Transformation
Romans 12:1–2
We are in Romans, chapter 12. Tonight we’re starting a new section in
Romans. This gets into a section related to what, unfortunately, a lot of
theologians have divided into the practical section of Romans. It’s really
unfortunate the way theologians talk about a lot of Paul’s epistles. There’s a
pattern. Galatians is this way. Colossians and Ephesians are both this way. For
instance Ephesians 1–3 give instructions regarding the Christian life,
which is usually labeled doctrinal. Ephesians 4–6 is labeled application.
Romans is the same way. Romans 1–11 is labeled as doctrinal and Romans
12–16 is labeled as application. In several other epistles Paul followed
that pattern.
To me, that’s a problem because what happens it creates the impression
that doctrine is separate from application. Doctrine that isn’t application
isn’t biblical doctrine. Application that isn’t doctrinal isn’t biblical
application. Doctrine has been given this sort of restricted and narrow meaning
to refer to that which seems to some more abstract theology as opposed to
practical principles for the spiritual life. That’s a false use of the word
doctrine. There are many areas of life and many different disciplines in life,
the military is one area, where the word doctrine covers everything from the
initial, theoretical design of something all the way through to its final
application out on the battlefield. That’s how the word doctrine is really used
in Scripture because the root word didaskalos is just teaching or instruction. We’re instructed
about God. We’re instructed about salvation. We’re instructed about
justification. We’re instructed about how to apply those principles. It’s all
instruction. That’s what the word doctrine describes.
I prefer to think about this in terms of reality and responsibility.
What usually goes under the concept of doctrine is really Paul teaching the
nature of reality, such as the nature of God, the nature of salvation, or the
nature of whatever the area is. Then in the latter part of the book he’s saying
that once we understand the nature of reality with respect to different areas
of revelation, then he talks about what our responsibility is in the light of
that reality. And so, Romans 1–11 has been a discussion of the reality of
God’s righteousness and how it relates to the human race. Now in light of that,
in the latter part of Romans we’re going to talk about the responsibility of
the truth as explained in the first eleven chapters.
Even in these chapters there are many places where Paul talks about the
immediate application of those principles of justification and sanctification.
There was much there related to application. We create this false dichotomy and
I think that’s just one of the ways human viewpoint, which is just a
manifestation of Satan’s thinking, seems to separate the Word of God from
day-to-day significance in people’s lives. I think that’s what’s happened in
the evangelical church over the last hundred years. It’s created this tendency
for people to think of doctrine or theology as something sort of abstract but
it doesn’t really relate to everyday living.
I want to talk a little bit about that as we go through the lesson
today. There’s this false separation. Theology is up here and we live down in
this everyday area, so there’s a disconnect between the two. For many
Christians that’s their reality because over the generations in the last
hundred to hundred and fifty years pastors have fallen prey to that kind of
thinking so that if you go to a church that’s talking about application all the
time, you get something like you find in these motivational churches. People
feel good. They learn positive thinking. They learn some establishment
principles. They get all revved up to face another week but they’re never
really taught anything about the Bible.
And then there are some churches you go to where the Bible is taught and
theology is taught but it’s never really connected to day-to-day living. People
live with sort of an academic disconnect from the day-to-day issues of life,
whereas Scripture teaches and shows us that anything we learn about God is
intensely practical. So real theology, Biblical theology, is always going to be
intensely practical. Now you may not be able to draw the connection or connect
the dots but sound Biblical theology is always intensely practical. And any
practical principle of application can never be separated from its theological
foundation. You’ve heard me and others that if we were to ask the Apostle Paul
how to brush our teeth, he would start off with Genesis 1 and 2 how God formed
man’s body from the dust of the earth and the chemicals of the soil so that we
would have a proper and Biblical understanding of the significance of the body.
Then the responsibility to take care of the body that’s created as part of mankind,
the whole of which is created in the image and likeness of God.
So we have to understand things in their proper place and the proper
structure. We have to understand that this must be understood as God’s instruction
about every aspect of life, and the purpose of that instruction is to teach us
how to think with the result that it changes how we live. If we change how we
live without changing how we think then we end up being like the Pharisees who
are called by Jesus “white-washed sepulchers”. They just had an external change
but there’s no internal transformation and that’s at the heart of this opening
verse we have in Romans, chapter 12.
This is one of the most challenging pair of verses in the Scripture and
I think, at least in my thinking, that this presents the essence of the
pastoral mission, especially in verse 2. Now I ran across a quote the other
day. It was in a forwarded e-mail, someone with whom this had originated is a
retired military officer. He included this as sort of a quotation under his
signature in the e-mail. It’s a quote from Pericles who was an ancient Greek
general but it also states something very significant that I think applies to
the local church in many ways, and is a great challenge. Where do you fall
within this quote? He says, “Of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be
there …” He’s talking in military terms but there’s an application to the
church. “Of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there. Eighty are nothing
but targets. Nine are real fighters. We’re lucky to have them. They make the
battle. Ah, but the one. One of them is a warrior and he will bring the others
back.”
Now I have had the philosophy of ministry for years that I’m in the
business of producing people who would fit in those ten, the nine who are the
fighters and the one who is the warrior. Many pastors waste their time and
truly it is a waste of time because those other ninety never, ever get the
picture. I know pastors who’ll spend all their time trying to get the ninety to
wake up and ignore the other nine or ten. What the church is all about and
we’re going to see this increasingly in Matthew, what the Christian leadership
is all about, is making disciples. The challenge in the gospels of what a
disciple is ought to make all of us sit up and pay attention because it isn’t
just something easy. A disciple isn’t someone who is just a casual student or
who just seems curious about the Word of God but that’s often where we start.
The word disciple means a learner, not just someone who’s learning and
filling up their doctrinal notebooks with information but is being transformed
according to the principles of Romans 12:1–2 where their thinking is
being radically overhauled and renovated by the Word of God. You sort of have
to start off with the mindset that you want to be one of those ten; you don’t
want to be one of the ninety. Because if you’re one of the ninety you’re either
a target or you shouldn’t be there. And sadly, if you take this and extrapolate
it to Christendom I think that fits. I think in this congregation these
percentages are skewed. We have many more who are fighters and who are seeking
to be the warriors than not. That also means you have many churches such as
ones composed of a thousand people 2,500 of them shouldn’t be there, and the
other 7,500 are targets, including the pastor. Nobody in those churches is a
fighter or a warrior. That characterizes too many churches in the world today.
We make up for a little of that because I do believe we have people in this
congregation and people who listen online who are serious about their spiritual
life. They want to step up to the plate to be counted among those who have been
faithful in their Christian life and those who have been used by the Lord and
have truly wanted to serve the Lord.
So the question is what do you want to be? This is the real challenge
we’ll see in the Scriptures of being a disciple. There were a lot of people who
wanted initially to be disciples. If you trace that through the gospels, you
see there are thousands who are the casual, curious disciples that show up to
listen to Jesus. But as He starts to make clear what is involved in being a
true follower of Jesus, then everything changes. You remember the command given
to the disciples and to the original disciples and it is applied to all the
pastors in the churches that we are to make disciples. That’s our
responsibility to challenge people to be disciples. Jesus’ responsibility is to
build the Church and our job is to feed the sheep and make disciples and let
Jesus worry about how He’s going to build the Church.
But what we need to do is lay this challenge out there of whether
we want to be just casual, curious believers. Remember when we get to passages
like John 6, as people understood what Jesus was saying they just went their
own way. They just walked away. They didn’t hang in there because they really
didn’t want to do what it took to be a disciple.
Now I think of all the passages of Scripture that summarize what the
Christian life and its challenge is all about, what the pastoral ministry is
all about, is in Romans 12:1–2. Paul begins by saying, “Therefore I urge
you, brethren, [beseech you] by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a
living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, {which is} your spiritual
[reasonable] service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will
of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
So I think there are some things in this verse that are a little
antiquated, words like “beseech” are a little difficult for people to
comprehend today. “Holy” is a word that’s been so overused that most people
don’t understand what that means. The phrase “reasonable service” as it’s
translated in the New King James doesn’t quite capture what the Greek says. But
I’m not sure any single words in English really capture the sense of what the
Greek is trying to communicate.
Verse 2 is really a contrast for verse 1. Verse 1 tells us we’re to
present our bodies a living sacrifice and in contrast we’re to not be conformed
to the world. That’s how we present our bodies a living sacrifice, by not being
conformed to the world but by being transformed by the renewing of our mind. So
let’s get into this. A lot of applications come from this but I think we need
to understand the translation and understand just what is being said before we
go very far.
At the very beginning we have Paul making a very strong personal
statement. He says, “I beseech you.” “Beseech” is just an old English word and
it translates the Greek word parakaleo which means to encourage, to strengthen, to come alongside. It has the
idea of urging, exhorting, comforting, or challenging someone to a particular
course of action. This is the significance of that word. Paul isn’t saying, “I
command you to do this” but he’s recognizing that the listener, which in the 1st
century was the Roman church, by extension that’s each one of us. Paul is talking
directly to me. He’s talking directly to you. He’s saying, “I’m giving you this
challenge but you’re the one that has to make up your mind whether or not
you’re going to accept the challenge. Some of you are just willing to be E
minus students, others of you think B minus is okay, but the focal point of
ministry should be toward the ones who want to be A plus students. This is a
challenge to them. It has the idea of pressing somebody, pushing them,
challenging them to a particular course of action, telling them to do
something. I would translate this, “I challenge you” or “I urge you”. There’s a
sense of impending disaster if they don’t do this because they’ll come under
divine discipline and they’ll destroy their life or destroy their spiritual life.
He addresses them as “brethren” because he views them as believers in
the Lord Jesus Christ and he says “I challenge you on the basis of the mercies
of God.” The word here translated mercy is the Greek word oikternos, which is in the plural, and he’s talking about the
manifold grace of God in his life. This is the ground for his urgent
exhortation is that God’s mercy has been manifested in his own life. God’s
saving grace has been manifested and he’s talking about the grace of God at the
cross that provided a free salvation for us. He’s talking about God’s free
provision of His word to us and He’s talking about God’s provision of God the
Holy Spirit to us to empower us and to fill us with His word so all of these
are part of that concept of the mercies of God.
He uses the structure in the Greek, dia plus the genitive, like we have in
Ephesians 2:8–9, meaning through faith. It’s talking about the
intermediate grounds or basis for something. Now we have passages like 2
Corinthians 1:3 where Paul says, “Blessed {be} the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” He views God and
God the Father ultimately as the source of mercy in terms of His plan of
salvation and His plan for the spiritual life. So he draws a connection by
basing his challenge on the mercies of God. He’s drawing a connection back
to everything that he has said in the first eleven chapters.
That’s reinforced by the fact that he uses the word “therefore”. Those
of you who have been in the Bible study methods class know that whenever you
see a “therefore”, you have to see what’s it’s there for. This is a
conjunction that draws an inference or conclusion. It’s the Greek conjunction oun, which is one of
the strongest inferential conjunctions and it’s not just referring to what was
just stated in Romans 11 or 9–11 but really on the basis of everything
that had been said before. So when you take the “therefore” along with this
further statement on the ground or the basis of the mercies of God that all takes
us back to this wonderful exposition that Paul has given us of God’s wonderful
grace in salvation and in justification and in providing God the Holy Spirit
and the baptism by the Holy Spirit which frees us from the tyranny of the sin
nature. All of this is the manifestation of the mercy of God.
So on that basis, because we see this wonderful manifestation of the
mercy of God and this is seen in Romans 9–11 in God’s treatment of Israel
that this has a natural consequence and that natural consequence is that we
should present our bodies as a living sacrifice. Now the concept of
presentation here is expressed in the word paristemi, which is grammatically an aorist
active infinitive. An infinitive is frequently used to express purpose or
result. So Paul is stating, is urging them that the result of his challenge is
that we engage in action. That the reader, and that you and I, engage in a
particular action and that is to present our bodies as a living sacrifice.
Now as we look at this word we recognize that it is a word that is
commonly used to express the act of bringing a sacrifice to the altar. A living
sacrifice which of course would be killed but what Paul is talking about here
is like a praise offering where there’s not a death but something given to the
Lord in response to what he has done which is a sacrifice. The verb here is the
same word that’s used in Luke 2:22 when Jesus’ human parents brought Him to the
temple to present him and to consecrate or set Him apart for service a week
after He was born. It’s also used frequently of offering sacrifices. Josephus
tells us this was a technical term for the offering of sacrifice and it’s used
of the Christian presenting himself to the service of God in Romans 6:13–16.
So this isn’t the first time Paul has mentioned this concept.
He’s going right back to connect what he’s saying here to the foundation
he’s explained already in relation to the spiritual life in Romans 6. It’s also
related to God presenting the saved. What we are to present, then, to God is
our bodies. There’s a couple of different ways we might take that. First of
all, we could take it literally and this is a problem you would have if you
were thinking in terms of Greek culture that there’s a harsh distinction
between the material part of man, the body, and the immaterial part of man, the
soul and the spirit. But Paul is not talking about just a bodily sacrifice.
Part of the problem you have from Greek philosophy is that they would create
certain artificial distinctions in the composition of man.
Under Platonism they put such an emphasis on the immaterial part of man
that the material part of man was not really that important. So they would
emphasize that what’s really important is your soul. But see the Lord created
man as a unit, as a body, where God specifically designed the body for a purpose.
You can’t go in and say, “Well, the soul is the real you.” That’s pure
Neo-Platonism when people say that the soul is the real you. The Bible emphasizes
value of both the material and the immaterial. Platonism says the material is
not that important; that what’s important is the soul. That has tremendous
problems with it. There are implications to that that have baggage we don’t
want to deal with.
So what Paul is emphasizing here is the body. He doesn’t just mean the
physical body. That is the first option to just think he is talking about a
bodily or material sacrifice. Second, Paul is using the body as a figure of
speech where the body is used to represent the whole of the person. This is
called a synecdoche, which means a part for a whole. That’s the technical term
for this kind of figure of speech where you talk about a part of a thing and it
involves the entire
thing.
The fact that the party involves all of you is indicated by the fact
that you can’t have your body go someplace without having your soul go with it.
That is a unity there. If you think about it, the soul never, ever has an
existence without a body. How can you see without a body? How can you hear
without a body? How can you experience all of the essential feelings if you
don’t have a body?
Even in the interim state we have the story in Luke 16 where you have
the story of Lazarus and the rich man. Lazarus is a beggar outside the gates of
the rich man, who is never named. The fact that Lazarus is given a name
indicates that this isn’t simply a parable. It is a story about a real person.
If you read all the other parables they just talk about a certain man, a rich
man, a landowner, a servant. It never names them. The fact there is an
individual identified here with a specific name indicates that Jesus is talking
about a specific situation and a specific reality. When Lazarus died, he went
with the Old Testament saints to an area called Abraham’s Bosom, which is in Sheol.
The New Testament word for it is Hades. It is divided into two compartments.
The compartment for the righteous was known as Abraham’s Bosom or Paradise.
Then there was another area known as Torments. The rich man was not a believer
so he died and he went to Torments. While he is in Torments he can look across
this great chasm or gulf between Torments and Paradise, and he sees Abraham on
the other side. He begs Abraham that Lazarus can take his finger—which
means Lazarus has a finger—to dip in the water and put it on the rich
man’s tongue because he’s burning up.
So all of this indicates there’s something there. It’s not the
present, corporeal body but it is an interim body. After the resurrection,
there’s a resurrection body. There’s even some sort of body for the unsaved and
it is through the body that the soul is able to interact with what surrounds
it. Without the body the soul would just be blind and deaf and speechless. The
body is important and theologians from the 1st century, including
the Apostle Paul, have understood and taught the importance of the body for the
composition of man—very much against the Neo-Platonic idea. Paul uses the
term body here to represent the totality of each person. Some translations come
along and translate this as "yourself" but that’s open to
interpretation. Paul is talking about body, soul, and spirit here, about the
entire makeup of the regenerate believer, about the fact that the body is
important. He has done this already in Romans 6. The body can be an instrument
of righteousness in 6:13; the body is a member of Christ in 1 Corinthians 6:15;
the body is made a temple by the Holy Spirit for the indwelling of Christ in 1
Corinthians 6:19 which sanctifies or sets apart the physical body. So the body
is important and significant.
So he says we’re to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. The fact
that it’s living shows that this is something that is going to endure. This
will continue. That is indicated also by the present tense of the verb. The
aspect of presenting your body is an aorist infinitive, which is simply
presenting it as a single action. It’s not a single, one-shot decision. That’s
how people taught this that weren’t well schooled in Greek. When it comes to
the aorist tense it was taught this was punctiliar action, a one-shot decision.
That’s not what it means. It just means that when you’re talking about the
aorist tense, it’s a summary tense. It’s taking a lot of action and summarizing
it at one-point, not that it is one-point. An aorist infinitive is simply
expressing that as one action but Paul recognizes by using the present tense in
other places that this is something that goes on and on. We don’t just make a
one-shot decision and that’s it. Every single day we have to reinforce that
particular decision.
Now this concept of presenting ourselves to God is clearly stated in
passages like Romans 6:13–16. In Romans 6:13 Paul says, “And do not go on
presenting the members of your body to sin {as} instruments of unrighteousness;
but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members
{as} instruments of righteousness to God.” "Members" there is talking
about the parts of your body. In the contrast in Romans 12:1 you present your
bodies as service to God, whereas in 6:13 it is saying not to present your
bodies to sin. Why? In the Baptism by the Holy Spirit the tyranny of the
sin nature is broken, so we are no longer in the position of being a slave to
sin. If you re enslaved to sin it’s because you’ve put yourself back in that
position. You no longer have to be a slave to sin. We have been freed from the
power of the sin nature, though we still have the presence of the sin nature.
We don’t have to yield to it. Yield is another antiquated term. You read
Lewis Sperry Chafer’s volume on “He That is Spiritual” and he talks about
yieldedness. That was a catch phrase that came out of the victorious life
movement at the end of the 19th century. Yieldedness was just
another way to talk about presenting yourself to God. It’s the presentation of
something to a superior for His use. So we are not to present our bodies as
members of unrighteousness to sin but we’re to present ourselves to God for His
service because He’s the One who has made us alive.
We’re to present ourselves to God as being alive from the dead and the
members of our body as instruments of righteousness to God. Why? He explains in
verse 14, “For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but
under grace.” In verse 15 he draws another conclusion. He says, “What then?
Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! Do
you not know that when you present yourselves to someone {as} slaves for
obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in
death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?” You have two options.
You’re either going to present yourself as a slave to obey your sin nature, or you
present yourself as a slave to serve God. One or the other; there’s no
in-between.
When I present myself to do what I want to do and I’m just serving my
own selfish desires and needs, I’m serving my sin nature. Because the primary
focus of the sin nature is on the self. What Paul says is that we need to learn
that we are either serving our sin nature, and ourselves or we’re serving God.
It’s an authority issue. It always boils down to an authority issue. Are we
going to obey God or just do what we want to do?
Now back to Romans 12:1, “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies
of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God,
{which is} your spiritual [reasonable] service of worship.” Now when we
look at this in terms of the original Greek. The last phrase is describing
categories relating to service, not related to the sacrifice. The sacrifice is
not a sacrifice in the sense that we’re going to feel like we’re just
suffering, like we’re giving something up. You know, some people get the
mistaken notion that sacrifice means you’re giving something up. Actually, you’re
not giving anything up. You are accepting the authority of God in your life,
which means you are going to have the fullness of life that Jesus promised.
You’re not giving up anything. That’s what a sacrifice is in the Old Testament imagery;
it is giving something to God.
It does not have the primary idea of suffering through some sort of pain
or discomfort. It is giving something over to the service of God. That’s what a
sacrifice is. It’s being given to serve God, not to serve our own desires. For
many people, that’s what makes it suffering because we just don’t want to give
it up. We just don’t want to let God use us in the way He would use us. We want
to live life on our own terms. So this is what is addressed in these next two
words. Hagios, which is translated holy, a word
that is so overused and abused that most people don’t know what it means. The
core meaning of holy is to give something, to consecrate, to set apart
something to the service to God. It doesn’t have the idea of moral purity.
That’s a secondary idea in many contexts but it’s not the primary idea. How do
we know this? We know this because a form of the word hagios is used to describe the male and female
prostitutes who served in the fertility religions of the Baal’s and the
Ashtoreth’s. Now they certainly weren’t morally pure as male and female
religious prostitutes but they were given over to the service of their god.
The same thing can be said about the inanimate objects that were part of
the worship in the Tabernacle and the Temple. The bowls that were used, the
laver and altar, are all are impersonal and inanimate. They can neither be
moral or immoral. A piece of metal can be neither moral now immoral. A piece of
wood can be neither moral nor immoral but it can be set apart to the service of
God. That’s what makes them holy. It is that they’re set apart to the service
of God. It’s set apart for a divine purpose.
This is why the land of Israel has been called the holy land. I remember
going to Israel on the first trip and someone asked, “Why do they always want
to call it the holy land?” Holy means set apart. It’s the only piece of real
estate on the earth that’s set apart for God’s people and God’s purpose. That’s
what makes it holy. It’s a set-apart piece of real estate. So that’s why it’s
accurate to refer to it as the holy land even though most people think that
means it’s something special.
You always get these people who have the “Jerusalem syndrome”. They end
up coming to Jerusalem and all of the sudden they have all kind of mystical
experiences. They end up in the insane ward in a hospital in Jerusalem thinking
they’re the Messiah or Peter or Abraham or David or something like that. Some
people flip out when they go over there, thinking it’s something special. It is
in one sense but it’s not a mystical type of special.
So when we present ourselves to God what we’re saying is, “God, I want
my life to be used by you. I want to serve you. I want Your will, not my will,
to be accomplished in my life. I understand I was saved and redeemed for a
purpose and that purpose is to serve you.” So that’s the idea of the fact we
are to be a living sacrifice, set apart to God, acceptable which is the word euarestos, meaning something that is
acceptable and pleasing to God. It’s acceptable and pleasing to God because it
is functioning as God intended us to function. He saved us to serve Him. So
it’s pleasing to Him because we’re doing His will.
This is then described as out “reasonable service”. Now this two-word
phrase is one that’s difficult to translate into English because we don’t
really have words that fully capture the translation. The word translated
“reasonable” is the Greek word logikos. It’s a hard “g”. We would soften
it if we brought it into English. It’s where we get our word “logic”. It has
something to do with thinking something through from its foundation to its
conclusion, to reflect upon it. It’s something that is logically derived from a
certain set of assumptions. Now what this is showing is that the Christian life
is to be a life based on thought, not a life based on emotion, not a life based
on a response to some kind of emotional appeal or a feel-good sermon.
It is something where people are taught to understand what God has done
for them as we’ve done by going through the first eleven chapters of Romans,
that God had a plan for salvation, that He sent His Son to become a human
being, to go to the cross and to die on the cross as a substitute for every
human being, to bear in His own body on the cross the punishment for our sins
so that we could have freedom from sin and forgiveness from sin by simply
trusting in Him and His substitutionary death. Now once we come to understand
all that God has done for us and we reflect upon that we realize that by
believing in Christ we become identified with Christ in His death, burial, and
resurrection and we are given a new life in Christ. Then the logical consequence
of understanding that is that we should live that new life in service to God.
So the idea of using the word logikos here brings us
to the fact that a person should reach this point through a logical
consideration of all that God has done for them with the result that they
recognize they are to live to serve God and not themselves.
The second word there “service” is the word latreia. Now this isn’t your normal word
for worship, which has more the idea of bowing the knee. This is another aspect
of worship, which is service. It’s not emphasizing the submission to authority
side, which the other word emphasizes but it’s emphasizing the service side. So
it’s a service of worship. It is serving God with our life. That’s why it’s a
living, on-going sacrifice because we’re serving God rather than the desires of
our sin nature.
The sentence ends there in English but it really doesn’t end there in
Greek. It continues on. The thought of the second verse grows out of and develops
from the first verse. Here we read the prohibition, “And do not be conformed to
this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” There’s a reason
for that because it demonstrates something. It puts something to the test. The
word “proof” there is dokimazo, which has the idea of not just
proving something but it’s like in a laboratory where you’re demonstrating the
truth of something through your life. It’s not just testing just for testing
sake but it’s testing to demonstrate the quality of something. “… So that you
may prove [demonstrate] what the will of God is, that which is good and
acceptable and perfect.” I prefer to translate that as that “you’re supposed to
demonstrate that the will of God is good and acceptable and perfect”. It’s
demonstrated through our life.
So let’s just look at the first part of this. The first part we have a
present passive imperative. Present imperatives emphasize sort of a standard
operating procedure in the Christian life whereas an aorist imperative is more
like a jab to get our attention or to emphasize a priority; a present
imperative emphasizes something that is to continually be a reality in our
life. It’s an ongoing characteristic in the Christian life. So we’re not to be
conformed, which is the word suschematizo. It has the idea of not being impressed into a mold of something.
So the picture is that we have our sin nature but there’s something
outside of us that is pushing us to conform to this preset mold of the world
and the environment around us. We’re not to be conformed to this world but
instead we’re to be transformed. The word schema is emphasizing more of an external
conformity whereas the word here is metamorphoo, which emphasizes an internal
transformation. It, too, is a present passive imperative. We don’t transform
ourselves. There’s something else acting upon us that brings about that
transformation. That’s the Word of God and the Spirit of God, which we learn
about from other passages. It changes us from the inside out. It’s not just an
external transformation.
So we’re not to be conformed to the world but we’re transformed by the
renewing of our emotions. Right? No, that’s not what it says. But that’s what
you think when you look at a lot of Christians. They’ve given up on rationally
defending the Scripture. They’ve given up on believing in the inerrancy and the
infallibility of the Word of God. They don’t believe it’s historically
accurate. They don’t believe it’s scientifically accurate. They don’t believe
that when it touches on things of history or archeology or science that it’s
right. They say it’s right in the spiritual things but remember, Jesus said
that since we can’t validate the spiritual things, the way that we know that
it’s true spiritually because when it talks about the things that we can
validate it’s always true. So modern man has everything turned inside out. So
we have to believe in the Word of God and trust in the Word of God and that
changes our thinking, not our emotions.
It is by transforming the way we think and not just what we think but
how we think. It’s not just changing the content of our thinking but how we
think, the structure, the forms in which we use to think. We can think right
thoughts in a wrong way and a right thing done in a wrong way is wrong. I’ve
seen this happen a lot of times. You get a certain type of people who are saved
out of an existential mystical background, which was typical of hippies coming
out of the 60s and they get converted and they hear the gospel and they get
converted through some sort of the ministry of a charismatic church. But
charismatic theology is basically existential mystical theology so they don’t
have to change their worldview at all. They’re still existential and mystical
but they go from being in a pagan environment to charismatic theology. They
change a lot of the content but it’s still within the same structure of
existential mysticism. It doesn’t do them much good because it’s a right thing
now but it’s done in a wrong way. So we have to learn how to think differently.
As one of my professors in seminary said so wisely at one time, “It’s hard
enough to think. But it’s really difficult to think about how we think, to
analyze our own thought forms and structure that.” That gets really tough.
Fortunately, it’s not ultimately up to us, we have God the Holy Spirit
and the Word of God. Now we’re not supposed to be conformed to this world. The
word for world there is not the word you might expect. The Greek word normally
translated world such as “For God so loved the world,” is the Greek word kosmos which is sometimes translated earth
but ultimately it refers to an orderly or organized system. Often it refers to
the earth. Sometimes as in John 3:16 it refers to the inhabitants of that
system.
But the word used here is aion. It’s a time word. Sometimes it is translated “age”, but
different thought forms characterize each age of earth's history. Worldliness
based on the word kosmos often talks
about how human beings think a certain way that is in contrast to God’s way.
What aion emphasizes is that this is related
to a certain time frame in history. Just think about the history of ideas. We
know there was a time before Greek philosophy when things emphasized the fact
that things were more supernatural. Then the Greeks came along and began to
transform that into ways to try to remove any religion or supernatural ideas or
superstition and you had the pre-Socratics and then you had Heraclitus and
Parmenides and then you had Plato and Aristotle and then the Neo-Platonics and
others like the Epicureans and the Stoics who came along. Each age does a shift
in the way people think. You get into the period of Christianity some people
thought according to the Bible but a lot of early Christians were still
thinking within the structure of Neo-Platonism. That characterized much of the
early Church. It wasn’t biblical Christianity. It was a Neo-Platonic
interpretation of Christianity. Until you get to the Middle Ages around the 11th
or 12th century and there’s a rediscovery of Aristotle under most
notably Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and some others. Then they had an
Aristotelian interpretation of Christianity. It wasn’t until Luther came along
and argued for the Scripture alone that you have a genuine “back to the Bible”
movement that gave birth to the Protestant reformation. But then it’s not long
before Europe gets corrupted again by secular forms of the ancient rationalism
of Plato, now the rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza, and the empiricism of
Aristotle becomes the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume and some others. So each
era is characterized by different ways of thinking.
We live in one of those eras where most people have one leg in one era
and another leg in another era. One leg is firmly planted in modernism and the
other leg is firmly planted in post-modernism so they have a really jumbled way
of thinking. But that’s the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist as the German word calls it.
It’s the common way in which people think. It’s gotten really screwy how people
think. If you look around, many of you wonder and ask me questions about what
in the world is going on. Well, people are working out the implications of
their assumptions. These assumptions got firmly embedded in Western culture as
a result of Darwin, Freud, Spencer, Marx, and many others. Ideas that were on
the fringe 150 years ago are now embedded so deeply in the thinking of the
children running around the ghetto that they’re existential nihilists and they
can’t even say they word, but that’s what they are. And they’re post-modern
relativists. They know how to work those systems and they think that way. Your
children are that way and your grandchildren are that way. You wonder where in
the world they’re getting these ideas. They just sort of absorb them from the
culture. And they pick it up. Why? Because they’ve got a little culture magnet
inside of them called the sin nature that just attracts these ideas, and their
sin natures just love these ideas because it gives them a rationale for
self-serving.
We’re not immune from that. Just because you’ve been around for a while
and you’re a believer doesn’t mean you’re immune from this same kind of thing.
We are all very prone to falling into the trap because that’s our sin nature and
it gravitates to these different kinds of thought forms. So this is the command
to us. We’re not to be conformed to this world but we have to be transformed by
the renovation or overhaul of our thinking. The word there for renewing is anakainosis meaning to renew, and it has to do
with a transformative overhaul. The word mind is the word nous, which is the idea of a manner of
thinking, the way in which you think.
The illustration I’ve used is that most Christians are in a mess. If
you’re north of 15 when you get saved you’re probably a little bit unhappy.
It’s not quite what you thought it would be. But if you got saved like I did,
at six, there’s not a whole lot to repent from, and there are not a whole lot
of problems because you’re just a little kid. When you get older you mess up
and you figure out that you need to really rely upon the Lord but the way most
Christians are is that they have a house that’s just disheveled. It’s in
shambles. The sheetrock is peeling off the walls, the paint’s peeling off, the
hinges in the kitchen cabinets are breaking, the roof leaks a little bit and
the house has settled, it’s a little crooked and if you put a ball down on the
floor it’s going to roll from one end of the house to the other. They want God
to come and straighten it all up.
The trouble is the Holy Spirit shows up with a bulldozer. They just want
Him to come in and kind of, like an interior decorator, slap some new paint on
the place and kind of straighten up the cabinets and a few things and just do a
superficial fix but the Holy Spirit shows up with a bulldozer and He wants to
tear it all down, including your rotten human viewpoint foundation and rebuild
from the get-go. Most Christians once they realize that’s what the Christian
life is all about say, “Uh Oh. Wait a minute. You’re not the guy I want. I want
the guy who’s just going to slap on a fresh coat of paint and whitewash
everything so it looks good.” We don’t want to really substantively change
anything from the inside out and yet that’s what Romans 12:1–2 is talking
about, a deep, internal renovation, down to a destruction and replacement of
the very foundation of how we think. We’ll get into that next time.