Romans 12 | Against the Tide of Conformity | Silas Thiem

Welcome to you.

I'm so glad that you're here.

As Sean said, we're in the book of Romans, and we'll be picking up here and we'll be finishing the book for the next few weeks.

And today I want to think with you about the topic of worship.

Worship.

And just um uh run with this for me.

Um just imagine that uh you're with me, you're stopped in the street outside of Goodfields, and uh you see some random coming towards you, and you ask them, what do you think about worship?

What comes to mind?

Come up with something in your head, why don't you talk with the person next to you?

I'll bring you back in 30 seconds.

What comes to mind when you think of worship?

Okay.

You know, depending on who you might ask, some people might think of um religion, like the institution, religion, religiosity as a whole.

Others might have in mind the temple, going to the temple, lighting incense, maybe chanting some prayers.

Some will think of music, dim lights, or or the organ, either way, some way of God's people singing God's praises together.

And others again might think that worship really is actually something that's irrational and outdated.

You know, something that modern people, modern educated people, have moved past.

But this morning I want to put it to you that worship is not just something that religious people do.

It's something that we all do.

David Foster Wallace was a very popular American writer.

He was an atheist, a professor.

He wrote for the New York Times a lot.

In his famous address that was called This Is Water, he said, in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.

There is no such thing as not worshiping.

Everybody worships.

The only choice we get is what to worship.

See, what Wallace understood is that worship is hard-coded into who we are as human beings.

It's just what we do.

You know, Wallace says we're all dying to give our lives away to something.

And the Bible says that he's right.

The Bible says that we do that because that's how we were made, that's how we were designed.

The problem that we have is what?

What we worship.

We choose all sorts of wrong things to fill up our lives with, to fill that void in our hearts.

And Wallace observes this, and remember, this is an atheist speaking.

This is what he says.

He says, an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship, be it Jesus Christ or Allah, be it Yahweh, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

He says if you worship money and things, if they're where you find and you tap real meaning in life, then you'll never have enough.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

Worship power, you'll feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep that fear at bay.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid.

A fraud always on the verge of being found out.

That's the predicament that we find ourselves in.

We're constantly pouring our lives out for things that can't satisfy us and will ultimately eat us alive.

And our passage this morning tells us there's something better.

So, what I want to do with our time this morning is I want to make a case for why it's God who should be the object of your worship and speak to why it's actually so hard, if you are a Christian, to put him at the center of your life.

And hopefully we can work out how to be helped in that.

We're gonna see three things.

We're gonna see the reason to worship, we're gonna see the nature of worship, and we're gonna see the renewal that we need.

First, the reason to worship.

Look at verse one with me.

This is what it says.

It says, Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

This is your true and proper worship.

You might have noticed that the passage starts with the word therefore, which means that there's something that came before it that's part of um its logic.

And one of the things that this word is doing is Paul's using it to bridge us from all the things that he said before in this letter to what's about to come next, this new section.

See, up until now, Paul's been unpacking the significance of what Jesus has done.

He's laid the foundation by arguing that all of humanity faces this problem called sin, and that Jesus in his life and death for us means that we can be forgiven by God and we can be saved through faith in him.

And just now, he spent the last three chapters, chapters 9, 10, and 11, wrestling with God's mercy in electing his people to salvation.

And so now he turns to the practical question.

So what?

What does this mean for how we live our lives right now?

And his answer can be summarized in just one word: worship.

Now it's crucial that we understand this because lots of us here have grown up with all sorts of different ideas about God and about religion and about family and about home life and about the meaning of life.

Some of us think that we need to do things to come to God.

You know, if I'm good enough, if my offering is um pure enough, if I'm religious enough, then I can come to God.

But that's completely the opposite to how God wants us to come.

We're told to worship, yes, but why do we worship?

We don't worship to get right with God.

We worship because God made us right with Him.

That's why we worship because God has shown us mercy.

Uh it's Father's Day today.

Uh till all the dads in here, a massive, massive, massive, happy, happy Father's day.

Um, I love being a dad.

Um, some of you know Orion, or you see him running around like um uh he's amongst it, you know, he's two and a half now.

Um and he is so precious to me.

He's so, so precious to me.

Uh I hope he's having a really good time at Kids Church right now.

Um, and I know that lots of you will resonate with this, whether or not your parents you'll resonate when I say, I really don't know what I'd do with myself if something happened to him.

I really don't know what I'd do.

Is there someone in your life like that?

Where you can't imagine what life would be like without them?

Or you just know that you'd be picking up the pieces of your life and what must it have been like for God to give up his son?

You know, forgive this illustration.

Um but if a person murdered my son and he was put on trial and sentenced to death, and I let justice take its course, that would be justice, right?

That would that that'd be right, that'd be a good thing.

That's justice.

If I was to plead for that murderer to be shown leniency, that would be mercy.

But if I was to take that murderer, if I was to forgive him, if I was to welcome him to my home, if I fed him, and if I adopted him as my son, and if I gave him all the love and all the privileges and all the inheritance that my son should have received, that would be completely undeserved grace.

And that's what God the Father does for us.

If you're new to Christian things, it's really important that you understand this.

When we talk about God's mercy and God's grace, um, we're not just talking about his qualities, you know, like in that God is a merciful kind of God or a gracious kind of God.

He is those things.

Um, but what we're also talking about is how God demonstrates those qualities by acting in real history.

And we see that most clearly in Jesus.

See, Jesus died a real death on a Roman cross.

He died the death that you should have died.

It was our sins that were the reason that he was on the cross in the first place.

And he died so that we could be forgiven, so that we could be accepted, so that we could find new life in him, so that we could be restored, so that we could be adopted as God's children, and so that he could destine us for a new heaven and a new earth where everything would be made right.

What's a reasonable response to receiving a mercy like that and a grace like that?

Look again at verse 1 with me.

This is the reasonable response to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

This is your true and proper worship.

This is important where we see the words true and proper in the original language of the Bible in Greek, there's actually only one word, and it's the word logikos, um, which means, as you might guess, logikos means logical, logical, sensible, reasonable, truthful, all those things.

And part of what Paul's trying to convey here is that yielding your life to God, yielding your whole self in God of worship, it's not irrational.

It's not reckless.

No, no, it's the most reasonable thing you could ever do.

In fact, what would be irrational, what would be reckless, is to hold back your life, to withhold from God when you've received that sort of grace and that sort of mercy.

That would be foolish.

Now, I realize that that sounds pretty strange to some people, and the secular materialist worldview completely disagrees with all that.

They'll say, look, I can see that Christianity in some ways makes your life better.

I can see that church is somewhat fulfilling for you, but you don't need to do all of that.

You know, you don't need to go all in and make it all about God.

You know, don't be foolish and give up your time volunteering at church.

Don't give your why would you give your money to church?

I can't think of a stupider thing.

Why would you waste your life like that?

You're giving up too much.

It's completely irrational.

And this scripture says no.

Jesus loved us, he loved us to death.

And if he loved us and he gave his body for us, then it just makes sense.

We love him right back.

We yield our bodies to him right back.

It's the only thing that makes sense if you've experienced the wild love and mercy and grace of God.

Why on earth would we hold back for ourselves when we've received that kind of love?

And if you're saved by Jesus, that's the reason to worship God.

But what does worship actually look like?

That brings me to point two, which is the nature of worship.

See, if you're a first century Israelite, worship mostly involved going to the temple with an animal and offering a sacrifice.

That's usually what worship involved.

Um, and there's all kinds of different sacrifices in the Old Testament, but broadly speaking, they come in two categories.

The first were offerings made to fix a breach between a person and God.

Um, these were sin offerings and guilt offerings.

And what we've seen just earlier is that Jesus is that sin offering for us, right?

All the Old Testament sin offerings point to him, he's the one perfect, true sin offering that pays for my sins, your sins, past, present, and future, as he stood in place and shed his blood for us.

So when this passage says, offer your bodies as a sacrifice, he's not talking about a payment for sins.

He's talking about the second kind of offering, which is done from thankfulness and devotion.

And there's a few different kinds in the Old Testament, but the most prominent one is the burnt offering.

It was the offering of the most valuable, very valuable animal in the flock without any defect.

Why?

Because you don't give God your second best.

You don't give God your leftovers, right?

And what happened was the offering was burnt completely.

It was totally burned up.

It represented complete devotion to God because it was burnt up and there was nothing left.

And what this passage means for us even now, in 2026 here in Linfield, is that we must continue to offer this kind of sacrifice of thankfulness and devotion.

The only difference is that it's not an animal's body that's being offered.

Did you see it?

It's your body.

Offer your bodies as living sacrifices.

Now, I need to be clear here.

Um, bodies here does mean our physical body, yes, but it's also more holistic than that.

It doesn't stop at just your physical body, it means your whole embodied life.

It means your time, your money, your sexuality, your ambitions, your words, your relationships, all of it.

See, worship isn't really something that you do as a Christian.

This passage says that it's something that you are.

And you don't merely offer sacrifices, you are the sacrifice.

You give every part of yourself as an offering to God in thanks for the mercy that He's shown you.

Which means, by the way, that there's no partial sacrifice.

You know, the sacrificed lamb doesn't get up on the altar and say, you know, God, you can take my legs, but not my head.

You know, the lamb doesn't get to do that.

All of it on the altar, and the whole thing is put to death.

And in the same way, you and I don't get to say to God, God, you can have my Sunday, but not my work life.

God, you can have my actions, but not my thoughts and my heart.

That's for me.

You can have my work, but not my ambitions, my dreams, my aspirations.

See, the worship that pleases God is all of you.

All the time.

It's not something that you do at 10:30 on a Sunday morning.

It's all your life.

No secular, sacred divide.

Your home, your workplace, your university, your school, the kitchen, all of it is a place where worship is supposed to happen.

You're supposed to offer yourself there as a sacrifice of praise to God.

Now, if you're living as a follower of Jesus, you know how hard this is.

You know just how hard this is.

And I think it's because we're called to be living sacrifices.

See, in the Old Testament, it was dying sacrifices.

Lamb goes on the altar, forgive me, you slit its throat, and then it's dead and it's done.

Dying sacrifices.

Here, a living sacrifice, that sounds so much more nice, right?

So much more positive until you realize how impractical it is.

Because what does a living sacrifice on the altar want to do?

It just wants to get off the altar.

Just keeps crawling off the altar.

You know, you gotta strap it down, make sure that it stays there.

And you know what that's like, right?

You offer yourselves to God one day, and then all of a sudden you find yourself wrestling back control.

God off the altar again.

Say, no, no, no, God, can I please keep this part of my life to me?

No, God, like I've given you this.

Can you just leave this part alone?

Can I have this bit?

And this passage says, no.

What we're to be is we're to be living sacrifices, which means it's not a one-time decision, it's a daily surrender, a daily offering of yourself to God.

And so I gotta ask, church, is there a part of your life that you're holding on to?

Is there some part of your life where you've fallen into the trap of thinking, you know what, God?

You can have this, but please leave that to me.

You can have this, but you can't have that.

If you have, maybe it's time to let go.

Maybe it's time to say, God, you can have it all because Jesus gave me his all.

You know, pray prayer like this, Lord, today is yours.

Take my speech, take my body, take my work, take my study, take my thoughts, take my affections, take everything I am and everything I have today, and make it yours.

Maybe that's what you need to pray.

And this is really hard.

This is really, really hard.

It's so hard to give all parts of yourself to God.

And I I don't know about you, I want to ask if I'm someone who loves God, if I'm someone who's received that beautiful grace that we were talking about, why do I still find it this hard?

And that brings me to point three, which is the renewal we need.

Take a look at verse two with me.

This is what it says it says, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Then you'll be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will.

Notice the distinction here.

Conform versus transform.

To conform is to be, you know, like soft clay, you know, or or play-doh, and and to be pressed into a mold.

That's what it is to be conformed.

And so what this patch is saying is don't let the world do that to you.

Don't let the world do this to you.

Don't let the world's pattern of thinking, its its loves and what it approves of, what it says is valuable, its ambitions.

Don't let those things shape you and conform you into its mold.

You know everything in the world, everything, even ourselves, is screaming at us to get off the altar.

Everything, all the time.

It's saying God isn't the object of true worth.

It's not worth it.

You can give some, but not all.

Do you know what the real object of your worth is?

It's your career, it's your relationship, it's your holiday, it's your house, it's your education, it's your comfort, it's your security, it's your happiness.

That's what's of greatest value in your life.

Get off the altar.

And so Paul says in verse 2 do not conform to the pattern of this world.

But be transformed by what?

The renewing of your mind.

What's he saying?

He's saying that for all these things to happen, your mind needs renewal.

See, the problem with us, the problem with human beings, is that our default state of mind is bent inwards.

It's concave.

It kind of forms back in on itself, and we're determined to make absolutely everything about ourselves.

This is how Wallace put it, and remember, this is an atheist speaking.

He says, everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid, and important person in existence.

We rarely talk about this sort of natural basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us deep down.

It is our default setting hardwired into us at birth.

See, we live in a world that tells us over and over again that all of life is about me.

And what I should have at the center of my life, the thing that I should uphold as most high is me and whatever makes me happy.

And so we see ourselves as bigger than we are, we ascribe worth to lesser things, we chase after them by pouring out our lives for them, we sacrifice for them, we stay up late, we do all sorts of things in order to try to chase that thing that we think will satisfy us and bring our lives meaning.

That's what we do.

And it's worth saying that Paul isn't just speaking in general terms here.

You might recall back in chapter one, if you know Romans chapter one, it describes this downward spiral.

Humanity suppresses the truth, it exchanges the truth of God for a lie, and so they end up worshiping and serving created things rather than creator.

And it keeps spiraling down, spiraling down until it ultimately hits this point where we're handed over to what's called a depraved mind.

We don't think right, we don't value things right.

We see the world in a distorted way.

And what's beautiful here in Romans 12 is that it's reversed.

We're not to conform, but be transformed.

Now the Greek word for transform is metamorpho, and you can probably guess what word we get from it.

Metamorpho.

Metamorphosis, yes.

Which describes not some kind of cosmetic external change, like you know, taking off a coat and putting a new one on.

It describes complete structural change from the inside out, the whole thing is rearranged.

Think of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly.

Completely different things.

That's what's in view here.

So in Romans 1, there's this downward spiral into sin and idolatry, the mind is darkened, but here we see in Romans 12 a transformation.

The mind is renewed, and we're trained to stay on the altar so we can worship the right thing.

God, the right person.

And we can stay on the altar because we value things differently, we see differently, we love differently, we live differently.

And there's this incredible irony here, right?

Because so many people in our culture will view the idea of worshiping God as restrictive.

You know, as if God is the cosmic joy killer, you know?

You know, He prevents you from becoming who you're truly supposed to be.

They say, I don't want to worship God, I want to be free, I want to be authentic, I want to be true to myself.

But what happens is that they end up swapping out a conformity for something else, another kind of conformity.

They end up still being shaped by something in the world.

They're not actually free.

You know, whether it's conformity to consumerism or conformity to the God of, you know, the endless cycle of the life with the rat race and you know, earning money to get a good house, to get a good job, to get a good spouse, etc.

etc.

Or conformity to the sexual revolution, or conformity to expressive individualism, everyone ends up shaped up by something.

But counterintuitively, a life lived in worship, a life lived on the altar, offers something better, which is real transformation.

Again, think with me.

Think of the caterpillar.

No one says to the caterpillar, be true to yourself.

No one says that.

That's stupid.

You know the caterpillar is destined for something better.

It's destined to fly.

And so it is with God.

God has so much more in store for us by his spirit.

He wants to transform us more and more into the likeness of his son Jesus Christ, into what is real perfection.

And that's the promise of what God can do for you.

And that happens as our minds is renewed.

So how do you renew your mind?

You ask.

Well, it's by coming to the very place that God revealed his mind in the scriptures.

See, when you open the scriptures, God reveals his will to you through his word and he impresses it upon your heart by his Holy Spirit such that it changes you from the inside out.

That's how transformation happens.

See, there's plenty of ways you can get motivated.

You know, you can listen to a hyped-up video, you can go to a conference.

Maybe even a preacher might motivate you.

But it's only by coming to the scriptures that you'll be changed.

You'll only be changed as you come to the scriptures continually, humbly, seriously, with intent.

You know, asking, are these things true?

What does it mean to live this out?

Asking questions like that.

And then together singing truths in light of that, praying in light of that.

That's how we'll have our minds renewed.

Do you want a surefire way to stunt your transformation?

Here it is.

Don't read the Bible.

Or, you know, just skim it.

Um, don't bother with growth group.

Uh, skip church, skip youth, don't worry about reading the Bible for yourself.

That's a surefire way to stunt your growth.

Church, don't do that.

Don't do that.

Come to the word, let it shape you, let it renew you.

Let me bring these things together for us.

We're all worshipers and we all worship something.

And always and at all times, we're all dying to give our lives away to something.

And the question is, what?

What are you yielding your life to?

If you're not yet a follower of Jesus, I hope you can appreciate the logic of Christianity that if Jesus has given his life for us to save us, forgive us, and restore us, then it's completely logical for the Christian to lay down their life in response, to yield their life, their time, their energy, their body to God.

But all of that rests on the presupposition that the claims about Jesus are true.

And so what I think you need to do is explore whether those claims are true.

You already know from your own experience that what you're giving your life to right now is fragile, it doesn't satisfy, and it's killing you.

You know that.

And so you've got to work out whether there's truth to these claims about Jesus.

Is he really the Son of God?

Did he really die for your sins?

Does he really offer forgiveness in new life?

Can he do that?

Because if those things are true, that'll change your life.

Keep coming, keep investigating, take another step.

Come talk to me afterwards, you know.

Do something, keep moving forward.

But if you're here and you follow Jesus, this passage actually takes us to a specific place, and that specific place is in church.

Um, we're gonna have a proper Bible talk about this soon, so I'm not gonna spend too long on this.

But if you look at verse five in the context of church, there's a specific transformation that happens.

Uh it's that we're united by Jesus such that we actually belong to each other, and it's so profound that it actually borrows imagery from marriage.

Check it out, this is in verse five.

It says, So in Christ we, though many, form one body, as in marriage.

And each member belongs to all the others.

And what's it like?

What's it like to be a living sacrifice in the context of one body?

Service.

And that's what verses six to eight are all about.

See, it's it's possible, even here at church, to come week in and week out and somehow make church about me.

To make church about how it meets my needs and fits my preferences.

Isn't that crazy?

You know, church is meant to be about God, and yet somehow in my sin, I can take this thing that's supposed to be about God as I'm talking to you guys about it being about God and make it about my ego.

That's insane, right?

Maybe that's you as well.

Maybe there's some part of you that's made this about you.

You know, the kind of church that God wants is one where every single one of us is engaged in, engaged with each other, supporting each other, caring for one another, serving each other, there for one another.

And for that to work, each one of us needs to play our part.

And there's all sorts of things that this could look like, you know, um could look like being here every week, putting in the calendar, making sure that's time blocked in, um, coming with the intention to be of service, you know, looking for someone who uh has been to church for a while but always sits by themselves and you think uh they don't have many friends yet.

Maybe I could be the one that sits with them.

Or maybe it involves joining a ministry team at church.

And all these things are important, um, and we ought to be engaged in them.

But I don't want to focus on that because, as we've just talked about, worship is an all-of-life thing, right?

It's to be lived out here, yes, and that's very important, but it's not just here.

Being a living sacrifice occupies every dimension of our lives, every part of our lives is on the altar.

And in fact, if you read the rest of chapter 9 through verse, uh chapter 12 through verse 9 onwards, you see that it's meant to be lived out completely, not just in the spheres of our life, but in our being, our whole self, our ambitions, our character, our desires, our thoughts, all of them captive and given over to God for his purposes.

And where does it all start?

It starts in view of God's mercy.

It doesn't start with gritted teeth or guilt or shame, but with wonder and apprehension of what Jesus has done for us.

It doesn't start with your efforts, it starts with Jesus' sacrifice.

You know, the more you look at the cross, the more you see that the only true and proper response to God and what he's done for us is to give your life and worship to him.

So, church, this is what I want to say to you.

Tomorrow morning, when you feel the pull, just as I will, to crawl off the altar.

Remember that Jesus didn't crawl down from that cross.

And when you're tempted to hold back something from God, remember that Jesus gave it all.

You know, when you're tempted to settle for conformity and being shaped in the way of the world, remember that he rose to make you new.

And when you're tempted to think his way is dull and he's out to kill your joy, remember that for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross so that he could bring you the joy of a new life, a real life, a purposeful life.

It's a hard life, it's not easy, but it is a good life, a lasting life with him.

Let me pray.

Lord God, we thank you so much that you gave us Jesus.

Thank you so much that it's by your mercy that we're saved and that we get to respond to you like this.

We're not even worthy to pick up the crumbs from under your table.

And yet you let us come to you in worship if you adopt us as your children.

Wow.

Father, please help us live in light of that.

Please help us live with every part of our life offered in worship to you.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.