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Romans 12 says, do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, and then you may test the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God. That is not a self-serving verse, when we understand the text.
This is when we understand the text, studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ.
Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We are in Romans 12, 1 and 2 again today. I apologize for being late with this episode. We had some friends from out of town come and visit us yesterday, so I didn't get this recorded until this morning.
But yesterday's episode was long enough that it should have carried you over into today, right? I did not expect when I started that it was going to come out to be 45 minutes. When I did that sermon with my congregation, it was an hour long, going back through those 11 chapters of Romans and doing highlighting and underlining.
But I thought that I could move it a little bit quicker for the broadcast and not talk about as much. Well, didn't turn out that way. It was still 45 minutes long. But anyway, I hope that was of service to you, understanding Romans 12, 1 even better, bringing all these things back to light that we've talked about over the course of the last five months.
We expounded upon the mercies aspect of Romans 12, 1. We're going to go on from there, look at the rest of the verse and also verse 2. So Romans 12, 1 and 2, 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. We come back to verse 1, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, that therefore is encompassing of all the previous 11 chapters, this doctrine of justification, of being justified by faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord, that Paul had expounded upon in this letter to the Roman Christians all the way up to this point.
The mercies of God that he has presented to them through this deep theology, according to this, present your bodies as a living sacrifice. That's a living sacrifice as opposed to being a dead one. You cannot attain salvation or justification by your death.
We attain it through Christ's death and by his perfect blood are our sins atoned for and we are made right in the presence of God. Now the Mormons actually believe that Christ's death did not atone for all sins and there are some sins that man has to spill his own blood in order to atone for.
This is why the state of Utah is the only state in the U .S. that still has death by firing squad because if a person is guilty of murder, the only way that he can enter into heaven, so to speak, the Mormons believe in different levels of heaven, but the only way that he can enter into heaven is if his own blood is spilled.
So for that capital crime, he would be killed by firing squad. That's what the Mormons believe. Now the Mormons are doctrinally off on all kinds of things. That just happens to be one of the doctrinal problems that they have in their belief system.
We cannot attain salvation by spilling our own blood. It was only by Christ's blood can we attain right standing before God by faith. And so because Christ has died, we are to live as a living sacrifice, presenting our bodies to the Lord as a living sacrifice, no longer under the sacrificial system in the temple of blood needing to be spilled to atone for sins.
Christ paid that once for all. And so now in Christ Jesus, we are to live as he lived, holy and acceptable unto the Lord. So in our conduct and in the very ways that we behave, everything that we do with our bodies, let it be holy unto the Lord.
This does not give us salvation, but it is a reflection of the salvation that we have in Christ. We're talking about something spiritual here. As Paul says at the end of the verse, which is your spiritual worship.
So the way that we reflect on the outside, the holy change that has happened on the inside is a spiritual acts of worship. So there are things, desires of the flesh that we do not indulge in anymore because we have died to sin and are alive in Christ Jesus.
Paul has mentioned this before in chapter six. So in light of all these things that we've read, we are to present ourselves as living sacrifices unto the Lord. And this is our spiritual act of worship.
Okay. Now, verse two. And as I mentioned in the introduction, this is a hugely popular verse. It's one of the verses that I wrote in my book, 40 of the most popular Bible verses and what they really mean.
Romans 12 two is one of the most popular verses on any Bible search engine that you could use out there. 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. Now let me tell you what this verse meant to me when I first came into it in about middle school. Okay. I attended this conference when I was a teenager, a young teen called dare to be different.
It was in Wichita, Kansas. I don't remember anything about the preaching. I remember that Romans 12 two was the theme verse. I remember that PFR pray for rain was the guest band that played my favorite all time Christian band.
Okay. Anyway, so this was the theme verse. It was printed on our shirts and I loved the verse because we had been living in Kansas for just a couple of years and I thought it was a mistake or I thought it was something that God had called my parents to do, but he had something different for me.
How do I become the next Michael W. Smith living in Kansas? This is what I was thinking in my middle school mind. And so Romans 12 two is kind of a verse that to me helped me realize that God is for my dreams and if I believe in God and I have faith in him, then my dreams will come true.
So let me, let me exegete for you how I understood this verse in my young boy mind. Okay. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind meant to me that I'm not to do what everybody else thinks that I should do or I should not be depending upon their opinions to know whether or not I'm doing the right thing or I'm not trying to be popular in their eyes.
All right. That was what that half of the verse meant to me. And then the next half of the verse that by testing, you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. This meant to me that God's will is the Christian equivalent of wishing upon a star.
So God's will for me is to do something great and amazing somewhere else other than Kansas in the future. So if I'm not trying to please everybody else and do what they expect of me and instead I'm looking for God's will, then all of my dreams will come true.
That's the way that I viewed Romans 12 two when I was too young to know better. When I was a child, I thought like a child. I behaved like a child. I acted like a child. I reason like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
Here's how we're to understand this verse. And it couples quite beautifully with verse one. This is this is basically Paul's introduction into this next section, the sanctification section of of Romans chapters 12 through 16 and verses one and two are the introduction to this section.
So they go together. Do not be conformed to this world. Is going back with presenting your bodies as a living sacrifice. And this is your spiritual worship. So don't live like the world. Don't do what the world is doing.
You have taken off the old self and all of its sinful practices and put on the new self, which is being renewed after the image of its creator, which Paul talked about with the Colossians. Do not be conformed to this world.
Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. I've heard Chip Ingram talk about this transformed by the renewal of your mind thing as being something that is supposed to happen every day. This is not when you got saved, you transformed in your thinking.
But every single day you are taking thoughts captive to obey Christ. Second Corinthians 10, five, every single day, renewing our minds in the Lord. We also have Christ in Luke nine, twenty three, if I remember the reference correctly saying, if you are going to be my disciple, you must take up your cross once a week at Christmas and Easter and follow after me.
Take up your cross daily and follow me again. Even here in this charge, Christ is calling for a daily submission of our mind and our thoughts to the Lord. Being transformed by the renewal of your mind is a constant and daily process, man.
When the world gets into our heads, whether we want it to or not, we are still inhabiting fleshly bodies in the world. And so there is all kinds of stuff in the world that's getting into our minds. It is toxic and it needs cleansed.
Even no matter how Puritan you are trying to keep these things out of your minds and away from yourself, it's still getting in there. We do need to be disciplined in our in our boundaries, not giving ourselves into opportunities to be tempted by something in the world.
So we do need to be careful by what we expose ourselves to, what we watch on TV, what we what movies we go see, what music we are listening to. All of these things are toxic. I had someone try to say to me yesterday that it's not what goes into a man, but what comes out of him that defiles him, quoting the words of Christ.
Well, when you're using that to try to justify the music you're listening to or the TV shows you watch, you don't understand what it was that Christ was talking about. You don't understand what Scripture is calling us to when it says that we are to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God.
Standing before the throne of God, is it OK for you to watch that movie that you watched last night? Do you think that that is OK to the Lord? So do not be conformed to this world. Be transformed by renewing your mind, constantly submitting your thoughts to Christ, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
How do we test the will of God? How do we even know what the will of God is? Well, God's will has been revealed to us in the Scriptures. Paul said to the Ephesians, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of God is.
What he was basically telling the Ephesians to do is study God's word. Don't be ignorant of what has been revealed of God's will through the prophets and the apostles, but study these things and know them.
Paul said to the Thessalonians, this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality. And he also said to the Thessalonians that we are to be thankful in all circumstances for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.
That's not what we want to hear. We don't want to hear that God's will for us is to be thankful in all circumstances and to stay away from sexual immorality and temptations of this world. What we want to have is our fortunes told.
And that's what I wanted when I was a kid reading this verse, looking for something outside of the state of Kansas. Now I'm in my 30s and I'm still in Kansas, but loving it, doing God's work by preaching his gospel to the flock that I have been entrusted to care for.
It is a wonderful calling and I love it. I would not ask for anything else. So God's will for us is to be thankful in our circumstances, which I am now. I had to come to learn this, putting away childish things and to grow in sanctification and in holiness to keep ourselves unstained by the world.
As we also read in James 1 .27, by testing, you may discern what is the will of God. Testing all things in this world against the scriptures. That's what's being meant here. Don't be conformed to the world, but test everything in the world according to the will of God that has been revealed to us in his word.
That you may discern what is there, what is therefore good and acceptable and perfect. Is it okay for me to watch this movie or do this thing or engage with these friends or talk this way? Test all things according to the word of God so that you may discern what is good and acceptable and perfect.
This is a daily process. It is something that you should do every day. It is something that you will get better at as you grow, constantly submitting yourself to the Lord and his word, the authority of his word, and he will set your paths straight.
Our great God, we are so grateful to this word that has been given to us that we might have something with which we can test all things in this world and know whether something is pleasing to God or something is the work of the devil and I need to stay away from that.
So Lord, give me a mind and a spirit that is not trying to use scripture and twisting it and bending it in such a way to get what I want. But I understand the scriptures well enough that I am submitting myself to your will and what is pleasing and acceptable to you.
May all things that I do with my mind and with my body, God, may all of these things be a spiritual worship pleasing and acceptable in your sight. Discipline me according to these. In the name of Jesus I pray, Amen.
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