Romans 12:1-8 – Romans

Good morning.

Today's reading is from Romans chapter twelve, verse one to eight.

And the question for city kids and city teens, so just um look out for this.

What are some of the gifts Paul talks about in this passage?

Okay, so what are some of the gifts that Paul talks about in this passage?

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercy 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.

For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more higher, more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

For as one as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body of Christ, and individually members of one another.

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them, if prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness, and so reads God's Word.

May I add my welcome uh to Ben's.

My name is Mark, I'm one of the leaders here at the church, and it'd be really helpful for you to have Romans uh 12 open in front of you as we look at the at the first eight verses.

So you can look that up uh on your phone.

Uh you can Google search Romans 12 ESV uh to follow along with you.

Let me tell you uh let me tell you three uh short stories.

Let me tell you the story uh about Alex.

When Alex was uh 11 years old, uh his uh father sat him down and started to show him uh inappropriate images and videos on the internet.

He did that because he wanted to ensure that his son didn't quote unquote grow up gay.

Fast forward nine years ago when I first met Alex, and I was a 20-year-old, he felt like he had no other choice but to look at images and videos like that.

Uh, every night before he went to sleep.

He felt utterly depressed, trapped, and ashamed.

Well, then there's Hannah.

Hannah uh grew up in a Christian family, uh, at least on the surface, everybody saw them as a Christian family.

Uh her father served in church leadership, but behind closed doors there was little gospel fruit.

Hannah learned to be a good moral young woman, but she had little joy when it came to being a Christian, and she felt resentful towards others who seemed happy in their faith.

Well, then there's Max.

He's a king Christian, attends Bible study every week, serves in church, and always appears enthusiastic.

But Max is driven internally by a desire to prove himself, and he needs the approval of others, especially those who he respects within the community of the church, in order to feel validated.

What hope is there for these three people, for Alex, Hannah, and Max?

These three people have been through the doors of City Church, though that is not their names, and details have been changed, and they are no longer with us now.

But how would you help them change?

What hope is there for them?

And what about you?

What are you hiding?

What's in your story?

What lives in the dark corners of your life that you need to address, but you don't really know how.

The good news of Romans chapter 12 is that change is possible.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

The transformation does happen in a human being's life.

You see, the good news, the gospel of Jesus is transformative, not just at a surface level, not just in terms of cleaning us up and making us appear more moral, but it actually changes us at the level of our hearts.

But how?

How does transformation occur?

That's what I think this passage is about.

And the first thing to note is this transformation happens through mercy, not fear.

Transformation happens through mercy, not fear.

I'm gonna ask a question, and I think probably only those who have an Irish background are going to understand this question.

Um, although maybe there is there is something that translates across cultures.

Here's the question.

Irish people are you listening?

What's the wooden spoon for?

What's the wooden spoon for?

It's not for stirring things, it's for smacking, right?

It's for giving you a good baiting, right?

My mother, all she had to do was rattle a drawer, and I would fall immediately in the line out of threat of the wooden spoon.

Maybe, maybe the wooden spoon has uh has gone global, maybe in some mirror something else.

Maybe it was the slipper came off.

Uh and saying a few nods, maybe it was the slipper, okay?

You just needed to see the parent holding the slipper, and you just knew my behavior now had to change.

The fear of punishment brought me into line.

I stopped doing the thing that I was doing, and I started doing what I was told.

But you know what the wooden spoon never did?

It never changed my heart.

It never changed my heart.

Paul begins this section by reflecting upon the mercies of God.

Not the mercy singular, the mercies, the abundant mercies of God.

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God.

What's the therefore, therefore?

Well, Paul's beginning this new section.

In a sense, he's looking all the way back to chapter one.

He's saying, do you remember all of the wondrous and beautiful mercy that we have outlined in the first 11 chapters?

He's saying, well, live in light of that now.

Now that you've experienced the mercy of God laid out in those first 11 chapters, here's how we ought to live.

Well, what mercy?

Well, the mercy that despite our sin, despite our selfishness and our rejection of God, our harm of ourselves and other people, that despite all of those things, God has acted in history to take your sin through the death of his son, most precious thing, and bring you into newness of life, adopted into his family, raised with Christ and seated with him.

The mercy that as a result of that, you no longer have to fear future condemnation, because you were adopted forever into God's family.

The mercy that we can now call him Father, as we have just been singing about.

And that through every trial and suffering and failure, he will never let us go and he will preserve us to the end.

And Paul says, in view of all of that mercy, in view of all of those wondrous things that God has done for us, now let's live this way.

This can I say is why I hate, and I use that word advisedly, I hate the pernicious belief that goes around churches like ours that you can lose your salvation.

It is a wicked and unbiblical belief.

Why?

Because it bases all of your obedience in fear.

It bases all of your obedience ultimately in fear, fear of rejection, fear of exhausting God's grace, that one day perhaps his patience with you will run out, fear that he will change his mind and place you again back under condemnation.

And Paul has already said that that is never, no way going to happen.

Folks, it's not fear that changes people, it's the mercy of God.

It's having received and realized the abundance and lavish nature of the mercy of God to you, though you are sinful, that that's what changes your heart.

It's gratitude to the grace that God has given you that changes you.

Paul has spent 11 chapters on outlining what God has done and who he has made you to be before ever giving you a command about how you ought to live.

This is the essence of Christian transformation.

God shows you his grace, he forgives your sin, he makes you a new creation, he raises you to newness of life, and then he says, Be who I've made you to be.

Live into the new identity that I have given you.

Live in light of that reality, not in order to achieve it, but because you've already received it by faith, not in order to keep it, but in gratitude.

With a desire to please the God who has been so lavishly generous to you.

Folks, whatever is going on in your life that nobody else knows about fear won't change it.

Only grace will change it.

People come and they people come and they confess their sins to me from time to time and they expect they expect me to punish them.

They expect me to whack them verbally by how foolish they've been.

But I know that it doesn't.

Fear's never changed anybody.

Only grace changes people.

Only the mercy of God changes people.

Fear will never transform you.

It might cause you to live differently for a while, like mum rattling the wooden spoon drawer.

It might snap you back into uh back into line, but there will be a time when actually you'll kind of grow numb to it.

You'll kind of grow up to it.

Like when my mom comes and visits us now, and you know, if she were to rattle the drawer in my house, I'd look at her and go, What are you talking about?

I'm bigger than you.

What's more, any change that is achieved by fear won't last.

And it will be undone by suffering.

It'll be undone by by by trial or hardship or failure, because you'll think, well, why is God punishing me now?

Or we'll think, well, I did everything right, and he hasn't.

Surely he owes me.

Surely he should recognize the fact that I've tried really hard.

Fear won't change you.

Fear of rejection, fear of punishment.

They might conform your behavior for a time, but they'll not change your heart.

And each one of you, I'm sure, wants to change some aspect of your life.

Some of you wish that you could be scolded, told off.

I would do it.

If I felt that it would change you, but it doesn't.

Now, does this mean that I'm saying transformation doesn't require any repentance of sin?

No, of course not.

The whole way that we come to faith in Jesus is by recognizing our sin and our shortcomings, our selfishness and our harm of ourselves and others, our rejection of God and the embrace of lies.

So don't hear me say that all I'm saying is that, uh, oh, well, you don't worry about kind of saying sorry for your sin.

Don't worry about repenting.

No, no, repent of your sin.

Turn from those sinful behaviors and embrace new life-giving behaviors.

But if you're if you're controlled by fear, then repentance.

Repentance is a terrifying and bitter thing.

It's like it's groveling back to God, hoping against hope that he might forgive you.

And he kind of rolls his eyes and goes, Well, fine then.

I suppose I have to, it's my job after all.

But repentance in light of mercy.

That's a beautiful thing.

Repentance knowing that you're safe.

Repentance knowing that it is safe to be seen and known because you're still loved.

That's a great thing.

That's like a that's like a child who knows that they have done wrong, who knows that they need to apologize, but who also knows that they are loved and that they will never be disowned.

Transformation only happens by the mercy of God, not by fear.

Folks, are you pursuing life change by willpower and out of fear of consequences of how it'll affect the the people around you?

You need to be very careful.

It's not going to last.

The only way you'll change is by the mercies of God.

Because it's by the mercies of God that Paul says that we present our bodies as living sacrifices.

By the mercies of God, we live a different life.

How are you seeking that transformation?

By fear?

Or by the mercy of God?

We should probably move further than verse one, shouldn't we?

Transformation begins when we think differently.

Part of what transformation entails is that we think differently.

So, back in the passage.

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

We'll we'll come to that.

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.

All the way through this passage, Paul is encouraging us to think differently, to think differently about certain things, to have what he says, our minds renewed.

Why do we have to have our minds renewed?

Well, because we we ingrain thought patterns and behaviors that aren't always helpful for us, don't we?

We just begin to believe that, well, this is this is all I can do.

I have no choice.

I'm completely trapped in this, like Alex.

Or you just say, well, I uh I'm completely and utterly worthless uh unless somebody gives me approval or validates me.

We we ingrain those things and we start to believe those those lies.

You imagine that your mind, I've used this illustration before, but imagine that your mind is like a uh is like a hay field that hasn't been cut yet.

You see those those long stalks of hay just kind of waving in the breeze in some nice uh August afternoon.

And the first time you walk through that hay field, uh you begin to press down some of those stalks of hay.

And they they spring back up again a little bit, but the next time you come along, you can kind of make out the the outline of a path.

You think, well, that's that's kind of the way that I walked.

And so you you walk over those again and you press them down just a little bit more.

And and as you keep on doing that, before you realize it, what you've done is you've you've worn in a pathway, just a way that you walk across the field, a way that you get from one side to the other.

You wouldn't think of walking in a new path because you think, well, I have I have this one and I can see it, and it and it makes sense.

In our lives, when we when we face temptation or we deal with suffering or sin or trauma, we create these pathways in our minds, these ways of thinking.

A little at first, and then they become ingrained.

And before you know it, it's just like, well, that's that's just how it is.

That's just the way my life is, that's just how I think.

That's what happened to Alex and Hannah and Max.

These ways of thinking have become so ingrained.

And one of the things that that they needed to know, and that you need to know, is that your mind can be renewed.

That is, that you can begin to walk in new, healthier pathways of thinking.

That's what Paul's saying.

That you're going to be transformed in light of the mercies of God, his lavish grace that he has given you, that he continues to pour out upon you in order to make these healthier pathways, to think differently, to have your mind renewed.

I think there are three ways in which Paul encourages us to think differently.

There are three points.

This second point has three sub points.

There you go.

All right?

Yes, we all love a good sub point, right?

So, first of all, they're they're short, I promise, kind of.

Um maybe I need to start thinking differently.

Uh Paul encourages us to think differently, first of all, about God.

Paul says that being a living sacrifice, and we're going to come back to that phrase, living sacrifice, that being a living sacrifice that's holy and acceptable to God is our spiritual worship.

That's actually quite a poor.

Translation I discovered this week.

Hey guys.

Spiritual worship is quite a poor translation.

It makes more sense for it to be our logical worship, our rational worship.

So let me let me read the verse again.

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your rational worship.

Do you see how it kind of changes the meaning?

It's like the most logical, rational thing that you can do in response to the lavish mercy and grace of God is to live for him and him alone.

That if your transformed life is all due to his undeserved grace, then the most logical response is wholehearted, joyful obedience to him.

In fact, it would be illogical, irrational to say, well, Jesus gave his all for me.

But my half-hearted obedience is sufficient response.

My half-hearted worship is good enough for him.

Rather, we are to, in a sense, arrest ourselves in those moments of uh of temptation to think, no, no, the most logical thing that I can do right now in response to the abundant grace of God, the fact that Jesus gave everything for me is to give everything in response.

And to live a life that pleases him, knowing that you can, in fact, please him.

Did you know that?

That you can live a life where you feel the pleasure of your heavenly father.

But I had to say, don't we?

Well, um, you know, as good as good evangelicals, we say things, you know, because grace is true, God can't uh God can't love you any more than he already does, and he can't love you any less than he already does.

And there's a wonderful objective sense in which all of that is true.

But it's nice actually, isn't it?

To feel a person's pleasure, to actually make someone's, to make someone happy and to feel the radiant of the radiance of their joy towards us, knowing that we have done something that pleases them.

So that their their love for us hasn't hasn't changed, but their pleasure, their delight in us is more acute, it's felt.

And and Paul's saying that actually that's possible in the Christian life.

That while grace means that it's objectively true that God can't love you anymore and won't love you any less, that actually you can, as you renew your mind, as you present your body as a living sacrifice, that you can feel the pleasure of your Heavenly Father.

So renewing our mind, first of all, is about thinking differently about God.

Secondly, it's about thinking differently about the world.

So verse 2 says, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Paul here saying that the renewal of our mind happens when we realize that there are ways that the world receives as true, that are actually quite destructive patterns for us.

That there are assumptions and beliefs that the world encourages that ought to be actually questioned in light of God's word.

You think right back, cast your mind back if you've uh endured this sermon series until now.

Think right back to chapter one.

What was Paul saying there?

He said, Well, actually, human beings by nature, well, we we believe lies about God.

We believe that he's mean-spirited and badly motivated, and that he uh that he won't actually satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts, and we replace him with other things.

What else does Paul say there?

Well, Paul says that what human beings do in response is, well, we the things that God calls good, we call them evil.

And the thing that things that God calls evil, we call them good.

That's how our world has so ordered and constituted itself that the people in the world give approval to those who practice wickedness.

And part of what Paul's saying here is actually you need to take a step back and go, hold on a second.

Is this part of that old way of thinking?

Am I being conformed or transformed?

And so it's worth thinking about well, what lies am I believing about God?

What lies am I believing about myself?

What lies am I believing about my body, about moral issues that have been embedded and ingrained in us that actually are stand in contradiction to what God has said.

And the renewing of our mind is to allow the scriptures to inform us how we ought to think about these sorts of things.

So we renew our minds with respect to how we think about God, how we think about the world, and then we renew our minds with how we think about ourselves.

Verse three.

If you don't know anybody like that, it's you.

Paul here is encouraging what he calls sober judgment.

And to remember this interesting little phrase, the measure of faith that each has been given, that God has assigned.

What does he mean?

Well, sober judgment is neither it's neither boasting and bigging yourself up, but nor is it self-loathing and just going, well, I'm just a bit of crap.

Yeah, I don't have anything to offer, uh, I've got nothing to give.

I'm basically a pointless human being, I've got no gifts.

Uh that's not that's not sober judgment either.

Now, Paul elsewhere might encourage us to think of others uh more than ourselves, but here he says, well, actually, you can be, well, matter of fact.

That's what sobriety is, a kind of a clear-eyed thinking about something.

You can be matter-of-fact about the gifts that God has given you, the limitations that you have, yeah, but also the good things that He has equipped you with.

So if you're if you're good at something, well, sober judgment would say, well, you don't actually need to kind of just be falsely deferential and just kind of go, oh no, don't look at me.

You say, yeah, look, this this seems to be something that I appear to be good at, and I'd like to use that to serve others.

Praise God.

You don't need to hide it, don't let it define you.

Don't use it to do other people down or to to look down on them, but to acknowledge it isn't wrong.

Sober judgment.

And then this he talks about the measure of faith.

And in one sense, he's saying, well, folks, whatever gifts you have, whatever God has endowed you with, one of the things you need to remember is that the most important thing in your life is the identity that God has given you.

What God says about you.

This is a great remedy for the person who thinks that they're useless or that they've got nothing to offer.

That God has already spoken words of value.

God has already spoken words of dignity, God has already honored their life through the cross and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

They were loved enough to have the Prince of Heaven lay down his life for them.

But in another sense, measure of faith, Paul's saying, well, yeah, like some people have greater faith.

But here's the paradox.

The evidence that someone has, quote unquote, strong faith or a great measure of faith is that they don't talk an awful lot about it.

They don't boast about it.

They don't look down on others.

That someone who is grown in faith and has a healthy measure of faith, well, they become more humble, more self-forgetting.

We all know that the Bible frowns upon boasting and pride and high opinions of ourselves.

But these verses, folks, are also saying, well, don't think too little of yourself either.

God has been gracious to you, He has equipped you, He has granted you faith, He has gifted you in certain ways, and don't you dare despise them.

Don't dare look down on yourself and think, Well, I am worthless and I have nothing to offer.

Sober judgment.

Paul goes on in the rest of this section to say that we've all been gifted in different ways.

And had we more time, we would look at the individual gifts in greater detail.

But Paul's primary point here is that we've been assigned these gifts in order to serve one another, to be a blessing to one another in the united body of Christ that is the church, expressed here amongst us in the local church.

And so to think differently then about ourselves is to think about ourselves in relation to others, to think about my place within the body of Christ here in the church.

Think, well, I have this ability to bless others.

How can I do that?

So that they are encouraged to promote their flourishing.

That just as we've been gifted these things, we also have a responsibility to not rob others of the gifts that God has given us.

And this leads me to our final point.

So transformation happens not by fear, but by the mercy of God.

Secondly, transformation means that we think differently about God, about the world, and about ourselves.

And then finally, transformation means that we act differently.

That having begun to think differently about ourselves, about the God who made us, and about the people around us, that we begin to, in a sense, press down those stalks of hay and walk in those new tracks by actually acting differently.

This is all the way through the passage, but you know, back to verse one, to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.

You know, don't make the mistake that the renewed Christian life is merely an intellectual pursuit, or that Christian worship and devotion simply means singing a few songs on a Sunday morning.

No, for Paul to be transformed, it's something that's embodied.

Present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.

Sacrifice is something that was brought into the temple courts, given holy, devoted to God entirely.

But this is a living sacrifice.

There's no need for the shedding of blood because the blood has already been shed to atone for our sin.

And so our devotion to God is something that's vital, it's active, it's tangible.

We do it in seen and felt and heard ways.

The sacrifice to be a living sacrifice is not the stuff that we have, but it's us, holy, set apart for his service.

So you must ask yourself, what does what does embodied worship look like for me?

What actions do I need to take in order to live a life that is pleasing to him?

How can I honor God with my relationships, with my with my marriage, with my work, with the places that God moves me into?

How can I be an embodied living sacrifice?

And later in the passage, when he talks about gifts, the big emphasis on the gifts is not on the individual actions, but I think that Paul keeps on saying, well, if you've got a gift, use it.

Have a look at it with me.

Verse 6, having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.

If prophecy in proportion to faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal or passion, the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

What pulls me in point is that if God has equipped you with something, use it.

Put it to good use in worship and devotion to Him and blessing other people, do it.

You say, well, how do I know what I'm gifted in?

Well part of it's self-reflection and examination, but part of it's also testing and seeing where there's an ability and a desire and an affinity and and all of those things.

And as we as we discern them, as we as we do that process of testing and and and do more, well, that's that's part of the the ongoing embodied transformation that happens.

We test, therefore, what God's goodwill for us is and and walk in those paths, and we feel his pleasure, he delights in us.

So think of our the three people that we started with, with Alex, Hannah, and Max.

Alex needed to think differently about God and about his sin.

He felt trapped and he believed that he can never be free.

But in time he began to see that that was a lie.

And it wasn't until he realized that actually he could say no to sin, that sin's power, as Paul has already talked about in uh in Romans chapter six, has been broken over his life.

That it wasn't until that first evening when he said no that he knew that he had the spiritual musculature to say no the second night and the third night, and on and on and on, and begin to work in those new pathways of thinking and acting.

Or Hannah.

She believed that lie that intellectual assent and obedience was all that God asked of her.

It wasn't until she began to think differently that actually God was a father who loved her and who delighted in her.

She reflected on the words of David, Restore to me, O Lord, the joy of your salvation.

She found the pleasure in obedience and felt a warmth come into her worship and her life with God.

Or Max realized that the reason that he was looking for that affirmation and approval was because he wasn't living in light of the mercy of God, but because but in fear of rejection.

He wasn't thinking of himself with sober judgment.

He believed that he had nothing to offer and he needed others to make him feel better about himself.

But slowly he began to embrace the father's love for him.

He began to embrace the mercies of God.

Now not only is he less needy, but he's more genuinely loving.

He's not using people to fill a hole that's in him.

So his service is renewed and it's worshipful.

Where do you need to change?

Where does transformation need to happen?

Do you know that you can change by the mercies of God?

God's mercy and grace stands ready for you.

He will give it abundantly.

Ask him for it.

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