for me to give up all of this for him.
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And what Paul is trying to exhort his people to understand is there's nothing more logical than that. There's nothing better than that.
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There's nothing more all life transforming than that. There's nothing that will cause you more joy, more happiness, and more health.
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And so give yourself to this Christ. Paul is saying, I am saying, this text is saying to present your bodies as a sacrifice that is living, that is holy and pleasing to God because there is nothing better out there for you to do.
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There's nothing more logical for you to do. There's only foolishness that awaits you apart from that because he's that good.
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He is that good. And not only is it reasonable, but it is our service of worship.
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Here's what this means very practically. True worship does not consist in elaborate and impressive prayers, intricate liturgy, stained glass windows, heightened candles, flowing robes, incense, and classical sacred music.
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It doesn't require a lot of talent, skill, or leadership ability. If you wanna worship
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God properly, it just requires all that you are all the time. It is a lifelong pursuit.
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It is a lifelong pursuit where you are consistently and constantly growing in your ability to be a sacrifice unto
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God as you yield yourself to God by doing what is reasonable.
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So the question becomes, okay,
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I know what it is. I know what it's about. How do I do it? So the fourth thing that I want you to see, the fourth thing is the means, the means, the means.
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We're just gonna go for it because I haven't been here in two weeks. And amen, the means.
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I want you to look at the means. He goes on in verse three or verse two, rather.
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And he says, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So here he tells us how to live as a living, holy, and pleasing to God's sacrifice by presenting to us negative and positive dimensions of the same reality.
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He shows us how to combat crawling off the altar, as it will, because many of us find it too hard to live as a sacrifice, and we wanna scurry away from the fire.
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But we can take measures to secure that we move forward. In other words, there are means that we can employ to the end of our objective, that is to present ourselves as a sacrifice.
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The first is by not being conformed to this world. Verse two, do not be conformed to this world.
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Now, when we pause here and we look at this word conformed, it's an interesting word that literally means to not be squeezed out into the mold of something else.
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In other words, it means that we are not to be recast into another shape, that we are not to follow the pattern of the world.
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Now, when some Baptist preachers get up that, you know, they start talking like you almost need to just build monasteries and have nothing to do with the world.
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But as we have discussed in many other sermons at many other times, when John uses the word world, he doesn't always mean the same thing.
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However, Paul also says, and Paul's the one who wrote Romans, and he obviously was inspired by God, so it's all the same.
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But nonetheless, when we get into the mind of the author, he says, when he's talking to the Corinthians, he's rebuking them for not associating with the world.
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He says, why are you not eating with them? If you're not gonna eat with them, that means you gotta withdraw from them and you can't withdraw from them because they're your mission field.
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That's not exact wording, but that's the translation I'm giving you.
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Or as one of my mentors says, it's not that we're to leave the world, it's kind of like a boat, right?
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The boat is to be in the water, but the water is not to be in the boat. In other words, we're not to engage and fill our minds and our hearts with the world's entertainment, but it's fashions, it's vocabulary, it's music, it's attitudes, and it's values.
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We're not to let the world chisel and mold us into in its image. We are to be preaching the gospel that will conform the world into Christ's image.
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And so one of the ways that we present ourselves as a sacrifice unto the Lord is we keep our head on a swivel and we conform our lives to the image of Christ.
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And we don't let these other influences tell us what we ought to govern and what we value.
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The world doesn't value giving itself up as a sacrifice. The world doesn't value life, which is why abortion is astronomical in numbers, even after Roe and Wade is overturned.
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As a matter of fact, it's not even that our world doesn't value, it hates life. I mean, you look on all of the newsfeeds about the
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Olympics that just happened, and it's just mocking the Bible. The world doesn't just ignore or is indifferent to the things of God.
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They hate God and they hate what he stands for, and they will kill as many people as they need to to make it happen.
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Now in America, to some degree, we've experienced a lot of grace. But I think maybe that might begin to shift.
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There's a reason that the old church fathers said things like the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church.
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And the book of Ecclesiastes says there's nothing new under the sun. And Christians think it's fine when
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God is mocked on national TV. Are you living as a sacrifice?
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Are you being conformed to the world? Are you conforming the world to Christ? If not, why not?
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This is important because 1 John 5, 19 says, the world lies in the power of the evil one. Now, of course, we know that God is sovereign, but the world now is being shaped into what the world or what the devil desires, right?
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This is why Ephesians chapter two says that those who are unregenerated are under the prince of the power of the air.
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It's meaningless power, it's temporary power, but it is power nonetheless. 1
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John 2, 15 says, do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him.
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So not only does the love of the world mean that you're following the evil one, but it means that you don't love the father and that the father does not love you.
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And in James 4, 4, it says, friendship with the world is hostility toward God or enmity toward God.
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So if you are friends with the world, you hate God too. And when he's speaking about the world, of course, he's speaking about the world system.
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So we are not to be conformed by what we see on TV or what we read on Facebook or the values that's put across by the mainstream media.
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We are to be conformed to Christ. Secondly, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
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So the negative, do not be conformed to something. Now the positive, but be transformed, right?
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This is the mortification, vivification piece. The Puritans talked about quite often, right?
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You mortify something, that is you kill it, you put it to death, you kill the sin, and you replace it with things that stir your affections for God.
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You vivify it. You put something off, you put something on. So you do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
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Now, this word transformed here is one that we need to pay attention to, and we need to be paying attention to it because it helps us to understand firstly, how we are wired and how the
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Holy Spirit moves us from spiritual death to spiritual life, or as we are being sanctified throughout our lives.
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This word transformed means to be radically and dramatically changed from the inside out.
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Or if you look at the Greek dictionaries, the Bedex specifically, it means a change in a manner visible to others, to change inwardly in fundamental character or condition.
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That is that everything about you looks different. When your friends who knew you before you were
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Christian know you now, they should be like, whoa, that's a different thing.
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Or 2 Corinthians chapter five says a new creation. You need to be transformed.
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The word here is the same word that we get our English word metamorph, to morph, to change.
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And of course, this is progressive and lifelong, but it is done through the mind, the renewing of the mind.
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Here's what this means, friends, that the noetic effects of the fall are real, that your brain and your heart are not working in tandem.
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That the way that you view the world, the way that you view situations, the way that you view God, the way that you view relationships, the way that you view work, the way that you view everything is completely tainted by sin.
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And you need to have a renewing of your mind. You need to have your mind change in such a way that your entire way of acting and being is transformed.
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What it shows us is that there is an intimate connection between what you think and what you do.
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In other words, a transformed life begins with a transformed mind and transformed thinking.
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So you need to think differently than how you've been thinking because thinking newly is something that the spirit does when you are regenerated and as you're putting off the old world.
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The old man. The things that once used to govern your affections and put you to work.
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And the reason for that is because what you think moves its way down.
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This is why moralistic preaching is of no value. Do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this.
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At the end of the day, meaningless. Because it doesn't say that you need to be transformed by the renewing of your hands.
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It doesn't even say that you need to do it by renewing your heart, right? Why? Because Jesus did that in the new birth.
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But we need to renew our minds. We need to have our thinking changed because it's when our thinking change that then our hearts grab onto what we were thinking and then our hands do.
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In other words, it is the theological non -God trinity of sanctification.
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The mind, the affections, and then the will. That is sanctification's blueprint. You learn stuff, you love stuff, you do stuff.
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And it's gotta be in that order or nothing changes. This is so true.
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In fact, Jonathan Edwards has famously said that the will, that is the things that you do is simply the handmaiden of the affections informed by the intellect.
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Here's what this means. Everyone, whether you didn't graduate first grade or you have 13
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PhDs, you all are governed by the way that you think. Because the way that you think governs the way that you feel.
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And the way that you feel governs the things that you do. So you're all thinkers. You're all theologians.
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The question is, are you thinking about God rightly and are you putting to death rightly that which has been conforming you since you opened up your first breath?
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This is why the mercies of God are the things that motivate you to live as a sacrifice, to live rightly.
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Because once you know them, you can love them and live in light of them. But until you love them, you can't live in light of them.
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So if we are not living godly lives, that means that we are not godly people because we don't love God. And we haven't meditated on his truth.
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The problem with many of us is not that we don't have the truth that we need, but we refuse to let that truth travel five feet south.
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And then out of our hands, our fingertips and our feet to absorb, absorb, absorb.
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And the question becomes, how do we do that? We do that by engaging the word of God.
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We live in it. We breathe it. We let it cut us to pieces.
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Psalm 119, nine through 11 is a good passage to look at. Hebrews chapter four, verse 12 and 13 tells us that the word of God opens us bare and it deals with us and it convicts us.
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And woe to us if we do not listen, because eventually we will stand in front of God and we will answer for why we ignored his.
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And so what happens if we do this? Lastly, I want you to look at the mark, the mark.
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We've seen the means. Now, the mark. He goes on to say, so that, right?
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So do not be conformed to this world, verse two, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that, and what is that, children?
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What do we call those things? Purpose clauses, right? Instilling it into you deep, all right?
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Purpose clause. That means here's the payoff, right?
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Because if you present your bodies as a sacrifice, one that is living, one that is holy, one that is pleasing to God, and you are conforming yourself to Christ and not the world and being transformed by the renewing of your mind, then you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good, pleasing, and perfect.
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Now, this pleasing and perfect, good, pleasing, and perfect is a wordplay on the above, right?
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If you are living as being pleasing to God, then you will see what is pleasing in God, his will.
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Now, this word approve here in the English obscures things a little bit.
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Not totally, I'm not trying to remove your love for the word of God or your ability to understand it, but when we say approve in English, we usually mean we're giving it permission.
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We're giving someone permission, right? For many of you, you work the nine to five, and you clock in and you clock out with a card or on a computer system, and you might want to go on vacation at some point or go on paternity leave for some of you.
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There's a lot out who've had children lately and ones that are about to come, which is beautiful and wonderful. Or maybe you're sick.
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We have a few families out sick, and they got to put in their time off request, and it gets approved or denied.
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So oftentimes in English, when we use the word approve, we think about it as giving permission to do something.
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That is not what's being said here. Nobody's giving God approval for anything. This word here literally means to prove by testing.
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In other words, what is being said here is, if you do these things, then you will see that God's moral will is beautiful, perfect, and amazing.
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That it is actually, according to this, what? Good, pleasing, and perfect.
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Another way to look at this is do it. Prove it by testing it.
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You always see these commercials for different restaurants or different products, and it's like, if you don't love it, it's on us, right?
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If you don't like it within 30 days, hit us up, money back guarantee, we'll give it to you. In many ways, that is what
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Paul is saying here. He's saying if you live your life in such a way, as a living and holy sacrifice, that is pleasing to God, where you are living on His altar, not desiring to crawl off, and that you are completely ridding yourself of the things of this world, and that you are transforming by the renewing of your mind, and that you are living this way constantly with every breath, with all that you are, you'll see that it's worth it.
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Because there's nothing better than Jesus. There's nothing better than living for Jesus.
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And if I had a million lives to do over, I'm sure Paul would say I'd do it even harder. To live is
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Christ, Paul has said elsewhere, to die is gain. To live is Christ, it's all about Christ.
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It's all about Christ. And too many of us will start to take our last breath and wish we gave
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Him more. In fact, I believe this text is teaching that we will all say that. No matter how much we give
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Him, so give Him more, because He gave you everything. Everything.