Romans 12:1-2 - Sam Beasley

If you would open your Bibles to Romans chapter twelve, verses one and two, you'll find yourself standing at one of the greatest pivot points in all of sacred scripture.

The Apostle Paul writes these words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit when he says, Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

This is your true worship.

You know, I love that in some translations, other well-known translations, uh you'll see true worship translated as this is your reasonable service.

In other words, the only reasonable thing to do in light of what he has done for us is to give him everything.

And then he says, Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is good, pleasing, and the perfect will of God.

And obviously, if you've been around church any amount of time, you've probably heard this old familiar homiletic adage, wherever you see a therefore, you must always stop and ask what it is therefore.

So Paul's therefore here is not just a casual transition.

It's not merely collect connecting verse one to the final few sentences of the previous chapter, chapter 11.

No, this therefore is a massive heavy iron hinge upon which the entire door of this grand epistle swings.

You see, for eleven chapters, Paul has been acting as a master spiritual architect.

He's building a towering monument to sovereign grace.

And so in those eleven chapters, he's piled doctrine upon doctrine, truth upon truth, tracing this golden, unbreakable chain of our redemption from eternity past and connecting it to eternity future.

And now as he steps into chapter 12, the tone dramatically shifts.

He moves from doctrine to duty, from theology to ethics, from what God has miraculously done for us to how we must now practically live before Him.

As we've heard our pastors here say, uh, from the indicatives to the imperatives.

And this is not the only time he does this.

He also does this in, for example, in Ephesians, uh, the first three chapters.

This is what God has done for you in Christ Jesus.

Now, this is what you should do in response.

But notice carefully the exact ground of his appeal.

You know, he does not say, I demand this of you by the terrifying thunders of Mount Sinai.

He does not say, I urge you to do this based on your own human willpower, your own moral stamina, or your own covenant faithfulness.

No, you know, pick yourself up by your own bootstraps here.

No, instead he anchors the entire weight of Christian duty in a singular phrase in view of the mercies of God.

In view of the mercies of God.

Because that's the engine.

That's the motivation for this verse, for these verses.

To understand what it means to step onto the altar and give our lives as a living sacrifice today, we cannot simply start reading here at chapter twelve.

We must cast our eyes backward to what's already been written.

We must walk back through this gallery of the first eleven chapters to behold and define and even marvel at the specific mercies that demand our total and unconditional surrender.

To truly appreciate the mercy of God, a redeemed heart must first look squarely and honestly into the mirror of human depravity.

Paul began this great letter not by telling his listeners how good they were or telling them how much potential they possessed, but instead by showing them and showing us exactly how desperate and spiritually ruined we are apart from grace.

Cast your minds back to the opening parts of this letter, specifically to Romans 3, verses 10 and 23.

Romans 3:10

Paul gathers up the Old Testaments of the prophets that write, as it is written, there is no one righteous, not even one, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

You see, before we can ever taste the sweetness of justification, we must swallow the bitter crushing truth of our total inability.

Paul leaves absolutely no room for human pride or self-congratulation.

Instead, he indicts the pagan world for its open rebellion, while at the same time he indicts the religious world for its hidden hypocrisy, and he concludes that every single human mouth must be silenced.

The entire world stands held accountable.

We're guilty, entirely defenseless before a perfectly holy and just God.

And so left to ourselves, we were not merely morally bruised, we were not merely disadvantaged, we're not struggling due to the fall.

We were, as the scriptures elsewhere declare, as I mentioned in Ephesians, we were dead in our trespasses and sins.

We were blind, we were deaf, we were actually hostile to the things of God, utterly incapable of changing our own nature.

And yet, it's precisely against this dark backdrop of our ruin that we see the spectacular mercy of God break through like a lightning bolt.

Look at Romans 5.8.

But God proves his own love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Brothers and sisters, look deeply at the mercy put on display here.

God did not look down the corridors of time and see that you or I would eventually choose him and then decide to love us based on our future faith.

Christ did not die for inherently good or righteous people.

Instead, he died for the ungodly.

He died for rebels, he died for his enemies.

He died for us.

But notice this the gospel doesn't leave us merely rescued from the pit and leave us shivering on the edge.

Instead, Paul takes us from the depths of our guilt to the celestial heights of our legal standing before the divine judge.

Look at the glorious declaration of Romans 5 1.

Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Here we stand upon the great, unshakable banner of the Protestant Reformation, sola fide, justification by faith alone, as we've been learning and studying in our small groups.

We are declared legally righteous in the sight of a holy God, not because of any inherent righteousness that's infused into our flesh, but it's not because we suddenly become perfect, but solely because of the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Your sins, your guilt, your lawbreaking were placed entirely upon him, as we sang in that last song about Calvary, and his flawless, perfect, lifelong obedience is credited completely to your account.

Reminds me of a song that we've sung here, I think, before, All Sufficient Merit, where we sing about God's on our account.

Because of this settled, unchanging legal reality, Paul drops the great anchor of Christian assurance at the beginning of Romans 8:1, when he says, Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.

Romans 8:1

Think of the immense weight that's lifted off of our shoulders as Christians when this truth truly lands in our soul.

If we've been united to Christ by faith, then the holy wrath of God toward your sin is not merely managed or put off.

It's been fully dealt with.

It's entirely spent.

It's finished, as he said on the cross.

It's accomplished.

God's not looking down at you today with a scowl of frustration or disappointment.

Instead, he looks at you through the flawless righteousness of his beloved Son.

More than that, this mercy is not just a change in our status, it's a profound change in our spiritual power.

In Romans 6, Paul reminds us that our old self was structurally crucified with Christ, so that we would no longer be enslaved to the mastery of sin.

We've been given a new heart, and we've been indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

As Romans 8 15 beautifully reminds us, for we did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but instead we've received the spirit of adoption by whom we cry, Abba Father.

The mercy of chapters 1 through 8 is that you and I are completely forgiven, entirely accepted, dynamically empowered by the Holy Spirit, and we are eternally secure in an unbreakable chain of divine love that stretches from election in eternity past to glorification in eternity future.

As Paul moves into the profound depths of chapters 9, 10, and 11, he confronts a massive theological problem.

What about God's historical covenant promises to Israel?

Has the word of God failed because so many rejected the Messiah?

Here Paul pulls back the curtain and anchors our personal salvation not in the shifting sands of human decisions, but in the deep, unsearchable God's eternal election.

He reminds us that God's purposes do not ultimately depend on human exertion or human will, but entirely on God, who shows mercy.

And then he summarizes the grand sweeping scope of all human history in Romans 11 32, when he says, For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may have mercy on all.

You see, Jew and Gentile alike, every single demographic of humanity must be brought down to the exact same level of desperate helpless need so that God might display the sheer unmerited international glory of his grace.

When Paul stands on the edge of this vast, breathtaking horizon of salvation history, beholding how God uses even human rebellion to bring about his perfect redemptive plans, he can no longer merely argue.

In fact, he breaks out into a spontaneous, ecstatic doxology, which a lot of us are aware of at the end of chapter 11.

Paul is so moved that God can even work through those means that he says, Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable his judgments and untraceable his ways.

For from him and through him and to him are all things.

To him be glory forever.

Amen.

This is the ultimate climax of this entire theological section of Romans, that salvation is entirely from him in its origin, it's entirely through him in its execution, and it's entirely to him in its ultimate purpose.

Human merit is factored down to zero.

Divine glory is maximized to the highest degree.

And it is precisely here, having painted this stunning masterpiece of free sovereign grace, that Paul turns over the page to chapter 12.

And he looks at us and he says, In light of all this, therefore, present your bodies as a living sacrifice.

But Paul does not leave that sacrifice hanging in midair as some vague, abstract concept.

He moves immediately in verse 2 to explain the precise architecture of how this sacrifice is actually lived out on a Tuesday morning in our workplace or in our home or in the secret places of our lives.

He writes, Do not be conform to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Notice the dual competing forces that Paul has set before us.

First, there is the ongoing relentless pressure to be conformed to this age.

The original Greek text carries the vivid imagery of being poured into a pre-made mold.

The secular world around us is constantly and aggressively trying to squeeze you and I into its mold, forcing us to think like it thinks, to value what it values, to fear what it fears, and to love what it loves.

It screams at us from every television screen, every social media feed, every cultural institution that life is ultimately about us, about our self-actualization, our self-worship, our materialism, and even our radical personal autonomy.

How do we resist this terrifying, powerful, gravity-like pressure of cultural conformity?

Paul does not say just pull yourself up from your bootstraps and try harder.

He uses a passive command when he says, be transformed.

This is the Greek word metamorphos, the very word which we derive our English word metamorphosis.

It refers to a radical structural organic change that occurs.

When we see a depiction or even see in real life a caterpillar crawl inside of a cocoon and come out fundamentally transformed into a new creature, to an airborne butterfly.

It's amazing to see.

But how does this spiritual metamorphosis actually take place?

What is the practical mechanism?

Paul tells us plainly it happens by the renewing of our mind.

In our reformed heritage, we understand a vital psychological and spiritual truth, that while the intellect is certainly not the whole of saving faith, it's always the indispensable gateway to the human affections and the human will.

You cannot truly love what you do not accurately know, and you can't faithfully serve a God that you don't deeply understand.

Our minds by nature have been corrupted by sin.

What theologians historically call the noetic effects of the fall, our natural default settings are they're broken, they're busted.

We naturally think fleshly thoughts.

We judge reality by worldly standards.

We endlessly justify our own sin.

Renewing the mind means taking down that old worldly framework and completely rebuilding a new gospel saturated framework in our thought life.

It means filling your mind with the truth of God's word so thoroughly that we begin to view every single aspect of existence through a scriptural lens.

Think of it this way.

Consider the relationship between a husband and a wife.

So I'll I'll share something with you personal.

So, you know, when I first met my wife Lynn, so we've been married for going on 18 years.

I got that part right.

Um that's not something you want to mess up, guys.

But I still remember the first time that I met her, um, we had a date at a restaurant down in Charlotte.

Uh we went to basically a fast food place, sticky fingers.

I don't know if they're still in existence or not.

But I remember, and we had, you know, we had talked, we had uh talked on the phone, prayed together.

We had sent some emails back and forth before we actually met physically.

And I remember uh reaching across that table just instinctively and grabbing both of her hands.

And I'm glad I did, because when I looked into those eyes of her, those beautiful blue eyes, if I had not been holding on to her hands, I might have fallen in the floor.

I might have just that might have been the end.

Okay.

And so I bring that up to say, as much as I was enamored with her then, and as much as I loved her on our wedding day, uh, you know, I can look now and say that I love her way more than I did on my wedding day.

And you say, well, you know, why, right?

And it's because as time has gone along, I have I've been able to see uh virtue in her.

I've been able to see virtue after virtue, and and so in seeing that, it's caused me to be moved uh in a direction of affection, of appreciation.

Um it it draws that out of me, you see.

And so I'll give you an example.

I I went through hip replacement surgery uh many years ago.

And so Lynn had to be my personal nurse.

And you know, it's it's such a nasty job.

So basically, without being too graphic here, um, you know, if you have your hips replaced, you you're not gonna climb out of the bed.

I had them both done, you know, and go to the bathroom, right?

So uh I had a little jug, and that was my bathroom.

Okay, those of you in you know that are in the medical field, that's no big deal to you.

But for for most of us that that aren't dealing with bodily fluids that often, it's it's a challenge.

And so oftentimes um I would wake up in the middle of the night to go, and uh unfortunately my container was full.

And so I would wake her up and say, hey, can you and and this is this is this is uh this sounds so crazy to share this, but this was this was one of those occasions where seeing her virtue caused me my love for her to grow exponentially.

You know, she she had to do that for an entire summer, you know, for two surgeries.

And I can honestly say, with God as my witness, there was not one time that I ever heard her complain.

There was not one occasion where I ever heard her even take a deep sigh, like this is just such a bother.

And how are you not moved?

And so, you know, sometimes when we look at being a living sacrifice, I think sometimes we just we get so caught up in Christianity thinking we've got to follow all these rules and regulations in our own strength, and we say, I can't do that.

And just for an example, um, you know, I think sometimes as men in a world that's so hypersexualized, we think we have to walk down the aisles of the supermarket and we we gotta get our blinders up, and you know, we just don't want to look at anybody inappropriately.

You know, we don't want to look at anybody else, and we're like, I've just got to try really hard today not to look at anybody with lust because I don't want to violate that commandment or that rule.

And that's just all wrong.

You know, what we need to do is we need a greater love.

So, you know, my love for my wife is so great that I don't I don't battle that.

I don't I don't feel like that I have to to worry and get all wrapped up in following that rule.

Because what happens is that desire completely displaces lesser desires in my life.

You know, a a man who has a faithful wife.

Because his heart is thoroughly captured by the beauty, virtue, and character of his bride, his desire to look at other women is fundamentally swallowed up.

His love for her makes the allure of strangers fade into complete insignificance.

It's not just this rigid legalistic determination to avoid a violation.

It's a profound, joyful devotion that doesn't leave room for competitors.

And you say, why do I share this story?

This is true of our relationship with the Lord, right?

Even on a much, much greater scale.

The modern world tells us that worship is this vague, emotional, anti-intellectual experience that's based on like how we feel.

You know, we can see a beautiful sunset or a beautiful scene in nature, and we think, oh, this was a sacred, this was a worshipful experience.

And we don't realize that our transformation doesn't work from the outside in, it works from the inside out.

You know, it's interesting sometimes that I teach at a high school Bible at a Christian school in High Point.

And sometimes at our chapel services, I know that we mean well, but sometimes our leader will say, Okay, guys, we're getting ready to go into a time of worship.

You know, I know what he means.

I almost wish he would say a time of praise.

Because actually, worship is something that we do from the time we wake up in the morning till the time we go to bed at night.

Our whole life is worship.

Everything we do is declaring, hopefully, that he is worthy of us living a life that's worthy of the gospel calling in our life.

And so I know what he means when he says that, but I can't help but cringe a little bit.

Like, no, we've already been worshiping.

Before we even walked into this chapel building today, we were already either worshiping God or not.

So if you want your heart to burn with a genuine love for God, and if you want to be able to completely kill the idols, the counterfeit gods, then we have to relentlessly feed our mind with the truth of who he is.

And as your mind lays hold of these attributes, as you study his absolute sovereignty, his holiness, his infinite wisdom, his tender faithfulness, and his unchanging rock solid justice, your soul cannot help but bow in total wonder.

You know, it's interesting as a Bible teacher, the place that I start every year is with the attributes of God.

Because to me, that's where it starts.

How can you love and serve and have a have faithful obedience to a God that you know very little about?

In fact, I spend an entire unit at the beginning of the year just looking at God's attributes.

You know, and so I would ask us today, how how well do we really know God?

What is our mechanism to know God?

What is our motivation to love Him and serve Him in a way that causes us to want to put ourselves on the altar?

This is a living sacrifice.

You know, I'm sure you've probably heard this preached before, but the problem with living sacrifices is they often they often crawl off the altar.

As soon as life gets hard, things don't go our way, we tend to abandon God in that moment and decide to just do it our own way, do it in our own strength.

So, how do we how do we do this?

Paul talks about renewing of our mind.

So, this renewing here it implies a continuous ongoing renovation, a daily rewriting of those internal scripts that run our lives.

Just like a husband that actively fixes his eyes on his wife's virtues, rather than just letting his mind drift into lazy indifferences.

You and I, we have to actually daily fix our minds on the character of God.

Just like we sang earlier today.

I I you know I fix my eyes on Calvary, right?

We we keep our eyes and our attention there because that's what's going to change and give us the motivation.

The human mind is never a vacuum.

If it's not being consciously filled with the majestic weight of God's truth, then it will automatically default back to shallow, anxious, lustful patterns of this passing age.

Renewing the mind is what the great theologian Thomas Chalmers famously called the expulsive power of a new affection.

I thought of just another hymn that gives us this same picture that I'm sure a lot of you probably learned from your youth.

When he says, Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.

Notice the physics of this song.

It doesn't say you force the things of earth to go away by our sheer willpower, but it says when our mind is occupied looking full in his wonderful face, in other words, when we're consumed with the majesty of his sovereign mercies, the things of the earth do grow strangely dim.

The allure of the world loses its grip, not because you were able to break free of the grip, but because the superior beauty of Jesus Christ has outshined it.

It's the holy work of dismantling the old fleshly way of interpreting reality and laying down a new, gospel-saturated architecture in your thought life.

When your mind is thoroughly renewed by the Holy Spirit through the Word, your thoughts are no longer held captive by worldly anxieties, worldly ambitions, or worldly philosophies.

Instead, your intellect becomes the glorious gateway through which the beauties of Jesus Christ captivate your heart, driving us to our knees in joyful surrender.

Notice the final result of this renewed mind in verse 2, where he says, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

A renewed mind doesn't just know cold information, it possesses living spiritual wisdom to navigate this broken, complicated world with a holy, Christ-like discernment.

It's a gospel lens.

It's like some of you probably notice I'm wearing these glasses.

I'm not real comfortable with them yet.

Last time I spoke, I think I had my readers on and I looked at y'all over the top.

And so I thought, well, this is a little better, I hope.

I hope you can get used to it.

But you know, without without these lenses, everything up here is just smudges of ink on a page.

And it's kind of like the way we look at life sometimes without having a spiritual lens.

We look through a spiritual lens, we look at what we've talked about today.

We look at this extravagant mercy of God in all those chapters previous to 12, and all of a sudden things become like super crystal clear because we see what he's done for us, and so we we respond naturally to that love.

And it's important that we get that order correct.

And he does the same thing in Ephesians, where Paul, in a lot of his in his writings, he says, This is what God has done for you, this is what he has given you.

So now this should be your natural response.

We get that backwards, then we become legalistic and we become somebody that's works based.

So again, the only logical, reasonable response to eleven chapters of mercy, unmerited grace from God is to present our bodies as a living sacrifice.

Isn't it interesting that he says our bodies?

He keeps going back to this body.

If you read Romans 6 and 7, you just keep seeing this same theme about fighting the flesh, the body, the body, the body.

And I don't know if you've ever had this experience before, but sometimes, you know, as a Christian brother, we try to hold each other accountable, and you'll you'll try to speak to somebody about something you see in their life.

And, you know, because of this culture we live in, they'll say, Hey, uh, brother Sam, listen, you don't really know my heart about this.

So don't judge me, right?

Don't judge me because only God knows my heart about this.

And I don't say this, but sometimes in my mind, I'm not sure if this is a kind response.

But sometimes I think, you know what?

I don't I don't really need to know what's in your heart.

You're right.

That is between you and God.

Because what's in your heart's gonna show up in everything you do.

I'm not watching your heart, brother.

I'm watching your actions.

I'm watching your body.

I'm looking to see what you do, right?

You know, we do realize the heart is the center, it's the um, how can I say this?

It's the it's the power plant or the engineer of everything you do with your hands, everything you do with your feet, everything you say with your tongue, of everything, your wills, your desires, your emotions.

That's why I asked Zane if we can include that song today.

Take my life and let it be.

Consecrated, Lord, to thee.

Take my moments and my days, let them flow in ceaseless praise.

Take my hands, let them move at the impulse of thy love.

Take my feet, let them be swift and beautiful for thee.

Take my voice and let me sing, always only for my king.

Take my lips and let them be filled with messages from thee.

You know, sometimes when I look at Isaiah chapter six, and we see Isaiah in a vision seeing the throne room of God, and he says, Whoa, I'm I'm undone because I'm a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.

The problem's not Isaiah's lips.

Even though that angel goes and takes a coal and just his lips.

The problem is, as Jesus explains later in Scripture, is that out of our lips our hearts revealed, right?

Everything that we do should be out of a response of what God has already done for us, as we looked at briefly in those first eleven chapters.

This is our true spiritual worship, or uh this is our reasonable service.

It'd be completely irrational for me to claim to believe chapters 1 through 11 and then live chapter 12 entirely for myself.

It would be completely illogical to say I am saved by sovereign, unmerited, eternal mercy, and keep my rebellious hands on the steering wheel of my life.

Total joyful surrender is the only true logical, rational response to this kind of total grace.

Let's be clear as a redeemed people that we don't offer our life to God to earn an ounce of his mercy.

We don't step onto the altar to make him love us more.

Instead, we offer our life to God simply because we've already received his infinite mercy.

So therefore, as we leave today, may we not walk in the fragile strength of our own flesh, but instead rest in the overwhelming, motivating gratitude of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Let us lay our minds and our bodies daily upon his altar as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to him.

For from him and through him and to him are all things, as as Paul writes, to him be the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

You know, this thought occurred to me.

You know, we have twenty-four hours in a day, and I don't know how much sleep you get, but I rarely get eight, but it let's say that I did.

That means there are 16 hours of my day that are spent in the filth, being bombarded by the filth of this worldly culture we live in today.

And you're not going to combat that by spending 15 minutes maybe reading a psalm.

You're certainly not going to combat that with a five-minute daily devotional from our daily bread.

Brothers and sisters, we have to spend time in God's Word.

That's the only way we can know Him well enough that it stirs up this affection within us that causes us to gladly throw ourselves on the altar, to gladly be a living sacrifice.

So I'm going to urge you, just as Paul would if he were here today, to know him better, to love him more.

And the only way you're going to do that is to spend time with him intentionally and get to know him through his word.

Let's pray.