A Living Sacrifice

So yeah, my name is Ben Kelly.

I'm I'm excited to be here this morning.

Uh these pat this passage today, these verses, I've actually done um a good deal of work on them this year in an academic setting, and I'm really eager to see how they transfer over to the pulpit.

Um there's a there's a big um just a big call to worship in these in these verses.

So uh one of the things we'll be talking about today is the use of the mind in worship.

How do we use our heads to worship God?

We don't normally associate that with our worship.

A lot of times the worship is a feeling for us, or how we, you know, we come here and we get real excited.

Um, but today we're gonna talk about how Paul really sets the standard of you enter into a life of worship by first renewing your mind so that your entire life can be transformed.

And so um let me step, let me set the stage for you a little bit.

Um this is actually my um this is really my expertise in academia, talking about the relationship between our faith, what we believe by faith, and where our mind intersects.

Where do faith and reason intersect in our lives?

And I've served in churches before with pastors and uh you know ministry leaders who are they're really kind of scared to use the mind.

They think about philosophy and they think about thinking about their faith, and they're just like, no, it's it's bad.

We we don't need to do that.

Everything we believe, we take it by faith.

And I sit there and go, okay, I don't really necessarily believe that.

That hasn't been the historical position of the church.

I don't believe that's the biblical position, but okay, I think you're overreacting to people on the other side who say, no, we really don't have faith.

Everything we believe, we get there by our reason.

That's not what the Bible teaches at all, but different theologians throughout the history of the church have taught that, both Protestant and Roman Catholic.

It's kind of scary that Protestants would teach that too.

But the idea of the relationship between faith and reason, we're gonna talk a little bit about that today.

See, the view that Paul presents in Romans 12 is that we as Christians who have faith, we ought to be transformed by the use of our minds to better help us understand those truths of faith.

We do this so that we're able to worship God.

It's almost like this is the first step in worshiping God.

This was the view of the great theologian Augustine.

I'm sure some of you have heard of Augustine before.

Outside of the writers of the Bible, he is undoubtedly the greatest and most influential theologian of all time.

He is um the church in the West simply would not exist without him.

Um it's just that important.

All these guys that people come up here and talk about, you know, John Calvin and Martin Luther, they were reading Augustine, man.

And Augustine was reading Paul, so not to not to put him too much on a pedestal there.

But um Augustine, Augustine believed that what we need to do is we approach certain things, we approach our faith, we have faith in certain revealed truths of the gospel.

All right?

And then what we do is we work with our minds to better understand those truths.

And so what he did was he actually talked about this.

Sorry, I'm getting mixed up on my pages here.

Forgot it was front and back.

He talked about this with the Trinity.

All right?

Augustine said, the Trinity is a difficult truth to arrive at.

You can't arrive at it logically, you can't think your way to the Trinity, right?

And we understand the Trinity in the Bible to be a three-part definition, all right?

So the three-part definition goes like this there is one God, alright?

He exists in three persons, and every person is fully God.

Now, do you understand?

That's tough.

So there is one God, he exists in three persons, and every person is fully God.

You will never arrive at that conclusion by reason alone.

In fact, I'm willing to bet that if you have non-believing friends, non-Christian friends, and they're asking you questions about your faith, they're gonna ask you questions about the Trinity because it just does not make sense, right?

Well, Gusam came along and he believes that Paul points to this.

He says, Well, we believe in the Trinity because it has been revealed to us by God.

This is what God says in his holy divine word.

And we don't understand it just by our reason alone, but we can better understand it through the use of our minds, and we can we can better worship God because of that.

And so that's what we're gonna be looking at today, that that idea of how do we engage the mind, how do we fully give ourselves over as a sacrifice, a living sacrifice to worship God in everything we are.

There's a process to it, and it starts up here.

All right, so the first two verses of the 12th chapter of Romans, they're significant for the entire book.

All right.

Uh and Pastor Justin talked about this a little bit last week about how Paul is moving into a time of worship in this book.

And Paul does this in every one of his letters, but it's really apparent in Romans 12.

Uh, these verses act kind of like a hinge or a turning of a page.

There's definite, there's a difference between what he has said and what he's about to say.

Um, theologians will say that Paul, for the first 11 chapters of Romans, has been talking about orthodoxy.

That's a that's a you know just a fancy word for saying right teaching, okay, or right doctrine.

All right.

And um now he's moving into writing about orthopraxy, which is right practice.

This is a very important question.

The the theologian Francis Schaeffer termed it, how should we then live?

I'm sure you've all heard that question.

In light of this great truth that Paul has been laying out for us, the gospel, justification by faith alone, the relationship between sin and the law, God's sovereignty and his mercy.

All of that laid out very intricately, very beautifully by Paul.

And then we're left with now what do we do?

Paul's gonna tell us.

Alright.

So I want to highlight a few things in these verses before we can move on, though.

Verse one, the very first words, I appeal to you, therefore.

And let's just stop there.

I appeal to you, therefore.

All right?

Now, have you ever heard a preacher get up at the pulpit and he say, if the word therefore is there, you ought to know what it's there for, right?

You ever you guys come from like preachers like that?

You ever hear that?

No, no?

Okay.

Well, all right, so yeah, if you ever see the word therefore in your biblical text, you ought to go look back because there's a reason it's therefore, because they're crafting an argument.

All right?

Paul is crafting an argument because of this, now this.

All right, because I've told you all these great truths of the gospel, I'm moving on to tell you how to practice them.

And he says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers.

And that word appeal, we don't use that very often, right?

We use it in maybe a legal tense, like, you know, people have appeals to their court cases or stuff like that.

That's not a word we really use.

In the sense, in the in the biblical language today, or back then, and how we could understand it today, is that the appeal is to give a sympathetic response.

That's how we would define it.

That because I have given you all this great doctrinal truth, everyone, my readers, I appeal to you.

I want you to sympathetically respond with this practice I'm about to give you.

And he goes on, he says, by the mercies of God, so let's not forget that, okay?

Even though we're going, we're moving into a time of practice and to a time of how we respond to the gospel of truth, he says, by the mercies of God, do not forget that anytime you are responding to the gospel message, anytime you are responding to the truth that it is Jesus Christ who paid the debt for your sin, you are responding because of the mercies of God.

You are able to respond because of the mercies of God.

It is not something we just do on our own.

It is not something we have the power to do on our own.

It is by God's mercy.

And so if you don't remember anything else today, remember that you respond to the gospel, to the truth of who God is by his mercy.

Alright?

So we're gonna move on there from there.

So Pauly, Paul clearly states that right away, this is done by God's mercy, that because God is merciful, you even have the ability to present yourself as a sacrifice.

All right?

Now, the word bodies, he tells us to present our bodies.

Alright?

I got to clear up some ideas about bodies here, okay?

Because we would read this verse as a bunch of individual people.

This verse, Paul is reading, writing this verse just for me.

But when you look at the language and how this verse was used throughout the rest of the New Testament, it has a very community feeling to it.

All right?

There's a lot of cohesiveness.

It's written for the bodies of people gathered in a local congregation.

All right?

It's for us here.

It's like Paul is up here saying, you all, everyone in here, you present your bodies together as a living sacrifice.

Go into worship together.

This isn't your individual mandate.

I mean, it is in a sense, but it's also your corporate mandate.

It describes this closely knit body of believers in the local church.

And so while we can we can read our Americanized, you know, individualized reading about, you know, it's just my body he's talking about here.

Let's keep in mind this is something that he's calling the church to do.

He's calling all of us to go forth and do this.

And then one other thing I want to touch on there is a living sacrifice.

Now, this would have been some strange terminology for Paul's original readers.

If you know anything about who Paul was writing to in Rome, he was writing to Jewish Christians.

Right?

All right, these were predominantly, and not all of them were, but predominantly these were people who came from Judaism and they were now Christians.

Okay?

And so they understood the Old Testament sacrificial system to some level.

And what happens with a sacrifice in the Old Testament?

Well, there's two things.

One, it dies, it's dead, its blood is spilt.

Alright?

And the second thing is the entirety of it is used for the worship of God.

Go read those Old Testament books where it describes everything they do with the animal.

They don't waste it.

Right?

Everything is used.

And so if we're if we're beginning to think about how Paul is calling us to be a living sacrifice, we go on living.

Everything that we do in our entire being is lived for the glory of God.

It's lived for his worship.

That's why we that's why we talk about this band that plays up behind us or up here in front of you every Sunday.

This is not a worship band.

This is not a worship team.

Alright, I grew up in a church where we had a worship team, all right?

And I'm not saying they they consciously thought this way, but when you use that terminology, it kind of speaks that, well, this is the place where we worship.

We don't worship out there.

This is where worship happens.

And it's some special, emotional, upbeat feeling that we get, and we sing a lot of songs, and we hear this guy talk about this book that we really don't understand, and great.

No, no, everything we do, everything is worship.

So what kind of worship?

Paul says it's spiritual worship.

All right.

Now I always said, before I went back to seminary, I always said, I'm never gonna be one of those pastors that gets up here and talks about Greek words because it doesn't matter.

Well, it does matter, but it's just it's just kind of like building yourself, I know these Greek words and I'm going to say them to you.

La di-da.

It's like, well, I don't do it unless it really calls for it.

And now that I know some Greek and I read through it, I'm like, oh, this is very strange.

We need to talk about this word spiritual, this adjective that he's using to describe worship.

Because if we carry in our ideas of spiritual into the text, we're gonna get it wrong.

All right?

See, a lot of times in our culture, we think that spirit is this idea of spiritual, it's like this otherworldly outer body type of thing.

It's maybe it's psychedelic, it's kind of mysterious, and um, it's kind of ghostly or something.

No, that's not what spiritual means at all here.

The word spirit here is actually logicos, all right.

And if you have heard any Greek words before, it sounds like the word logos, all right?

And if you've ever heard anything about John 1, 1, the Greek word logos, it literally means word, the word of God.

Jesus is the word.

All right, it's a very important word in the Greek New Testament.

Well, logos, this word spiritual is actually derived from Lagos.

And so this isn't like spiritual worship that is like, you know, emotional, uh, outer body, whatever.

This is the word spiritual means it's it's a response to almost like a speech or an act.

So one way we could read this to kind of get a better sense of what Paul is saying here is that this is your reasonable worship.

That in light of everything that I have told you so far, and this is this would be Paul speaking, in light of everything I have told you so far, the truth of the gospel, you need to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

Because this is the reasonable way you are to react to the word of God, to the word of truth, to the spiritual word of truth.

Because it does, it does affect our spirit.

I'm not cutting that out.

It does.

But there's there's there's a deeper meaning, there's more meaning than just our spirit, all right?

This is how we are supposed to act.

I said earlier, how should we then live?

Paul's giving us that right there.

This is the way you act.

And so we're gonna get into that.

In verse 2, Paul says, You want to know how to live?

Don't be conformed to this world.

Now, I think this church, as a general rule, does a really good job of this.

I'm looking around, I don't know all of you, but I look around and I hear stories, and the preaching that comes from this pulpit is uh very biblically driven.

It's true to the text.

We care about what God says in his word, and we want to live rightly because of that.

I think this church does a very good job of not being conformed to the world outside.

But we may not all understand the process of how that happens.

And Paul's going to explain that because he says, you go on, how do we accomplish this task?

Paul says that we are transformed by the renewal of our minds.

So the wording, the wording is absolutely clear here.

And churches abuse this over and over again, ministries abuse this over and over again.

This is not, we are not transformed by the renewal of our hearts, we are transformed by the renewal of the mind.

So I read I read this.

Um those of you who know me, um, I I love I love philosophy, I love logic.

Um, so this is not anything great for me to say.

Like, this is this is how Ben Kelly thinks.

Like, yeah, I operate like this.

I'm the guy who are like, you need to use more of your heart, brother.

In fact, one of the conversations I had with Pastor Justin before getting up here, he was like, you need to make sure you preach to their hearts too, not just their heads.

All right, I can be too academic sometimes.

However, and I just I see churches today, I see ministries, they're so focused on creating this experience of the heart.

It's just, I want to evoke this emotional response.

It's like it has to start somewhere else.

Not that that's bad, that's a good thing that they want.

We're gonna talk about that.

The heart does need to be convicted, but it starts somewhere else.

At the beginning of his book, Love Your God with all your mind, um, writer and philosopher J.P.

Moreland, he's a Christian theologian, philosopher, um, generally believes kind of what we believe here, not everything.

He's not a Calvinist, so.

But, great guy.

I loved his book.

In the 1800s, he he describes back in the 1800s in America, there were major, major revivals going on.

Christianity grew exponentially from about the year 1800 to 1885.

There were there was the second great revival, there was the what was called the businessmen's revival, there was the Civil War revival, and there was the urban revival.

And Christianity just, you know, decisions for Jesus, personal professions of faith just skyrocketed for like 85 years.

All right, but it's generally recognized that by the year 1920, Christianity, something happened, and Christianity just started coming back down, started to decline, and it's been that way for about a hundred years, and they don't know why.

Not everyone, everyone's got an idea, but they don't know quite why.

I mean, I've got a few ideas myself.

See, Moreland notes in his book that these revivals where faith was growing, it was growing in number, but it wasn't growing in substance.

Millions, literally, literally, millions of people were coming to faith in Christ.

They were making personal declarations.

Then they were never discipled.

They may have never read their Bible, they may have not even known how to read.

They may have never even stepped foot in a church again, but hey, they they made a personal declaration of faith under a meeting tent out on a prairie.

I don't know if we would count that as a Christian conversion or not.

And what Moreland points out about this is about how this faith that's growing in almost an emotive way, very emotional feelings, very, you know, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of people getting fired up in these revival tents, and it's it's growing.

He says, it's no accident that when the faith is not growing in substance, we also see the birth of the three major Christian cults during this time.

Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian science also appeared during this time.

Now, do you understand how cults work?

It's scary.

I do.

It's scary.

You see, cults don't go out there and look for new converts.

They don't just walk down the street and just like go up to non-believers.

I mean, they do, but once they find out they're non-believers, they just kind of walk back.

No, you see, they hang out on the fringes of orthodox Christian belief and they wait for the people whose minds cannot discern the will of God.

They want the people who are young in faith, who are impressionable, who don't know what they're talking about.

They make a quasi truth in there, and man, they got them.

We had a Jehovah's Witness woman come into our house pretty regularly, I don't know, maybe a year or two ago.

And you know, my wife was telling me, she always wanted to see my wife, and my wife was telling me about it, and my wife was like, I really hope I can be, you know, a gospel message to her.

Like I can preach the gospel to her.

That's that's why I want her to come and talk to me.

That's great.

And so I'm I'm at the house one day alone, I'm working, wife and kids are out of the house, and this woman comes knocking on the door.

And um, I answer the door, she's Mrs.

Kelly here.

No, she's not here.

And she's oh, thank you, and then just turns around and leave.

Why does she leave?

You would think that somebody who has a message to tell, somebody who thinks their religion is true, would say, Oh, can I talk to you instead?

Can I tell you what I'm thinking?

I I think, and I I I don't I don't know this for sure.

My wife is a stay-at-home mom.

I think she just wanted to get in to our house through my wife because she thought maybe my wife's mind was not as well trained.

She doesn't know my wife.

Not in the slightest.

I stopped the woman as she's walking away and said, hey, wait, you know, you are, you're welcome to come here anytime.

And you can bring any pastor or elder or any church leader from your church.

But what's gonna happen is that you need to know, my wife and I have been Christians for over 25 years.

We grew up in the church.

I was a pastor for a number of years.

I'm in school, I'm in graduate school to study theology.

We know what we're talking about.

And so if you come into this house, you're gonna hear the true gospel.

I will, I will, I'll listen to you, and then I'm going to correct it with the words of Christ.

Never saw her again.

She's not looking for us.

She's looking for that untrained mind, the person who does not know how to discern the will of God.

You see, renewing our minds, training to be able to discern God's will, it's important.

That is what Paul is getting at here.

Not only does Paul give us a sense of the renewal of the mind and how important it is, but we see that the renewal of the mind, it's really a first step in our reasonable response of worship to what a merciful God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

It's the first step.

True worship, spiritual, reasonable worship is a response to what God has done for his people.

It's enabled by the Spirit of God, and it's established through God's revelation.

Spoken to us.

God's revelation speaks to the head first.

The mind has to judge the word of God so the will of God can be discerned, and then a person can be cut to the heart.

This is in the Bible.

If you're questioning what I'm saying, it's in the Bible.

Go to the beginning of Acts, look at Peter's sermon at Pentecost.

The Spirit shows up right before Peter starts preaching.

Alright?

The Spirit of God is there.

And then what does Peter do?

He goes throughout the Old Testament and he says, hey, this is how this, this, this, this, and this.

All of the Old Testament points to Christ.

He was and is the Messiah.

He is the Christ.

And the people judged it for them.

And what do they say?

What does the text say?

We're cut to the heart.

Then they ask, what should we do?

I mean, it's it's all right there.

It is the progression.

Our main idea this morning is this.

Because of God's mercy, as Christians, our reasonable response of worship is to give over everything we are for the glory of God.

And this is accomplished first by being transformed through the renewal of our minds so that we are able to discern and test what is the will of God in all things.

There's a lot there.

I'm going to read it again.

All right.

Because of God's mercy, as Christians, our reasonable response of worship is to give over everything we are to the glory of God.

And this is accomplished first by being transformed through the renewal of our minds so that we are able to discern and test what is the will of God in all things.

This biblical order of allowing God's revelation to speak to us through the mind, which then convicts the heart and then equips the hands.

This is something you should be familiar with because you hear it every week.

Those of you who are here every week and you sit out there, and I'm right there with you, you hear this every week because it's the order your pastors are following.

And anybody who steps into this pulpit.

The sermons always follow this order.

Engage the head, inform the head, convict the heart, quit the hands.

And if you don't believe me, let's turn real quickly to 2 Timothy 3, 16 through 17.

I'll show you what this is.

Most of you have probably, or some of you have probably read this verse, talks about the doctrine of Scripture, God's word, it's God breathed.

Scripture is God breathed.

And that's a very important part of this.

But these two verses, when combined together, they actually reveal really an order of how we are to worship, too.

It says that all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, excuse me, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete equipped for every good work.

See, God has given his word to us so that first we would learn learn what he's saying, be able to understand at some level what he's saying, but then we see the renewal of the mind, what Paul is talking about, the first step of being transformed.

We see the renewal of the mind happening when we see teaching and reproof.

You see the connection between the head and the heart when we look at correction.

God's word should be correcting us.

We should feel something from that, right?

What is it?

Was Martin Luther who said the Christian life is continual repentance?

Was that Luther or Calvin?

I can't remember.

One of them says that.

Alright?

There's a continual correctioning going on.

We should be growing.

And it should not just come into our minds and stay there.

No, it must be allowed to work so that we can correct our sinfulness.

The word of God, it's working fully in the heart when Paul mentions that it's used for training and righteousness.

It's teaching us what we want to know to become more like the image of Christ.

And you see it move into the hands when Paul says that the man of God is equipped for every good work.

So we're not just making this head, hearts, and hands stuff up because we like alliteration and we want to sound trendy.

Like, this is a reality.

This is a biblical reality.

Worship has to start with the renewal of the mind because if it does not, it is shallow, it is fleeting, and it is weak.

And unfortunately, we do not always follow this biblical order.

See, our story in all this is that some of us refuse to renew our minds because we are constantly seeking emotional worship.

As I said before, there is nothing wrong with emotions.

I don't want you to hear that from me.

There is nothing wrong with emotional worship.

There are times where you should be there and you should be cut to the heart.

But it's when we seek that all the time and it doesn't originate from our head, when it's not informed by God's revelation, that's troublesome.

I've explained to numerous people numerous times that there are many people that if faith consists of entirely this inward, introspective type of faith that's only focused on the self, we've got a big problem.

If we're always looking, what's wrong with me?

What's going on?

Why am I telling you what's wrong is your gaze is inward and it's not outward, it's not looking up, it's looking in.

What ends up happening is that the theology we develop, we're all theologians.

You know, whether you're a first-time person in here and you don't believe in Jesus at all, or you've been going to church for 40 years and you are a committed Christian, we are all theologians.

We all have beliefs about who God is, what he's like, and what he's done.

All of us.

We all have it.

All right?

And what happens is when we take worship and we put it completely in the heart and it doesn't originate in the mind, what happens is we begin to build a theology, not from God said this, this is who God is, he has revealed it to us.

We build a theology from I feel God is like this.

I think God is all love.

It's dangerous.

Because what we're really doing is we're just looking right back in the mirror at ourselves.

If we're being honest.

When we develop what's what I call a bottom-up theology, and this has been going on throughout the history of the church.

This is not something that's unique to us, to our culture.

This has been this is going on for 2,000 years, friends.

When we build this bottom-up theology where we approach God with I feel, rather than God has revealed, it's always going to be a reflection of who we are.

Theology is really, though, it's top-down, isn't it?

God has revealed Himself to us.

It informs the head and then proceeds to the heart.

That's some of us.

Others of us, others of us are not giving our entire lives as living sacrifices because we only allow God's word to touch our minds, but never our hearts.

I will submit to you that at different times in my life this has definitely been me.

The Bible is in those times of life a bunch of theological facts, and I know more of them than you do.

That's dangerous.

I don't have extreme illustrations about that except to use myself, but some questions that if you think this might be you, is your life changing from God's word?

Or I mean, are you even reading it?

Um, can you look back on your life and see a maturing in Christ?

Has your life meant something to where it's actually affecting people?

You're building into people, or are you just getting fat on theology?

We believe the word of, I always like to use this illustration.

If we believe the word of God is like our food, Jesus said, man shall live by the word of God when he was tempted by Satan?

If we were literally eating it and there's all kinds of illustrations throughout the Old Testament how God's word is ingested as spiritual food, is it being used to build up the kingdom?

Or are you just getting spiritually fat?

It's a good question.

Reflect on it.

I know I've been there.

I don't want that for you.

You see what happens?

If only the mind is touched, there will be no change.

If reading your Bible is done simply to learn some interesting facts, you've got a big problem.

Don't believe me?

Go ask any Old Testament professor in any seminary out there.

You know why?

There's a funny thing about Old Testament professors.

I'm gonna I'm gonna let you in on.

If you ever go to seminary, you will notice that most of your professors, whatever they teach, they've probably been pastors.

Most.

Not all.

Especially the really good ones.

Not all.

All right?

But you go into the Old Testament, guys, none of them have been pastors.

You know why?

Because they are constantly dealing with other people in academia who just study the Old Testament as a good book.

Many major religions study the Old Testament because it has historical importance for them.

Only about 5% of Old Testament academics is actually comes from Protestant Christians.

So you think about everyone else they're dealing with, right?

Dealing with all these people who are probably, some of them are even atheists, and they're like, ah, we're studying the Old Testament for its, you know, literary significance.

Well.

Those are not bad things.

I don't want you to get that from me.

They have their place.

They are needed in the church.

I strongly believe that.

Jesus did not come to do that.

Jesus came to correct bad doctrine so that people would know God and they could come to him through Christ.

If you look at the first century in the New Testament, you have all these different groups running around.

You've got the Pharisees, you've got the Sadducees, you know, you've got the political parties, you've got the zealots.

All these people have power, and then who's following Jesus around?

The crowd.

The crowd.

You know who the crowd is?

It's you and me.

People who've got no power, no significance, just living daily lives, trying to feed their kids, get a paycheck.

That's the crowd.

And what was happening to the crowd?

Well, from one side, they're being fed lies about how there's no resurrection.

Those are the Sadducees.

On the other side, they're being fed these lies where you've got to follow these bazillion rules in order to be a right-standing Jew.

Those are the Pharisees.

And what had happened, especially with the Pharisees, is that you had God's word, the Old Testament, all right?

Then historically you had commentaries about God's word, alright, written by very gifted rabbis, you know, people who knew what they were talking about, all right?

And then you had explanations and rules about, you know, those commentaries.

And what was happening is it wasn't God's word is up here, and these things were used to explain it.

What was going on is these two things down here were being shifted over, and God's word was being brought down, and they were becoming a level, authoritative, you know, doctrine for everybody.

If you wanted to truly follow God, you had to believe all of this.

It wasn't God's word that was particularly important, it was all of this.

That's why Jesus spent so much time yelling at the scribes and the teachers, saying, all the law and the prophets, and that's his shorthand for the Old Testament, they point to me.

And that's what's really important.

God's revealed truth points to Christ.

Not this other stuff that you guys are burdening people with.

Jesus did not come just to talk about your feelings.

He will talk about those.

He can.

He holds you, he loves you, cares about you, but he came to teach so that your mind would first be renewed, and so that you can judge this, and so that the Spirit can empower you and it can save you.

See, if if we think that the church exists to feed our emotional needs all the time, we're just gonna miss it.

I'm not saying it doesn't do that, but there's there's something else going on.

Worship, giving ourselves completely over for the glory of God, it starts here.

It is revealed to us, it's enabled by the Spirit, it's revealed to us in God's word.

We learn from it, we judge it, it convicts the heart, and out of that conviction come hands that are eager to serve the kingdom, to bring new people in.

If a church is not serving, there's just a it's very simple to understand.

If new people are not coming in, it's very simple to understand why that's happening.

Either they're getting fat on Bible knowledge and their hearts aren't being convicted, or they're just so focused on their hearts, they're probably preaching some crazy theology.

There's a progression to all this.

Paul lays that out.

If we want to worship, in light of everything I've said, the truth of the gospel, Jesus Christ came to save you from your sin.

God is sovereign in all this, and He has done this.

If we're going to believe that and we want to respond to it, this is how we start.

You are transformed by the renewal of your mind.

So I want to give you a few points of application.

I know I'm going a little long here.

Let me give you a few points of application, and then we will wrap this up.

So, our gospel vision, the first one is God, allow God's word to transform you through the renewal of your mind.

I asked earlier, you know, if you're that elder brother type who's just kind of taking in knowledge and it's not transforming you.

You've got some questions to ask.

You may need to get on your knees and beat your chest and say, God, why is this not happening?

Because I need you to fill me with your spirit.

I need this change.

There's sin I need to deal with.

Are you spending time in God's Word?

I read a book for my discipleship class last semester, and the pastor who wrote it said, I think the average Christian should spend at least an hour a day in the Bible.

And I'm telling you what, that's a tall order.

That's tough.

I think most of us probably think if we get 15 minutes every day, we're hitting it out of the park.

And I'm not saying you need to put a time limit on it, but is it consistent?

Are you learning something?

Are you reading?

Are you meditating?

Are you studying?

Do you have questions?

I love leading small groups because when I'm leading a small group, I go, hey, everything's on the table.

Question about anything, let's throw it out there.

Do you have questions?

Now, when I was leading for Jordan, nobody asked extra questions.

So they probably just didn't get to know me enough.

We'll see.

But um, man, look, let's we should be curious about things.

If this is what gives us life, man, we should just take it for everything we have.

One other thing about remembering that God's word needs to, how it needs to transform and grow our minds.

I'm a big advocate of history.

I love church history.

I love historical theology.

I would encourage you, after, if you are knocking it out of the park, if you are in the scriptures every day, if you're reading, go back to learn what our brothers and sisters throughout the history of the church learn.

There's some beautiful, I don't know if it was by design or if it was intentional.

I just, I remember from churches that I grew up in, from young until even in college, you know, up until I was out of college and early married, whereas I went to churches that didn't care about the history of the church.

They're like, ah, we got the Bible, me and Jesus, we got this figured out.

And it's like, no, you have a plethora of brothers and sisters in the past that could teach you something.

They come to the scriptures just as you do.

You might learn something.

You might have your mind renewed.

You never know.

I have learned a lot from a 16th-century theologian this year.

So give it a shot.

But allow God's word to transform you through the renewal of your mind first.

Second, is remember that God's word must convict your heart.

If this is not happening, we've got problems.

We need to do business with God.

Something has to happen here.

Alright?

It's because something happens here.

We want to respond in worship.

But the cycle keeps the progression I'm talking about just keeps repeating.

You make that initial declaration for Christ, you get on your just say, Jesus, I need you as my Lord and Savior.

He's going to bring something to you next week.

Say, hey, you need to work on this, Ben.

This happens.

It's called sanctification.

All right?

It's a continual process of being more conformed to the image of Christ.

It must touch your heart.

Let it.

Some of us are so guarded.

So I just can't, I can't open up.

I can't let my community know what I'm struggling with.

Oh God, I gotta keep that in secret.

No, let it touch your heart.

Bring it out in the open.

I was in a men's conference, what did um Eric Mason?

He's a he's a church in Philadelphia, I think, right?

Yeah.

He says, bring that negative lion out into the street with a bunch of brothers and shoot it.

It's got to touch your heart.

And lastly, use what you have learned to serve.

Now for me, this is easy.

God has gifted me in a way that I am able to teach.

I am not necessarily afraid to get up in front of you all and talk like this.

I have been told from a young age, man, you should be a pastor someday.

Like, not everybody's gonna do this.

But I'll tell you what, you put me in the back of the house, I'm a lost child.

No idea what's going on back there.

And I admire that.

Admire people who do it.

You know what?

You know what something else?

I'm gonna let you in a little dirty secret.

I don't like coffee.

Yeah.

I know that's almost sinful, isn't it?

I don't know all this fancy stuff that you guys are making and how you ground your beings.

Use you guys are laughing, but that's how I feel all the time.

That's not bad.

We need to have a church that's relevant to the culture.

Coffee's a big thing.

Alright?

That's good.

That is very good.

And it should be done.

It's not my talent, it's not my gifting.

Alright?

But man, God reveals stuff to us as we go along in life.

He says, you know what, big?

You're really good at this.

You know, for years I was a musician.

I still play music here.

I'm not, I don't play much anymore.

Let God reveal to you how you can serve, what you should be doing.

Go to his word and see how the different people are building up the kingdom.

And they're not all doing it by teaching.

If we had a churches of just preachers, it'd be kind of weird.

Like, I mean, it really would.

We'd all be talking past each other.

Like, use what you've learned to serve.

I hope you're encouraged.

I hope that this sets the stage where you understand that everything we're going to be learning about in the rest of Romans is how do we live rightly?

In light of the gospel of truth, of Jesus Christ, who came to set sinners free, who paid for us by his blood.

In light of that, now how do we go on living?

And we do that through worship.

And as a first step, we are transformed by the renewal of our minds.

Let me pray for us.