Will you kindly turn with me to St.
Paul's Epistle to the Romans.
I would like to read verses 1 to
8, Romans chapter 12, verses 1 to 8.
Perhaps I should say at the very outset
that I am going to be meditating with
you this morning on the first two verses
in this remarkable chapter.
Rather than read the text a second time,
let us notice it very carefully as we
read it now, and then we'll go through
to the end of verse 8.
Therefore, I urge you, brethren, in view of
God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living
sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is
your spiritual worship.
Do not conform any longer to the pattern
of this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and
approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing,
and perfect will.
For by the grace given to me, I
say to every one of you, do not
think of yourself more highly than you ought,
but rather think of yourself with sober judgment,
in accordance with the measure of faith.
Just as each of us has one body
with many members, and these members do not
all have the same function, so in Christ
we who are many form one body, and
each member belongs to all the others.
We have different gifts according to the grace
given to us.
If a man's gift is prophesying, let him
use it in proportion to his faith.
If it is serving, let him serve.
If it is teaching, let him teach.
If it is encouraging, let him encourage.
If it is contributing to the needs of
others, let him give generously.
If it is leadership, let him govern diligently.
If it is showing mercy, let him do
it cheerfully.
May the Lord graciously deign to bless this
passage of his word to us today, and
particularly verses 1 and 2 of this very
remarkable chapter.
May I remind you as we come to
think of the subject of discovering and delighting
in the will of God, may I remind
you that at this stage the Apostle Paul
has just completed his survey of the gospel
in chapters 1 to 11.
Chapters 1 to 11 of Romans present us
with something which is quite unique.
There is no other place in the New
Testament which gives us such a comprehensive view
of the gospel of divine grace, all together
with the interrelatedness of the parts.
That is what Paul has been doing, and
he ends up with a great peal of
praise, you will remember, at the end of
chapter 11.
Now, with chapter 12, he comes to the
ethical outworking of the gospel received and experienced
by sinners.
The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is
not simply a theology.
It is that, but it is more than
that.
It is divine truth, and when we receive
it and believe it savingly, it has a
vital impact upon our lives, and we will,
of necessity, live a different kind of life.
The old has passed away.
The new has come.
It is a new day.
It is a new life under new lordship.
Now, in verses 1 and 2, the Apostle
Paul has a short little section giving us
the most comprehensive message within the compass of
two verses that I think you will find
anywhere in the New Testament.
You see, he is applying the gospel now.
He has been expounding it up until now,
and indirectly applying it, of course, but now
it is all application in verses 1 and
2.
He is kind of answering the question, all
right, if that is the gospel, what do
we do to respond to it?
What are we expected to do?
And in these two verses, he gives us
a very, very remarkable picture.
He tells us three things.
One, response to the gospel of God in
Jesus Christ, the gospel which is the power
of God unto salvation to Jew and Gentile
alike, responding to the gospel involves a sacrificial
beginning.
Then he goes on to tell us that
it is not simply a sacrificial beginning, but
as we step beyond the first, as it
were, as we move beyond the first step
and begin the habit of Christian living, there
has to be going on in our hearts,
in our lives, in our innermost being, an
ongoing transformation.
And then, he says, all this leads to
something.
And if you notice it in the New
International Version, it is quite graphic, more so
than in the King James.
If this is the proper translation and the
best, well, it is really graphic.
Then, he says, you will be able to
test and approve what God's will really is.
And what is it?
It is good.
And it is pleasing.
And it is perfect.
Now, not because I like to differ from
anybody else, but I want to start at
the end this morning.
And I want to work the way backwards
to the first verse.
I want us to start at the end
looking in the first place at the ultimate
goal in view.
What is it?
Well, we've mentioned it.
Then, you will be able to test and
approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing,
and perfect will.
Christianity involves so much.
It is so all-inclusive.
We generally concentrate upon the grace of God
in Christ.
Effecting our pardon.
And that is wonderful, for there is no
life without it.
But the God to whom we come through
Jesus Christ is the sovereign Lord of the
universe.
He is the living God.
He is the creator of all things.
And He is the preserver.
And He is the ultimate judge and the
consummator.
He is everything.
And part of the wonder of becoming a
Christian is sooner or later to wake up
to the fact that the God who brings
me to the place where He pardons me
and gives me the gift of eternal life
is a God who has planned for my
new life.
A God who has a will and a
purpose and a plan for every single one
of His redeemed.
I can well remember how in my late
teens, I recognized this for the first time.
I really felt like dancing.
And the passage that really gripped me is
the one that has come back to me
again as I've been meditating on this passage
for this morning's message.
It's that word of Paul's in Ephesians chapter
2.
You remember he says, We are not saved
by good works, but we are saved for
good works.
And then he goes on and he says,
We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus
to do good works.
But now listen.
Good works which God prepared in advance for
us to do.
My dear brother and sister, have you really
got that?
Put your arms around it.
Put your mind around it.
Grip it.
Before you were ever prepared for the work,
God had prepared the work for you.
It was so when you were born.
Before you were born, there was a purpose
for you.
When you were born again into the kingdom
of God, that same purpose was brought up
to date by Him.
And there is something prepared beforehand for you
to do.
There's a work for Jesus, says the children's
hymn.
There's a work for Jesus none but you
can do.
It's prepared for you.
Now, as Paul comes to apply the gospel,
which he has so painstakingly expounded, he is
telling us then that in the Christian life,
properly so called, we have come to the
end of living a self-willed existence.
I hope that doesn't sound strange to anybody
here this morning.
If that, if becoming a Christian has not
meant for you the cessation of living just
as you pleased, going where you chose without
any reference to God and His Word and
His Spirit, then you have yet to begin
the true Christian life.
It is the end of self-will.
We are not called into the kingdom of
God to run hither and thither just as
we please.
There is a work prepared beforehand for us
to do.
And at the end of this comprehensive little
passage in verses 1 and 2, Paul tells
us, look, he says, there is a point,
there is a place, there is a provision
that you may know, that you may prove
and approve what God's will for you really
is.
And this is what it is.
And this is what you will be able
to approve at the end of the journey
of your growth and maturing.
That it is good as God is good.
That it is pleasing as God's will must
always be pleasing.
And that it is perfect, it is complete.
It brings everything to full bloom, to perfection.
Is that, my friend, the level on which
you are living this morning as a believer?
Are you satisfied with the life to which
you have come this morning?
This, brothers and sisters, is the will and
the Word of God.
And God expects us to come here spiritually.
Now, that's the ultimate end in view.
Now, there is a proximate requirement here.
It's not the end and it's not the
beginning.
In between the end and the beginning, in
order to get to the end, in order
to get to the ultimate, there is this
proximate requirement.
Here it is.
Do not conform any longer to the pattern
of this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind, then, if I can
underline that, then you will know.
Now, there are two things here.
Discovering God's will and delighting in doing it
is a learning process in which a twofold
discipline is required of us.
The first is the rejection of a forbidden
pattern of behavior.
Do not be conformed to this world.
One translator has, I think, very beautifully translated
it, and you know it.
You've heard J.B. Phillips' translation, I'm sure,
quoted many times.
Don't let the world squeeze you into its
mold.
We must not, Christian people, redeemed by the
blood of Christ, indwelt by His Spirit, having
His law written upon our hearts, we must
not, we dare not, allow our thinking or
our living be determined by this fallen world
around us.
It runs counter to everything in Scripture and
everything in our own Christian experience, properly so
called.
Why?
I can't go into the details of that
this morning, but I'll tell you what I
think Paul has in mind.
Paul began his great exposition of Romans by
telling us in chapters 1-3, what's wrong
with mankind under the judgment and wrath of
God.
What is wrong?
And the first thing he does is to
tell us this.
He says, it isn't that men haven't got
a knowledge of God, any kind of knowledge
of God.
There is a knowledge of God to be
gained from the things that He has made.
For example, I'm not going into the details
of it.
But he says, what have they done with
it?
What they've done with it is this, they've
suppressed it.
And that's the message of Romans chapter 1
from verse 18 to verse 32.
Men and women have a knowledge of God,
but they've suppressed it and they've pushed it
down.
And therefore, when they've wanted to do this
or do that, go here, go there, they
have lived without any reference to the knowledge
of God that is given them.
They've suppressed it and they've lived in suppression
of it.
So that they end up, you remember that
awesome list, I'm not going to read it
to you this morning.
They've moved from one perversion to another until
they come down to the end of the
chapter.
And even though they know that God's wrath
and holy justice awaits the condemnation of those
who do this kind of thing, they not
only do it themselves, but they take delight
in those who do it.
Now, we are living in that world today.
But Paul tells us, you are not to
allow the world to squeeze you into its
mold.
Why?
Because you see, the world is moving in
the wrong direction.
The knowledge it has, it doesn't obey, it
suppresses.
And it goes on to do its sin
irrespective of what it knows about God.
So the first thing that we have to
come to terms with is this, the non
-conformity required here.
Do not let the world squeeze you into
its mold.
Do you want to know God's will?
Do you want to find it a pleasure
and a delight and good?
You've got to come via this place.
Non-conformity with this world, its philosophy, its
politics, its theology, anything that virtually traces its
roots and its beginnings and it's colored by
the philosophy of this world, the thinking of
unregenerate men and women.
But that's only the negative side.
The other, the positive side is very compelling.
If we are not to allow the world
to squeeze us into its mold, then what?
Well, here it is.
But be transformed by the renewing of your
minds, then you will know.
Be transformed.
The Christian's response to the will of God
must go well beyond simply obeying the commandments.
Now, notice this for a moment.
I can't dwell upon it, but it's important
to notice.
Paul says, don't be conformed to this world.
But he does not go on to say,
but be conformed to the Scriptures.
Ah, I can hear somebody breathing fast.
It doesn't even say be conformed to that
which is true and right and inspired.
Now, I believe that he includes that.
But there is something far, far, far greater
required of us Christians than mere conformity to
the letter of the divinest law.
What is it?
That we should be transformed by the renewing
of our minds.
That our minds believe it and receive it.
And inwardly, we want it.
And inwardly, we delight in it and are
capable of rejoicing in it.
And if we go wrong of coming back
to it, if we go off at a
tangent, we confess our errors and come back
to it.
And this is what he's saying here.
Simply to obey the truth of God may
at last simply make us into a kind
of Christian Pharisees, keeping the letter of the
law but with no heart, no spirit, no
soul, our heart in the far country, but
our lips knowing all the shibboleths of the
church and our actions likewise.
No, no, says Paul, I'm not asking you
just to be conformed even to the divine
revelation itself.
That's included, but what I'm stressing to you
is this.
You must be transformed by the renewing of
your mind.
This is a transformation that is radical.
There are two illustrations of transfiguration or transformation
that I'm thinking of.
One, and they illustrate what I believe is
found here and what is not.
Now, you remember that in a sense, Moses
was transfigured when he saw the glory of
God on Mount Horeb.
He came down from the mountain and they
wished not that his face was shining.
He didn't know, rather, that his face was
shining.
Something of the glory of God, though he
saw but the hinder parts of God, we
are told.
But something of the glory of God had
impinged upon him and when he came down,
his countenance was different.
But that passed away.
But when Jesus was transfigured, it was a
different thing.
Jesus was transfigured in this way.
The transfiguration began in the depth of his
soul.
And then it moved to his body.
And you read the Gospels, the three of
them.
Luke particularly.
And you will find that that which took
place within the depths of his soul first
kind of ignited his physical being.
He was incandescent.
He was like a lamp.
He was like the light of the world.
And from the physical incandescence and light, it
even reflected his garments were like sheets of
light all around him.
But the point I want you to notice
is this.
It was so radical.
It started in the depths.
And this is what Paul has got here.
Being transformed, an ongoing thing from day to
day, when you come to read the Word
of God, you must expect it to transform
you.
If it doesn't transform you, either you are
not listening or God is not doing what
he promised.
When you come to the house of God,
you must always go out a different person
from what you came in.
If you are not brother and sister, there
is something wrong.
When you come to the table spread and
the elements before you, and you drink of
the cup and you eat of the bread,
and you go out just as you came
in, I tell you something, something, something is
radically wrong.
Be ye being transformed.
And the center of the transformation is in
the mind.
Man fell in the Garden of Eden by
the dent of other unreasonable aspects of experience.
I won't go into them now.
But man's redemption is via his mind.
God addresses us intellectually.
Not that we have all got to be
scholars.
Not that we all need degrees.
But your mind needs to understand what you
are saying.
Whatever your skill on the intellectual ladder, you
need to know that you are doing something
that is rational.
The renewing of the mind.
Transformed by the renewing of the mind.
And what does all this do to us?
Well, the reason is this, you see.
By the transformation of the mind, we become
gradually changed so that we want to do
the will of God.
So that like our blessed Savior, we learn
increasingly to say, my meat is to do
the will of Him that sent me, and
to finish His work.
Or as we read in the Epistles to
the Hebrews, at His birth He said to
the Father, a body hast thou prepared for
me.
You don't want sacrifices and offerings and so
forth, but you prepared for me a body.
And I'm going to live in it.
That's the implication.
And die in it for your glory.
And He did.
But over and above that, it not only
qualifies us to know the will of God,
but it sensitizes us to it.
The sensitivity is something very precious.
You have seen it in the realm of
art.
Somebody will come in and say, oh, look
at that picture.
It's something out of perspective.
And somebody, an artist, is twitching and a
little bit uncomfortable.
Doesn't worry me.
It may not worry you.
Because you are not artistically attuned to that
kind of thing.
Or in the realm of music, some notes
are struck and they're just a little bit
off.
And you will see somebody who's very musically
astute.
Oh!
It's like having a tooth out for some
people.
Others are not worried by it.
Listen, my friend.
There is a place, I say so reverently,
in our knowledge of God.
Indeed, it's sometimes found between husband and wife.
You don't need to say anything and your
partner knows what you want or don't want.
But oh, in the relationship of a child
of God and His Heavenly Father, there is
a growing sensitivity.
You sense that something is wrong or you
sense that something is right and you know
you have the liberty to go or not
to go, to do or not to do,
as you grow in maturity, as this transformation
goes on.
Now, I must come back to close.
How does all this start?
How do we get on to this road?
You tell me, well, it goes to a
beautiful destination.
I wish I could get there.
And the proximate demand is so reasonable, really.
If it works, this is it, surely.
But how do we start?
Listen to the Apostle.
The immediate and preliminary challenge is this.
I urge you, brethren, in view of God's
mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices,
holy and pleasing to God, which is your
spiritual worship.
Where does it start, Paul?
Well, it starts with sacrifice.
And the sacrifice with which it starts is
the sacrifice of your body to God.
The sacrifice of your body to God.
I can't really convey to you in a
few words, and I must not take many
minutes.
I can't really convey to you how these
two verses are bathed in sacrificial terms.
The language here comes from the book of
Leviticus where Israel was offering its sacrifices.
The verb to offer and the noun sacrifice
are the precise equivalents of what you find
there in the book of Leviticus.
We're back with the Jews.
It's all sacrificial here.
And now Paul says this.
You, he says, you begin this pilgrimage into
the realities of the Christian life, you begin
by sacrifice.
And the sacrifice is this.
You offer your bodies a living sacrifice to
God.
Now what does that mean?
Well, a sacrifice is something that's very real
and very painful.
It means this.
Go back to Leviticus.
When a Jew was bringing, shall we say,
a sheep or a lamb or whatever, he
was bringing something for sacrifice.
He was handing it over to God, exclusively
to God.
No one else was to touch it.
The priest, on behalf of God, took it
from him and burnt it, did what God
required of it.
It was handed over to God exclusively, and
that is what Paul means here when he
says it must be wholly separated, separated exclusively
for God.
Not only that, it must be completely His.
When you hand over the sacrifice, it is
irreversibly belonging to the one to whom it
was given.
You hand it over out of your powers.
It doesn't belong to you anymore.
Before you sacrificed, it was yours.
But when you handed it over to God,
it belongs now to the God to whom
you gave it.
And you can't call it back.
You can only steal it back.
And that's why some of the prophets in
the Old Testament challenged the Israelites with stealing
from God.
My friend, whose is that body that you
brought to church today?
As you look at your hands and look
at your feet and think of your mind
and your eyes, what you look at, and
your ears, what you listen to, and your
tongues, what you speak, and your imagination, the
whole of the body, the feet, the whole
body and its parts.
Who do they belong to?
Who belong?
To whom does your body belong?
If you are a man or a woman
of God, then your body doesn't belong to
you anymore.
It has been sacrificed to God.
And there is no way forward without it,
only backward.
But notice the sacrifice is a special one.
The sacrifice is real, but it is a
special sacrifice.
In the Old Testament, it was the sacrificing
of a lamb or another beast or whatever,
and then it was burned.
It died.
It was slaughtered.
You don't sacrifice your body with a view
to slaughtering it or of getting anybody else
to slaughter it, for that matter.
You offer it as a living sacrifice.
Now, that may mean many things.
One thing I can only mention now is
this.
You sacrifice the body to go on living
for God.
And that means that your hands are henceforth
available for God, and your lips and your
mouth are henceforth the Lord's, and your eyes
from now on are the Lord's, and they
will not look on anything unholy.
You will say with Job of old, I
have covenanted with my eyes not to look
after a maiden to lust after her.
And the whole body and all its parts
and all its functions now belongs to God.
And the only issue is, what does God
want with my hands?
What does God want with my voice?
What does God want with my ears?
What does God want with my mouth?
What does God want with my body?
That's the only issue.
It belongs to Him.
Do you live like that?
Do you wonder you don't know God's will
from day to day?
Are you puzzled that you make mistakes?
Don't you now see how you go around
in circles and you don't know where you
are?
And if you've got children in the home,
they're following you and they too are going
around in circles, and you can't teach them
with any certainty, and you can't bring them
up with any knowledge, firm and true of
the will of God in a day such
as this.
And that is, says Paul, two things.
It is rational.
It is your reasonable service.
Do it, he says, because of the mercies
of God.
What he means is this.
All God's mercies spring from mercy.
Behind the multitude of His mercies there lies
God's mercy.
God's compassion.
God's mercy and His grace belong to each
other, but mercy stresses this.
It is grace to us in our miseries.
It's a great word, mercy.
It's grace in our miseries.
I can't possibly take time to allude to
them, but grace in our miseries.
In our miseries.
Now, behind God's mercies, I want you to
see God's mercy.
What did He do in mercy and in
grace for us in our misery?
Well, He came Himself.
And what did He come for?
He became incarnate in His only Son.
And what did He come to do?
Fundamentally, I'm separating this out from everything else
that was related to it or comes from
it.
He came, He came, my friend, to sacrifice
Himself for you.
How did the Almighty God take a physical
body to Himself in Jesus of Nazareth?
Was it coming on a trip to planet
earth as if it were strange to Him?
Did He not know us?
Is He not omniscient?
What did He want?
What sent Him from home?
What brought Him to earth?
Listen, my friend.
You were dead and lost and so was
I.
And He loved us in our lostness.
And He took a body in order not
simply to come alongside of us as Emmanuel,
but to come under our burden of sin
and guilt and curse and to die our
death upon the cross.
God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself.
Now, says Paul, with your eyes on that
great mercy and the mercies that flow from
it, I beseech you, I beg of you,
I plead with you by the mercies of
God that you present your bodies.
Said Sittistad, If Christ be God and died
for me, then there is no sacrifice too
great for me to do for Him.
He was dead on, wasn't He?
But some of us have been examining the
death of God in Christ and we've still
not come to that point where our bodies
are wholly His.
Two things.
I'm closed.
I'm finished.
Says Paul, It's your reasonable service.
It's the only rational thing to do in
the light of love so great, love so
amazing, so divine, makes our logical, rational demand
upon you.
And the other thing is this.
You will wake up sooner or later to
see that this is the first time in
your life when you've really worshipped God, when
you've given Him your body.
How come?
For this reason, what is worship?
Many things, but at the heart of it
is this.
In worship, you tell God and you show
Him how much you think He's worth.
That's what we do.
How much do you think God is worth?
The God who became incarnate.
The God who died your death, who hung
on the tree for you, creature, sinner, rebel
like myself.
How much do you think God is worth?
You don't begin to worship Him until you
give to Him who took a body to
die in it, until you give to Him
a body to live in by His Spirit.
If you've not done that before, are you
ready to do it today?
God wants your body.
He wants your body because He wants to
change your mind and metamorphose your whole inner
being.
And the end of the process that you
may prove God's will for your life and
then approve it and affirm here on earth
and in heaven with the spirits of just
men and admit perfect that it is good,
acceptable and perfect and continue the worship of
earth among the worshipful hosts.
I beseech you with Paul.
I beseech you by the mercies of God
that you present your bodies a sacrifice to
live for Him and then go on being
transformed from day to day by the means
of grace He has provided.
And little by little, sooner and later, you
will come to know that God's will is
this, that and the other and you'll be
able to approve it as the good thing
and the pleasant thing and the perfect thing
it is.
Glory be to God.
What a privilege.
I'm going to ask you to close your
eyes for a few moments.
And as we sit or stand together, I'm
standing here, you're sitting there.
I'm going to ask you to utter a
prayer of your personal response to this.
It's not to the preacher.
I believe this is the Lord's Word.
Will you respond to it quietly, sincerely, honestly?
Let us pray.
O Lord,
our God, hear the language of our every
heart and mind and spirit, the expressed purpose
of our wills in relation to Your mercies
and Your mercy.
Lord, take our lives afresh today all for
the first time.
Take these bodies of ours and make us
the temples of Your living Spirit in which
Your will is wrought.
And take our bodies that they may be
obedient to the Spirit within and that we
may fulfill in life and finish what You
gave each of us to do.
Lord, hear our prayers.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.