Do Not Be Conformed to This World

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. Romans 12:1

Romans 12:1–2 – Romans: The Righteousness of God
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 10, 2023 (am)

We are created to be worshipers of God. That was the beginning of humanity (Gen.1-2). That is the end (aim) of humanity (Rev.21-22). And that’s where humanity is called by God to live all along the way in between (Rom.12:1-2).

We understand worship to be adoration, reverence, allegiance—the motivational impulse that shapes our identity, governs our speech, and guides our life, displayed in our communication, and even our dress. Wearing the logo of our favorite team is the easiest way to see it, and listening to us celebrate their strengths, lament their weaknesses, and receive their wins and losses as our personal victories and defeats. I’m not even critiquing that dynamic among us humans; I’m just observing it and noting what it means. We were created to be worshipers and that characteristic permeates every area of our lives.

How much more fulfilling it is for us, then, when we discover the primary Object we were created to worship! Paul led us up to that understanding as last week’s text came to a close, and not just to a realization of Whom we were created to worship but to a bit of a taste of how we’re called to worship Him. 11:33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! They’re perfect! 34 “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” 35 “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” He doesn’t need our help to know what’s absolutely best for us, and He doesn’t lack anything that’s needed to achieve that! 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. The entire universe revolves around Him! To him—and Him alone!—be glory forever. Amen. That’s what we’re made for! Now, how does it happen?

Paul gives us two charges that tell us how.

Present Your Bodies as a Living Sacrifice – 1

1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers [and sisters], by the mercies of God—in light of all He’s done for you, granting you salvation from the disastrous outcome of your sinful rebellion against Him by His own unilateral, sovereign intervention, reconciling you to Himself at His own cost and giving you an eternal future with Him in His new heavens and new earth solely because He’s chosen to do so—present your bodies as a living sacrifice….

Now, that’s a vivid image, a living sacrifice. It really brings to mind only two scenes: Abraham with Isaac on Mt. Moriah (Gen.22) and Jesus alone on Mt. Calvary. In the first, God provided a substitute for the sacrifice. In the second, God provided a Substitute through the sacrifice—a Substitute for each of us who’ll receive Jesus’ sacrifice as satisfaction of the demands of God’s holiness to cleanse our sin and absorb the penalty for it.

But if Jesus is our substitute sacrifice, why do we still need to present [our own] bodies to God as a living sacrifice? What’s left to do? Why is more sacrifice needed? Simply put, He’s given Himself for us, so we now give ourselves to Him. Paul set us up for c.12 way back in c.6. 6:3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life—that we might live like one who’s been sacrificed. We’re a living sacrifice because the life we live after trusting Christ as Savior is lived under His reign-of-life, not under Adam’s reign-of-death, as Paul had just explained in c.5 (vv.12-21). It’s just like he wrote to the Galatians: Gal.2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. By faith in Christ, we Rom.6:13 [d]o not present [our] members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but [we] present [ourselves] to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and [our] members to God as instruments for righteousness. We live for Him!

Presenting [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, then, is a response to the gracious salvation God has granted us in Christ. It doesn’t contribute to our salvation, but it does confirm it, meaning, it testifies to the authenticity of our conversion by displaying the newness of life that we’ve received by faith in Jesus. And even though this obedience of faith (1:5; 16:26) doesn’t happen automatically, we’re impelled toward it by the mercies of God that come to us in Christ (Moo 2018 768) such that the living sacrifice we present to God is holy and acceptable to [Him] as [our] [reasonable,] spiritual[, service of] worship. It’s how we worship Him!

Be Transformed by the Renewal of Your Minds – 2

But Paul doesn’t leave us there, vivid though this description is. He goes on to tell us more of what happens within us by God’s grace that we should receive and embrace and pursue with our whole sanctified, undivided, undiluted will.

He calls us to be transformed by the renewal of [our] mind (2), in direct opposition to what happens more naturally because we still live in our fallen flesh in this world even though we’ve been born again into the next. This world just naturally works to squeeze you into its mold (Phillips)—an outside-in sort of conformity. But God’s Spirit works in our hearts to bring about an inside-out conformity to Jesus, a change that begins in the heart and mind and, over time, changes our whole life to look like Jesus.

This word transformed is used in only two other places in the NT: Mark’s account of Jesus’ transfiguration (Mar.9:2) and Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians: 2Co.3:18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…. Paul attributes this inside-out change to the work of the Spirit in the believer’s life and Mark’s description of Jesus on the mountain with Moses and Elijah offers a visible illustration of that very work.

Those who trust in Jesus are going to grow in His likeness as that trust is strengthened by their experience of His grace while living in this realm of Adam. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul called this process putting on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator (Col.3:10). And he said this renewal results from seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God and setting [our] minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, recognizing that [we] have died, and [our] life is now hidden with Christ in God; then when Christ who is [our] life appears, we will also appear with him in glory (Col.3:1-4)‚ the very glory Paul described to the Corinthians, which is a reflection of the glory Jesus displayed on the mount of transfiguration, and which becomes ours in the resurrection body we’ll receive when Jesus returns.

But that’s down the road a ways. Our experience now is of the transforming work that’s done in our hearts by the Holy Spirit as He causes the Word of God to come alive in our heart and mind and enables us to walk in obedience to it and experience the fruit of that obedience such 2 … that by testing [we] may discern what is the will of God—that we may live the will of God, not so much know it in advance but experience it in real-time, Spirit-enabled obedience, the obedience of faith—[and therefore grasp that it] is good and acceptable and perfect—like, by the Spirit’s work we know [inside], almost instinctively, what we are to do to please God (Moo 2018 776), and we increasingly love that experience.

Conclusion

These two verses are the end, the intended outcome, of all we’ve studied so far in this letter, and they’re the topic sentence over all the remaining instruction we’ll hear in it. One writer even said: Paul’s whole written work… could be seen as an extended application of Romans 12:1-2 (Wright in Moo 2018 767). We hear this gravity, this significance, this comprehensive instruction, as we first read this brief passage. And it immediately captures our imagination as a result. We long to experience what it describes—the transformation, freedom from the stamping press of this world that we escape only as we present [our] bodies to God as a living sacrifice in expression of our spiritual worship of Him. But still, it’s so elusive. Or at least it feels elusive. Our hearts and minds are so trapped in Romans 7-type struggles that we can lose hope of Romans 12 taking root in us, even though it’s undeniably our inheritance in Christ (cf. Phi.2:5).

I believe our only hope is prayer—calling out to God to enable us to hear Paul’s appeal in this passage and then to lean into the Spirit to enable our obedience to it, and therefore our experience of it, of this holy transformation. It’s so much harder to be freed from the snare of this world than we tend to believe. We’re so much more deeply ensnared by this world than we’d ever think possible. Only the loving God Who’s provided such a great salvation could even begin to possess the power to make the vivid descriptions in this text true of us as a body, of us as a church and as the individual members of it.

Toward that end, therefore, I’ve asked two Elders to lead us in prayer before we move to the Lord’s Table this morning, one asking our Father to enable us to present [our] bodies to [Him] as a living sacrifice and the other asking Him to enable us to be transformed by the renewal of [our] mind.

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Resources

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Next SUNDAY:  Think with Sober Judgment, Romans 12:3–8