Romans 12. Eleven chapters of what God has done for us. And now Paul moves to our response, how we are to be shaped by this amazing grace. We look through the reading of God’s word. If you please join me in prayer. Christ our God, we ask that you set our hearts on fire with love through your word, that in its flame we may love you with all our hearts, with all our minds, with all of our strength, and our neighbor as ourselves, so that by keeping your commandments, we might who are the giver of every good and perfect gift. And this we pray and ask through our Lord Jesus. Amen. Continuing in verse one, 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. The word of the Lord. Jesus’ story of the prodigal son is one of his most well known.
And the reason is that most of us understand being wavered, being prodigal. The sheer mercy of the Father rightly touches our hearts. The younger brother, he takes his inheritance and he leaves the family to go live a dump with a terrible life, as it were in Las Vegas, until the money ran out and he was destitute. He’s desperate, he’s ashamed, he returns home hoping not really to be a son any longer, but to be a hired hand by his father. And then we hear Jesus say, But while he was a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion. He ran and embraced him and kissed him. Of course, Jesus presents to us the image of our heavenly Father, the joy of the Father in finding the lost and the wayward. The prodigal may have left the Father, but the Father never left his son. Included in this story, of course, is the older brother, who outwardly he did what he was supposed to do, and he mad and he was upset at the mercy of his father towards his younger brother. I did everything right. And look at my piece of dirt brother, who you have shown love and compassion.
And after everything he has done. And Jesus, of course, is getting to our heart. He’s showing us where our allegiance lie. He’s showing us how we understand grace. Are we recipients of God’s grace and his kindness, or are we trying to earn our right standing? Are we being shaped by the Father? Or are we demanding that we get paid out for our good behavior. Grace before obedience or obedience before grace. One is Christianity, the other is not. The right order is absolutely everything. Because of God’s mercies given to us in Christ Jesus, we are now free to live a life that is pleasing to him. The Lord is, of course, not indifferent to how we live our life. Paul has already given his judgment on those who think that it’s okay to keep sinning because they have received grace. He’s already said, By no means. How can we who die the sin continue to live in it any longer. Those who have been freed by Jesus live differently. If you have not been freed by Christ, you are enslaved to your sin. You cannot break free on your own. Those the Son has set free, they are free indeed, and they are now to be shaped by this grace that they have received.
This is where Paul now directs us. Our lives are shaped by sacrifice, our lives are shaped by renewal. He begins I appeal to you, therefore, brothers. That therefore it looks back to everything he’s already been talking about. In the very start of his letter, up until this point, Paul has been building a foundation of our absolute utter dependence on Jesus. And in light of this, he urges, he appeals to us by the mercies of God. Mercies is plural. It speaks to all the acts of God’s compassion and kindness that he has already highlighted so far. And because of what our Father has done on our behalf, he says, to present your bodies. Now, it’s not an accident, he says, bodies. In the Greek and the Roman world, the body was just a trap for the spirit that you had to be set free from. But Paul brings us back to the very foundation of our creation, our being as body and soul, that we are to worship God completely in who we are. It’s not simply internal, it’s not simply abstract, but it involves our whole being. Everything is involved. And this includes the actions that we do externally, loving and caring for others, loving and caring for the things of God, that the internal and the external combine together in our presenting ourselves to God.
And then he goes on. We present ourselves, how? As a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Sacrifices were dead animals offered up to God, something dead put on an altar. And Paul turns this around. We are to be living sacrifices. Our lives are to be the sacrifices presented to God. In being united to Jesus, our former way of life has been put to death, and we have now been raised to a new life in him. And so there’s a living sacrifice, which Paul says is our spiritual worship. Now, that word spiritual, it gets translated in a lot of different ways. You’ll notice that in lots of translations. It’s one of those words that’s hard to capture with just one English word. In the Greek, it’s logikus, which we get our English word logical from. It speaks of a rational or a reasonable quality. And it’s spiritual in the sense of being from the heart, not just outward motivation. And that word worship, it can speak to our lives in general. All of life is worship to God. And it can speak of specific gathering of God’s people for corporate worship. And here, Paul is speaking in more of this general sense, a life dedicated to God in every area.
I put this in your bulletin, but it’s a great summary. Richard Longnecker is a New Testament scholar. He provides a full translation of this, just filling out all nuances. He said, It is eminently reasonable, both intellectually and spiritually, for believers in Jesus, because they’ve experienced the previously mentioned mercies of God, to dedicate themselves wholly to God. In fact, that’s your proper act of worship as rational people. So if you want a filled out version that’s in your bulletin that fills in all the places and the nuances that’s being spoken of. We are to present. We are to offer ourselves. That’s the response of God’s people to his mercy, to his grace. Even if you offer an offering, offer a sacrifice, saying, now we offer, present ourselves. Earlier in Romans 6, there Paul said, Do not offer your members, your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, your members, your body to God as instruments for righteousness. And then it’s a couple of verses later, For just as you once presented your members, your bodies, as slavers to impurity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification.
Now, let’s just stop just for a minute and hear Paul again. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. How often do we hear, Offer yourselves as a good sacrifice so that you will be holy and acceptable to God? That’s a big difference. But isn’t that so often how we hear this? Offer yourself as a good sacrifice, then you’ll be holy and acceptable to God. That’s the very heart of human religion. Do good so that God will bless you. And if we don’t, then we’re not acceptable to God. We can hear, I must do right things so that God will be pleased with me. No, Paul has been telling us that we have a right status with God already by being united to Jesus. It’s not based It’s based on our performance, it’s based on his performance. Of course, some of us are like, Well, I don’t feel holy. I don’t feel acceptable. Now, often it’s the case, our emotional state can take time to catch up with our actual state. I said this before, when you’re first married, when a pronouncement is made, the husband and wife, you don’t feel married right away.
It takes time for your emotional state to catch up with your marital status. There’s weirdness to it. And sometimes in our own life as believers, that our emotional state doesn’t connect with our status in Christ. And sometimes it’s because we’re sinning. We do feel bad. That’s the conviction of the Holy spirit. As Paul said, don’t present your members as instruments for unrighteousness. And if you do, the spirit in you is calling you back to righteousness. If I’m in Christ, my status This is not based on my performance, though. In light of God’s mercies, I have been made wholly acceptable, pleasing through the true living sacrifice. The one who was offered alive on the altar of the cross on which he died. As one New Testament scholar, he put it well, he said, Worship that pleases God is informed. That is, it’s offered by the Christian who understands who God is and what has been given to us in the gospel and what he demands of us. Paul is putting the right order to our actions because God, you, therefore. And from sacrifice, Paul moves to renewal. Verse 2, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is the good and acceptable and perfect.
In English, we get this really nice contrast between conformed and transformed. And again, we hear, you can renew your mind by doing a bunch of right stuff. No, that makes you your own savior. Our renewal is by the mercies of God. Our minds are no longer darkened by sin’s deceitfulness and enslavement because we’ve been set free by Jesus. Jesus. That’s the good news. J. B. Phillips, if you’re familiar with that older paraphrase of this, he said, Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold. That’s a really good picture of this. Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold. And that is certainly a great challenge for all believers. It’s true. However you spend your time, what you take in, it affects you. A diet of the world will squeeze you into its mold. And we are called not to be conformed to that, to be transformed. That very word spoken here is the same one when Jesus is on the mount of transfiguration, said he was transformed, he was transfigured. It’s the same word. Our being united to Christ, it transforms our lives. The Holy spirit has begun to free us from our self-centeredness, our egocentricity.
Paul here doesn’t really lay out how this renewal process takes place. But other places, he tells us it’s through the Holy spirit working by, with, and through the word of God. Renewal takes place through our worship, what we’re doing here, through exercising righteous acts, concerned for others. All of those things are a part of what God does to transform us. Obedience flows out of what God has already done. It’s not something that we can do on our own. Look again at the last half of this verse, that by testing, you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect. You see, our new life in Christ is to enable us to discern what is pleasing to God. In that, we don’t simply need a list of applications and moral commands. We are to be able to test these things. Even as new circumstances come up, we apply God’s wisdom to them. All the variations of life that bring before us, we don’t have to go back and what’s the right conduct here? It’s learning to discern in those moments what indeed is pleasing to God because his spirit dwells in us.
He’s transforming us into the image of God to his son. And that’s a part of the life of a believer. Now, the will of God, it’s not talking about guidance here, but how we recognize God’s way or intention for his people. The vast majority of time in scripture where you see the will of God, almost invariably, it’s talking about this, God’s intention, God’s way. The vast majority of time that people say the will of God, they’re talking about divine guidance for a particular situation. We need to be more concerning the will of God. Worry far less about what your next step should be and far more about how your steps in life conform to God’s way and intention. That’s far more important. Should I go this way? Should I go this way? I don’t know. But whichever way you go, do so as a Christian. Do so in a way that brings honor and glory to Jesus. That the steps you take reflect a life that’s being conformed to his way, not to the world. And that discernment requires our allegiance to be given a Holy to the Lord, where we learn to delight in his ways.
Whatever it is that you are living for, that is what you’re sacrificing for. And Paul is saying that we are to be a sacrifice to the Lord. You see, nobody is ultimately free. We all live for something. And if you’re living for yourself, you will in the end be a slave to the very things that you’re trying to feed yourself. Those things become your master. Paul is saying, We’ve been set free from that. These are the very things that Jesus has come to liberate us from. Our identity is based on what Christ has done, not on what we do. And because of this, we are then shaped by his grace and his mercy. The right order is everything here. Think about it. We’ve all probably experienced this and seen this. How easy is to say as a parent, the skull of a child, they do something and you say something like, you’re a bad boy, you’re a bad girl. And we don’t just do that of children. We do that of all kinds of people. A bad act equals a bad person. Immediately someone will say, well, yeah, but don’t bad acts come from bad people?
Don’t we judge a tree by its fruit? Certainly. And yet for Christians, your identity is now based in the good act that Jesus has done on your behalf. See the difference? We are to call one another back to who we are when we act contrary to that. When you’re not acting according to the freedom that Jesus has given to you, then as brothers and sisters in Christ, we call one another back. This is who you are. You shouldn’t be doing these things because that’s not who you are in Christ. That’s entirely different. You are better than that. You belong to Jesus. And to be able to say that in a way that lifts people up. Yes, there’s a conviction that comes with sin, to be sure. But Paul has already said, We are no longer under condemnation. Condemnation and conviction are very different. To think how we speak, not only to our children, but to one another. Yes, you are better than that. We do expect better behavior from you. Why? Because you are in Christ. Think about it, going back to the prodigal son. But while he was still a long way off, His father saw him, felt compassion, and ran, and embraced him, and kissed him.
The father ran to his son because he held the relationship before he held the conduct. When his son left, the relationship was fractured by sin, and it did need to be healed by confession and forgiveness, to be sure. But that is not what held the relationship. Without the Father’s having kept his son in his heart, the Father would not have put his arms around him. The relationship did not rest on moral performance. And one writer says, Therefore, it could not be destroyed by immoral acts. By squandering the wealth of a family, he didn’t squander his sonship to the Father. Because his sonship was not based on whether or not he squandered. The son’s confession came after the father’s acceptance. The order matters, doesn’t it? No confession was necessary for him to be embraced because the will to embrace was independent of his behavior. And then that drove the confession. The relationship had priority over the rules. The elder brother could not see this. The father held both sons in his heart. The elder brother did not. He could not rejoice in the mercies given to his brother because he saw the rules before the relationship.
How often it is that we do that with the Lord? We see the rules before the relationship. And I have to get back into the rules so the relationship can be restored. It’s like, no. The relationship is restored through what Jesus has done. And now we have the great privilege of the surrender of our whole life in a living sacrifice to the Lord. Paul is bringing this to this point. You now can surrender your life holy to God because of the acceptance and the forgiveness and renewal that you have received in Jesus. We have been set free, and this is how people who Jesus set free, how they live. The thought of, how on earth can I live a life that’s pleasing to God? It is flowing out of the pleasure that the Father has received from his son and that you haven’t been named according to his son in your baptism. You take on his identity. And now you are free to live a life that can please the Father. And it separates off the heart between a younger brother and an elder brother. Because if your life is just trying to figure out, how can I live a good life to get God off my back?
You’re never going to be free. You do not see the love of the Father. You just see that I just need to do the right things just to keep him satisfied, as opposed to, I get to do the right things because of the acceptance that he has given me and how that pleases him. Their For in light of God’s mercies, present yourself as a living sacrifice. We’ve had 11 chapters of just the profound mercy and sovereignty and grace of God, the understanding of our own wretchedness and sinfulness apart from that, and how he has culminated this after this beautiful doxology of the amazingness of God. He said, Now, brothers and sisters, you have been set free to live a life pleasing to God all through what Jesus has done. The order is everything. Grace before obedience. And that his obedience then flows from a heart transformed and continuing to be renewed by his grace and his mercy, shaped by the good news of Jesus. Pray with me. Father, as we come before you this day, We’ve all heard this passage, Lord. We’ve memorized this passage. And Lord, we confess so often we hear, do good so that we will be accepted.
And Father, we confess we cannot do good enough. Father, we just thank you that you have found we who were lost, that you have brought us to yourself through Jesus. And Father may it now please you by your spirit dwelling in us that we would live lives conformed to his image. Father, we thank you for how your spirit convicts us where we stray. But Father, we pray that you would continue to show us the joy of our salvation, to fill our life with the hope of this good news, that we would be able to live this way before others. We pray and ask these things through Jesus, our dear elder brother. Amen. Please stand. All for Jesus.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.