Romans 12:1 - 12:8

Romans — Steve Gregg

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Romans 12:1 - 12:8

RomansSteve Gregg

In this message, Steve Gregg emphasizes the practical application of Christian living and highlights the importance of presenting oneself as a living sacrifice for God. He explains that offering spiritual sacrifices, renewing the mind, and aligning oneself with God's will is key to becoming transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Gregg urges individuals to recognize their unique gifts and contributions to the larger community, understanding that each part of the body of Christ is necessary for its proper function.

Transcript

As we come to Romans chapter 12, we find that Paul here in Romans, as he does in several of his other epistles, has organized his material in such a way as to lay a theological foundation first, and then to indicate what practical steps, what practical measures, are appropriate to the Christian life in view of the truth. The Christian life is a Christian faith that actually contains truths to be believed and commands to be obeyed. That's what really the material in scripture boils down to.

Statements of truth to be believed and imperatives to be obeyed. In a number of Paul's epistles, he begins Ephesians and Colossians and Galatians all, he has a section of theological exposition followed by a section of practical application. In those epistles I just named, Ephesians, Colossians, and Galatians, the length of the theological exposition is the same as the length of the practical, indicating that there's sort of a balance, that the practice is as important as the beliefs.

Romans is somewhat unbalanced that way in that the first 11 chapters have been given over to theology. Now this probably doesn't mean that Paul felt theology is that much more important than practice. In all likelihood, he would have liked to have written a much longer letter, but he was so embroiled in theological discussion that he used up probably most of his parchment.

And so in chapter 12, where he begins to talk about the practical application, he crams a lot into a small space. Probably if he had a 50% longer parchment, he would have spent 11 chapters saying the things he says in chapters 12 through 14. But he does give a lot of different instructions, especially in chapter 12.

In fact, chapter 12 is the kind of chapter that rather than trying to teach it in a session or two, which we must do, it's better treated as a series of perhaps 10 or 12 sermons. Because it's full of imperatives, exhortations to Christians about Christian living, and they are of a wide variety of types. Easily, any one of them could justify a complete consideration as a separate topic, a sermon, or whatever.

But as I say, Paul crams them into a short space, and we unfortunately have to do the same because we only have a short amount of time left to finish our study in the book of Romans. And so be it known that I'm aware that many of the things we'll talk briefly about would simply justify a lengthy treatment. But to my frustration, we'll have to pass quickly over things that could be discussed in great depth.

Some things, though, we will certainly do our best to cover adequately. We'll try to cover as adequately as possible everything. But again, it's very compressed here.

We have in the opening verses of chapter 12, Paul says, Now, you'll notice these two verses speak of two aspects of our lives. One is our outward behavior, what our bodies do, and the other is what our minds do, the transformation of our minds. The inner life and the external life both should be brought into conformity with the truths that Paul has expounded in the first 11 chapters.

He begins by saying, And by the mercies of God seems to mean in view of the great mercies of God which have been expounded in the earlier chapters. It's only appropriate that our response should be a certain type. It's really a tragic thing when people become aware of great mercy and generosity that's been shown to them, and it doesn't spark in them any kind of response in kind.

And the Christian's response and behavior is supposed to match with what he believes about the mercy of God. And mercy should beget gratitude. And gratitude should beget grateful behavior.

If we are grateful to God for the mercies that he's given us, then we should be grateful enough to obey him and to please him and to seek to make him as happy as he has sought to make us, even if we have to make sacrifices, of course. He made sacrifices for us. There's a response in kind that is called for in view of the mercies of God.

Now, part of that response, he says, is to present your body as a living sacrifice. And then the second is to be transformed by the renewal of your mind. It's interesting that he puts them in that order because one might think that the way we behave should stem from the way we think, and therefore changing our thinking should result in a change in our behavior.

And it should. But perhaps he has it this way because the renewal of the mind is a process that goes on for a long time, where the presenting of our bodies must be done immediately and can begin immediately. We can start obeying right now.

Changing our whole mindset about everything usually involves time. So the first order of business is to present yourself. The language is that of offering a sacrifice, obviously.

You present your body as a living sacrifice. In all religions, worship involves sacrifice. In the Jewish religion, of course, there were sacrifices offered even before the Jewish religion.

Abel and the earliest humans knew that when you worship God, you offer a sacrifice. When Abraham was taking Isaac up to sacrifice him on Mount Moriah, he left the servants at the foot of the mountain. He said, the boy and I are going to go up and worship God.

Well, that didn't mean we're going to sing songs. It means we're going to offer a sacrifice. And that's why Isaac said, well, here's the wood and the fire, but where's the animal to sacrifice? Worshipping God in ancient times as well as now involves sacrifice to God, offering something to God.

And even the pagan religions had priests who offered sacrifices to Baal and to other religions. I mean, even the South American natives and so forth would offer live humans, apparently sometimes to volcanoes and so forth. It seems that every religion consists in sacrifices.

Now, the Christian faith is no different, except we don't offer physical sacrifices. We offer spiritual sacrifices. Paul doesn't use the expression spiritual sacrifice here, but Peter does.

And Paul certainly has it in mind. In 1 Peter 2, 1 Peter 2, 5, Peter says, you also as living stones are being built up into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. We are a priesthood.

We offer sacrifices. That's what priests do. And we offer up instead of animal sacrifices, we offer up spiritual sacrifices.

Now, the sacrifices we offer are not entirely spiritual in nature, though our offering of them is to be a spiritual act. Sometimes the sacrifices we offer are tangible, like our bodies. But it is an act of spiritual worship, Paul said.

Actually, at the end of Romans 12, 1, it says, which is your reasonable service? A variety of translations have been given to this. The word service there is the same word that can be translated worship. And reasonable is a good translation, but many translators feel that spiritual is a better translation of this.

And so you'll find some translations say this is your spiritual service of worship, your spiritual worship. Now, Jesus said God is looking for those who worship in spirit and in truth. In John 4, 24, and Paul says this is your spiritual worship or your reasonable, your inward, from your reason, from your mind, from your spirit.

This is your inward worship that you offer your body. That's an outward act. But it is done because of a spiritual desire to sacrifice oneself to God, to offer oneself to God.

Sacrifice sounds rather severe. Offer or present to God is a little less severe sounding. It is the language of offering an animal sacrifice, but it's not a dead sacrifice.

It's a living sacrifice. You see, Christians may offer, may actually have to offer their bodies as a dying sacrifice. Sometimes there are times when we're called to martyrdom.

Many Christians have offered their bodies up as a dying sacrifice to God. Paul himself said in 2 Timothy that he was ready to be offered up to God. He was speaking about his death, his martyrdom.

But we don't all have the privilege of dying as martyrs. And by the way, if you say, what do you mean privilege? Dying sounds pretty rough. Well, everyone dies.

You're going to die. The question is whether you die meaningfully or, you know, for no cause. If you die for Jesus, there's no greater privilege than that.

Otherwise, you're going to die for nothing or for little. Dying for Christ is the great privilege that only some have, not all do. But all can offer their bodies in life as a sacrifice to Christ.

It's harder to live for Christ than to die for Christ for the simple reason that dying for Christ only requires the decision of a moment. And sometimes it only takes a moment to be executed. It might be dragged out a little more, but not a lifetime.

Spending decade after decade continually presenting yourself as servants of God, dying to self and living to God's purposes, that requires choices many times a day for many years. That's a much larger assignment than to die for Jesus is. And so this is a calling to be a sacrifice to God in life as well as in death.

To be owned by God, now a sacrifice, we don't understand this that well, but ancient cultures did. Certainly the Jews did. There was a law that God said in the law of Moses, whatever touches the altar is holy and holy means set apart for God.

Whatever touches the altar refers to the animal or the whatever is offered to God on the altar. You touch the altar with a lamb, it becomes a holy lamb. Before that, it wasn't.

It was just a lamb. Any lamb that was blemish without blemish and without spot could do. You could use virtually any number of lambs and you could switch them out.

If you in the process of bringing them to sacrifice and change your mind, you can say, well, I'll take this one back and use this one instead. They were just all interchangeable. All lambs are about the same as long as they have the qualification of being without blemish, without spot.

But once it touches the altar, there's no changing it out. If it touches the altar, it belongs to God, period. When you present a lamb to God and the priest takes it and puts it on the altar, there's no pulling it back.

It's God's now. It's holy to the Lord. It's not an ordinary lamb.

It's separated to God. Now, Paul said that we're supposed to present our bodies as a sacrifice, holy, a living sacrifice. When we come to Christ, we are consecrated to him.

We say, God, this is yours. Me, I'm yours. I'm on the altar, so to speak.

I presented myself as if I were presenting an animal, but I'm presenting me. I am now on the altar. I'm now holy.

I now belong to God. I'm not available for purposes other than his purposes. Everything I do, everything I pursue at this point must be his pursuit, his will, because I belong to him.

Now, if I were a dying sacrifice, as I say, this would get over rather quickly. But as a living sacrifice, I need to continue to remember that I am holy, because I am in a position to make many decisions after the point that I presented myself. In the rest of my life, I may forget that I belong to God.

I may make decisions that are of a selfish nature. I may move without concern for God's will, in which case I'm violating the holiness of the sacrifice that's been made. I've offered myself.

I'm his, and I am not really at liberty to do anything that isn't an offering up to him. Now, presenting yourselves is a one-time thing, but no doubt you have to do it in a sense every day too. You have to reaffirm, because sometimes people feel like serving God at one point in their life, and they mean it, and they're sincere, but later they feel like not serving God, and therefore they kind of think they're at liberty to change their mind.

You're really not. Once you've offered yourself to God, you belong to him. And although people can walk away, and even possibly walk away so that their relation with God doesn't exist anymore, and they suffer the consequences of an unbeliever, because they've gone back to unbelief, they have not done so within their rights.

They've done so against God's rights. God has the right to keep what's been given to him, what's been set aside for him. And if you steal from God, after you've been offered to God, if you go off and say, okay, I'm not going to serve God anymore, well, that's like taking a lamb that's been put on the altar and say, I want that back, I'm going to take that home and barbecue it.

No, that's not an option. It belongs to God. You can steal from God, but you can't take it back without stealing from God, because it's his.

And Paul's saying you present yourself that way, as a living sacrifice, and preachers have often mentioned that it's much more difficult to be a living sacrifice than a dead sacrifice. The sacrifices the Jews offered were killed. Their throats were slit, their blood was drained before they were put on the altar.

But a living sacrifice is still alive when it's on the altar, and it always has the tendency to crawl off of the altar. And that is the challenge to the Christian, that we are offered to God, but we're alive and capable, but not entitled, not, we can't justly do this, but it is possible to crawl off the altar and say, I want to be my own person again. That is not an option in any sense legitimate.

The present yourself, the word present that is used here, is found in another place earlier in Romans, in Romans 12, when he says, present your bodies as a sacrifice to God. Romans 6 may very well be a verse that explains more clearly what this means, because in Romans 6, 13, the same verb is used, and in some sense, the same idea. Romans 6, 13, Paul said, do not present your members, that's the parts of your body, as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God, as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

So it doesn't mean, practically speaking, to present my body, it means the individual members of my body. I present them as instruments, or in the Greek, weapons, in God's service, in God's purpose, in God's warfare. My arms, my legs, my eyes, my ears, nothing is mine anymore.

These are the members of my body, and I present them day by day, because I've presented my body once and for all to God. This means day by day, presenting the individual members to do the things that are agreeable with being a holy person, set aside for God. And so, he said, doing this is your reasonable service.

If it's translated that way, it simply means it's not unreasonable. It's what God could reasonably expect of us. He's purchased us, that's already been said.

We're not slaves of sin, we're slaves of God, slaves of righteousness. So it's reasonable for us to be set aside for his service. And so, this translation works well enough, but if it's talking about spiritual worship, as some translations prefer, and is entirely possible from the same Greek words, then it is basically saying, being spiritual isn't about a bunch of mystical spiritual disciplines, it's about just obeying God every day with your body, in your physical life in this world, making sure that what you're doing is something presentable to God for his purposes.

That's being spiritual. That is spiritual worship. It's a physical thing that's being offered, your body, but it's a spiritual act of surrender.

And therefore, it's an act of spiritual worship. By the way, there are other acts of worship mentioned elsewhere by Paul. In Philippians chapter 4, in verse 18, he mentions that the Philippians had sent him a financial gift of assistance.

He's in prison, and they've sent him something to meet his needs, and it was brought by a messenger named Epaphroditus. And he says, Indeed, I have all, and I abound, I am full, having received from Epaphroditus the things which were sent from you, a sweet-smelling aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, well-pleasing to God. Now, what they offered Paul was actually financial assistance, but Paul said that is a sweet-smelling aroma of an acceptable sacrifice to God.

We are priests offering sacrifices, but in addition to ourselves and our bodies as a living sacrifice, our possessions offered to God, our possessions given to the poor or supporting a man like Paul, that's given it to God. That's what we own as well as what we are is offered to God as a sacrifice. That, too, is a spiritual sacrifice, though it's a financial thing.

You see, spirituality is not something divorced from our physical lives. We are body and spirit in one person, and the spirit, frankly, our bodies should live out the life of the spirit. A lot of times people think they're spiritual because they offer long prayers, and Jesus said the Pharisees were like that.

You woe unto you hypocrites. You offer long prayers, and then you spoil widows' houses as you rob from widows. Your behavior isn't very holy, but you sure act holy when you're praying.

You do these spiritual exercises. You fast and disfigure your faces so people will appreciate the fact that you're making a sacrifice of a meal or two. You do these spiritual exercises, but your life is not a holy life.

And Paul says what is a spiritual worship to God is when your body is offered to God, when you're actually physically living for God and your finances, too, as in the case of the Philippians sending Paul some of their finances, making a sacrifice. He said that's a spiritual sacrifice. That's a holy sacrifice to God.

Of course, another sacrifice, not necessarily necessary to get us distracted by it today, but in Hebrews chapter 13 and verse 15, the writer of Hebrews said in Hebrews 13, 15, Therefore, by him let us continually offer the sacrifices of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to his name. But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. Now, there are sacrifices we offer that are entirely spiritual, our praises to God.

That's not so much a physical act, although the tongue is employed, but it's basically offering up a spiritual sacrifice of the fruit of our lips. But he says don't forget to do good and to share. These are sacrifices, too, that God is well pleased with.

Doing good would be what happens when you yield your members as instruments of righteousness, and sharing is when you're giving your finances. So, clearly, spiritual sacrifices can be entirely spiritual in nature, like offering praise to God, but they can also be manifest in physical things, behavior, good behavior, righteous behavior, generosity of possessions, and things like that. That is all part of the priestly ministry.

We are a spiritual, holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices to God, Peter said, in that verse we saw in 1 Peter 2, 5. So, here we are in a priestly service, and we're supposed to, therefore, behave, yield our bodies into the behaviors that are righteous and that promote righteousness. Since Paul, as we saw in Romans 6, 13, said, you know, present your members as instruments or weapons, in the Greek, for righteousness, it means in the battle between God's kingdom and Satan's kingdom, between righteousness and unrighteousness, between light and darkness, our members, our behavior, what we do day by day, is supposed to be contributing to the victory of the side of good. They are like weapons in the warfare.

As I do a righteous thing, well, for one thing, that deprives Satan of the joy of me having done an unrighteous thing. I can do either righteous or unrighteous, so, in a sense, darkness is deprived of the action I didn't commit that would have pleased the enemy, and it pleases God, but more than that, my righteous acts may promote righteousness beyond my own fingertips. You know, that may have an effect influencing others for righteousness.

It may inspire others. It may actually be a righteous act such as, you know, giving to the poor or whatever, which would help others. That righteousness and justice are advanced by the things I do day by day with my body.

This is your reasonable service or your spiritual worship, Paul said. And he says in verse 2, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. It will show by your thinking and your life that flows from your thinking what God's will really is.

His perfect and acceptable will should be that which is manifested in your changed mind. Now, the mind is not the brain, and we need to always remember that. He's not talking about replacing brain cells.

I have, I think I have seen people have their brain cells replaced by becoming Christians. I've known people in the 70s who used so much drugs, people like Danny Layman and my friend Crazy Eddie, who had used so much LSD that they didn't know how to practically read, and they were just really, so many brain cells have been damaged. They seemed really stupid.

But, you know, when they became Christians, Danny in particular, but Crazy Eddie too, who went to high school with me, they just immersed themselves in scripture. They meditated day and night on scripture. In so far as they could read at all, they read scripture and memorized.

And I remember Crazy Eddie, who was, they called him that because he's gone crazy on LSD. But when he became a Christian, he actually almost memorized the book of Proverbs. Every time anything practical was being discussed, any decisions, he'd quote a proverb about it.

You know, it's like he became really smart. It's like his brain damage seems to be undone by the power of the word of God. Danny also, Danny Layman is one of the most brilliant men I know.

He can quote most of the New Testament by memory, and if you get him talking about missions and statistics about how many missionaries are in each country and stuff, he seems to have that all memorized too. He's brilliant. But his mind was damaged by drugs at one time, as he himself will tell in his testimony.

But he just, I knew him when he was, he got saved. I met him three weeks after he got saved. And when I met him, he was on the floor with his Bible and concordances and Chuck Smith tapes and Walter Martin tapes and everything spread all over the floor.

And he was just immersed in his research on the Bible. And he'd only been saved for three weeks at that time. And he never let up.

And his mind was, or I should say his brain would appear to have been, you know, restored. There were miracles in the Jesus movement there, and some of them were of physical healing. And perhaps this is just an unusual miracle when someone's brain, which seems to have been damaged physically, is repaired.

But those would be exceptional cases. I don't know that there's any guarantee of that or suggestion of that in Scripture that, you know, you're going to have brain repair by being a good Christian, but mind repair. Yes, the mind and the brain are not the same thing.

The brain is an organ of your body, like your heart or your lung or your liver. The brain is just made up of cells. It operates like a machine, an electrical machine, a little bit like a computer, I suppose.

I don't know enough about computers or brains to know how much that analogy works, but it's a machine in your head. John Eccles, a man who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the brain, human brain, he said the brain is a machine that can be operated by a ghost. Well, the question is what ghost is operating the machine? And the operation of the brain results in thought, opinion, emotion, choices.

Those functions of the brain that are the non-physical. I mean, the brain is operating physically, but then there's these non-physical things. Your opinion is not a physical thing.

And you can change your opinion without having a brain transplant. Your physical brain does not dictate what your opinion will be. Something else dictates that.

Get a brain transplant, you may have the same opinion. Or you may change your opinion and keep the same brain. The brain is not the same thing as the mind.

The mind is who you are. The brain is a physical organ that somehow is used in the whole working of the body to generate and sustain mind. If you kill the brain, the mind goes dark.

Or does it? Maybe not. Maybe it just moves out and goes somewhere else. Maybe we are absent from the body, but present with the Lord at the point of death.

That's what most Christians believe. I suspect it's true. Paul seems to say something that supports that notion.

That my mind, my consciousness, my thought, my emotion, my will, that's me. Those are non-physical things. My emotions change.

My thoughts change. My opinions can change. My beliefs.

My choices. I could be making a bad choice and decide I'm going to make a different choice. Now, no doubt there's some kind of activity of the brain that can be seen to take place in association with those things.

But is it the brain dictating those things? Is it because the brain is all there is and it just generates thoughts? If so, then I can't be responsible for any of my thoughts or opinions. How do I determine what my brain is going to do? Maybe it's going to produce unbelief. Maybe it's going to produce evil.

If the brain is producing all my thoughts, then I'm at the mercy of a physical organ that's operated by the laws of science or the laws of nature. But if I, in fact, can tell my mind, don't think about that. Think about this.

Don't believe that lie. Believe this truth. There's something that's not my brain telling my brain what it's going to be allowed to do.

There's a ghost running the machine. It's something non-physical. It's the mind.

And the mind is made up of some total of your values, your opinions, your beliefs, and all those things. Your thoughts. It's not probably different than what we often think of as the soul.

After all, the word psychology comes from the word soul in the Greek. It's a study of the soul or the mind. And the Greeks believe that the word soul referred to the thoughts and the emotions and the will.

Again, what we would call the mind of a person. And when Paul says be renewed, be transformed by the renewing of your mind, he's basically not saying you need a new brain or new brain cells. You need new opinions, new values, new beliefs, new priorities.

Those are part of your mind, not technically your brain. And you can change those. But it's not the easiest thing in the world because you're accustomed to thinking certain ways and believing certain things and feeling certain ways and reacting to people certain ways.

These are patterns of belief and reaction and thought that are conditioned by education, by background and so forth. And these patterns need to be changed. And that's not the easiest thing in the world to do.

I mean, even if you decide that you're going to change. I'm not going to get angry anymore when people say those kinds of things. I'm not going to want what I used to want.

I'm not going to want sin anymore. Well, good luck. Your mind has to be changed, but it doesn't change instantaneously in all respects.

It's a process. As your mind came to its present state through a process of conditioning and education, it has to change its state through a process also of conditioning and education. Meditating on the Word of God, believing what God says, even when it seems difficult, just say, I will believe God.

I choose to believe. I will love that person. I choose to do that.

I can't choose my emotions, but I can choose my choices. And I can, therefore, by the renewing of my mind, let it become more like the mind of Christ. And I will be transformed that way.

The transformation comes from the mind. He says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Don't conform to the world.

Your life, your mind, your actions will all conform to the world unless you have your mind renewed. You'll just pick up and repeat what the world conditioned you to say in your earlier pre-Christian years. What your parents taught you, what your school teachers taught you, what your friends at school thought was important.

Peer pressure. The world. It has dictated in the early stages of our lives what we think is true, what we think is valuable, who we think are heroes, who we think are schmucks.

All of our opinions, they have been formed by peers, by educators, and so forth. Now we're Christians. An awful lot of these opinions are going to have to change.

That means we're going to have to be re-educated. We might have to choose different peers to pressure us. That is good company.

Because bad company corrupts good morals, Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15. In other words, we have to make every effort to bring our minds around to the correct way of seeing things, which is God's way of seeing things. And that means re-education, re-conditioning.

And that is a discipline for a lifetime. Now, this brings transformation. The word transformed here is metamorpho in the Greek, and it's not found very many places in the Bible.

This same word is found in 2 Corinthians 3.18. 2 Corinthians 3.18, Paul said, But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed, again the same word, from glory to glory into the same image, just as by the Spirit of the Lord. This is the transformation Paul's talking about. It's a transformation of our mind.

We're being transformed by the renewal of our minds. This is done by the Spirit of the Lord, he said. As we gaze upon Jesus, as we look upon Him, although our view of Him is not perfectly clear, we see as if in a mirror, and in a mirror, it doesn't mean we're looking at ourself.

What he's referring to here is back then they didn't have glass. Glass had not been invented yet. If you wanted to see yourself, a mirror was simply a finely polished piece of brass.

It was not perfect. You could sort of see, you know, the shape of your head. You could see if there were major parts of your hair sticking out the wrong way, but you couldn't see the detail because it wasn't a nice modern mirror that reflects perfectly the light.

The light was somewhat diffused by the imperfection of the brass so that a view in a mirror was not as clear as face to face. That's why Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13, now we see as through a mirror, darkly, but then we shall see face to face, meaning when we see Christ now, it's not a clear view. There's some diffusion of the light.

There's some blurring. We can't see Him face to face yet, but we will. And that's what he says here in 2 Corinthians 3, 18.

We're beholding the glory of the Lord as in a mirror. We don't see His glory perfectly clearly. John tells us in 1 John 3, Beloved, it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him because we will see Him as He is.

We don't see Him exactly as He is yet. We're working on that. But even seeing Him imperfectly, it changes us.

We're changed from glory to glory by the Spirit of God as we gaze upon the glory of Jesus. That is, as we keep our eyes on Jesus, keep meditating on Jesus, when we do as it says in the book, In His Steps, when we ask, what would Jesus do? What is Jesus' way of doing things? How did He think about this? How did He respond to things like this? As Jesus is always before our eyes, before our mind's eye, the Holy Spirit in us works in us to conform us to that same image so that we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed, metamorpho, same word where Paul says, be transformed by the renewal of your mind. The only other place this word is found in the New Testament, besides in Romans 12 and 2 Corinthians, may be surprising because it is used in reference to the transfiguration.

In a couple of the Gospels, I don't remember which of the Gospels this does not apply to, but a couple of the Gospels, when it says that Jesus went up on the mountain and took some of His disciples with Him, it says He was transfigured before them. One of the Gospels that uses that word is Matthew in chapter 17, verse 2, and either Mark or Luke also uses it in their parallel. But it says that Jesus, in Matthew 17, 2, says, Jesus was transfigured before them.

His face shone like the sun. His clothes became as white as light. He changed, radically changed.

And the transfiguration or transformation of Jesus visually on that point, is the only other place where this verb is used besides Paul saying we are being transfigured, we are being transformed from glory to glory into the same image of Christ. It's as we are transformed by the renewal of our mind. Now, this word metamorpho, you probably recognize instantly a connection with some English words.

Morph means shape. Meta, actually in the Greek, means afterward or something that is different afterward than before. Metamorphosis means to be changed in form.

And we think probably when we hear the word metamorphosis, which comes from this word, we think first of all of the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly. That's kind of the most famous case that we know of in nature of metamorphosis. I suppose a polywag becoming a frog is another kind of a case of metamorphosis.

But the butterfly one is the one that we always refer to as metamorphosis. And what is it that happens with a caterpillar when it becomes a butterfly? Do you know what happens? Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar dissolves into liquid. And those organic elements that are liquefied in the chrysalis reassemble themselves into a different kind of animal.

The caterpillar that went in, it didn't have a segmented body like an insect. It was just kind of a bumpy, long body without any real legs, certainly no wings. It was destructive to plants.

But when it comes out, it has a three-segmented body, six distinct jointed legs, wings, and it pollinates plants. It's an entirely different kind of animal with an entirely different impact on its environment. It goes into the chrysalis as a destructive creature.

And it comes out as one that pollinates and that spreads fruitfulness. And this is the word, certainly God made things this way to be a picture of the transformation, the metamorphosis that Paul says we're supposed to have. Our old ways of thinking are destructive.

They're destructive to us and to our environment, to others around us. But the way Christ is, Christ never destroyed himself or others. His thinking actually elevated others, healed others, encouraged others, saved others.

His mind is different than that with which we began and we're supposed to be transformed, metamorphosized by the renewal of our minds. And what does the renewing really mean? It means instead of thinking like ourselves, we need to think like Jesus. We need to have the mind of Christ.

We're transformed. We've become a different kind of creature, as it were. And in 2 Corinthians 3, 18, which we looked at, Paul said, and this is done by the spirit of the Lord.

So this is not just a mental exercise. It's not that anyone who wants to can just say, I'm going to start changing my thinking. I'm going to adopt these views.

I'm going to adopt these attitudes. I'm going to believe these things. And I'll be a different kind of person.

Well, if you do that, you will probably have a different kind of impact than if you don't. But the change has got to be spiritual. It's got to be supernatural.

It's got to be what the Holy Spirit does. As we submit our thinking to Christ's thinking, you know, when you read the Bible, you find things that go against your grain sometimes. And these things are brought up in recent years by the famous atheists writing books.

They say, you know, that God of the Bible, He doesn't have the same opinion of women as of men and for slavery and He has all these evil traits that are politically incorrect today. Well, okay, we are conditioned by our culture and by political correctness to have certain sensitivities. And when we read the Bible, some of them just go right against our grain.

Why would God do that? That doesn't seem right. Boy, it doesn't seem right to who? To you? What are you using to decide what's right and what's wrong? There is, after all, the Bible says, a way that seems right to a man, but the ways there are the ways of death. Our conditioning isn't the same as God's thinking.

God said, my ways are not your ways. My thoughts are not your thoughts. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my thoughts above your thoughts and my ways above your ways.

When we find our thoughts and our evaluations up against God's, and God does a certain thing, that doesn't seem right. Well, it doesn't seem right to who? To me? The one who has many things that seem right to me, but they are the ways of death? Am I the judge of God? My mind, in its natural state, is not the same as God's mind, but He's not going to change His to agree with me. So if I want to be compatible with Him, then the change has got to go the other way.

If God says, listen, you and I are not compatible because we disagree. I'm not going to say, okay, God, come over to my side on this. Why should He come over to my side? I'm the one who's mistaken about so many things.

He's not mistaken about anything. If I find that I disagree with God, there's an indication I have something to change my mind about. And I've mentioned before my own experience with this in the case where I was reading years and years ago, when I only had one child.

I was reading Psalm 127, where God said, children are heritage of the Lord. Blessed is the man who's got his quiver full of these arrows. I remember it's as if God spoke to my heart and said, you and I don't agree about this, do you? Because I personally only wanted to have one child or none, but I had one, so I wasn't going to go for the none.

I thought one would be enough for now, maybe forever, because I'm in the ministry. I need to be mobile. I can't be tied down and so forth.

And I thought, you know, for the glory of God, I should limit the family size that I have. And I read this, and the scripture said, children are like arrows in the hands of a warrior. Blessed is the man who's got a lot of arrows.

I remember it was as if God was asking me, He said, you know, if you're in the battlefield in an ancient war, where it's fought with bows and arrows, and the, you know, the supply sergeant comes to you and says, how many arrows would you like? Man, my question would be, how many can I have? And I'd say, how about one or two, that'll do. Now, if you're in the battle, you want to not run out of arrows. You want as many as you can get.

And blessed is the man who's got his quiver full of arrows. And I remember thinking, I thought fewer is better. And God said, more is better.

And I remember right then, I just changed my mind. I just thought, God and I don't agree, and He's not going to come around to my way of seeing it. I'd better come around to His way of seeing it.

I need to be transformed by the renewing of my mind. So many things in the scripture go against our grain, and the worse for our grain, because our grain, if it doesn't agree with God, is grain that needs to be changed. And we need to change our minds to be in agreement with God, and we'll find that this results in transformation, a spiritual transformation.

For instance, the Holy Spirit works. He honors our obedience. He honors our submission to God's truth.

And He therefore creates in us a new nature, as it were. So we're transformed, metamorphosized, by this renewing of our minds. And this results in Christians who are something of a different species than other people.

A new creation in Christ. Children of God, not children of the devil. And so the life and behavior of Christians is supposed to be a demonstration, a proof, of what the will of God looks like.

And that's what Paul says, that you may prove what is that good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. Your life should be an exhibition of that. All right, now, those are two general statements, of course.

Then he gets into more specific instructions. I suppose everything that follows would fall into the category either of presenting your body to God or renewing your mind, or both. He gets very practical.

But in verse 3 and following, he says, For I say through the grace given me to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given us, let us use them.

If prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith. Or ministry, which means service, let us use it in our ministering, that is, in our serving. He who teaches in teaching, he who exhorts in exhortation, he who gives with liberality, he who leads with diligence, he who shows mercy with cheerfulness.

Now, when it comes to renewing your mind and changing your mind, one of the first things that has to change is your ego. I say by the grace given me, don't let anyone think more highly of himself than he ought to think. This is our tendency.

And even people who think they have low self-esteem, what that usually means is they think they're not as good as someone else, but they still think they're pretty important. If you don't think you're important, then you don't care what happens to you. You don't care if people diss you.

You don't care if you're not exalted. You don't care if you're not as pretty as someone else. You don't care because you don't care about you.

Insofar as any of these things depress you, you have a high opinion of yourself, at least of how you should be treated, what your rights are, and so forth. You shouldn't think more highly of yourself than you should. And that's our tendency.

I mean, this is not only arrogance that is thinking too highly of yourself. Just any time you think that what happens to you matters more than what happens to someone else, or frankly, has very much to do with the flow of history going well or badly. I mean, I'm insignificant, relatively.

No one's totally insignificant. God has significance and use for you. He wants to produce change through you.

But if you had never been born, the world would still eventually go God's way. We are dispensable, after all. We shouldn't think ourselves to be indispensable, better than others, and things like that.

That's not thinking soberly. He says, don't think more highly of yourself than you should, but think soberly. A person who's not sober is not very much in touch with reality.

They're seeing things out of focus. Their vision is blurred. They think they're tough when they're not tough.

They think they're in control when they're not in control. A drunk is not sober. He's lost a certain degree of touch with reality.

If you think more highly of yourself than you should, you're not sober. You're thinking too highly of yourself. You're not in touch with reality.

Let's get down to earth here. Let's look at things clearly and think as we should about ourselves. What is it that we should think about ourselves? To recognize that whatever we have is a gift from God.

We do differ from other people, and sometimes we want to think more highly of ourselves than others. We're saying, I'm more important than them. I make a more important contribution than they do.

Paul says, no, all the contributions you make are gifts, different gifts that different people have, different contributions they make. It's like a body with a whole lot of different kinds of functions, which everyone does what they should and is more concerned about the welfare of the whole body and the fact that what they're doing is making a contribution to the well-being of the body than they are concerned about whether their gift and contribution measures up to somebody else's. We're not comparing ourselves with other people.

We are simply doing what we're supposed to do. Is your gift teaching? Teach. Is it serving? Serve.

Is it exhorting? Exhort. If it's leading, lead. If it's giving, give.

Whatever your gift is, do that and recognize that what you have is simply a gift that God has given you. It's a proportion of faith that's been measured to you. Your faith is manifesting in certain abilities that God has planted in you through the Holy Spirit.

These are actually what we would call gifts of the Holy Spirit, though we don't see them called that here. The other famous passage about the gifts of the Spirit also talks about the body. In fact, the very first time in any of Paul's writings that we know of that he had mentioned the metaphor of the body of Christ is in 1 Corinthians 12, which is also where he's talking about the gifts.

Here, writing a little later, he mentions the body image in verse 4. That is the imagery of the body of Christ, not our body image. He talks about the body having individual parts and different gifts. Like I said, this concept is first introduced in 1 Corinthians 12, and Paul lists nine gifts of the Spirit in the early part of that chapter.

Essentially, his point is not everyone has the same gift because the body doesn't need a whole bunch of one thing. He says if the whole body was an eye, how would it hear? If the whole body was an ear, how would it smell? The idea being some parts of the body can hear but can't do anything else, but that's necessary. Some can smell but can't do anything else.

Some see most of the organs of your body. Your heart, for example, which is probably one of the most important, does just one thing, really. That's pump liquid.

It's just like a pump. But while a man can build a pump that pumps liquid, and that's all the heart does, of course, it does it much more efficiently and for more years than a man-made pump ever would, but it still is a very important function. Every function of the body is different than every other function of another member of the body.

But the body can't do without them. It needs them all. And instead of trying to compare myself with others, how important am I compared to someone else? How about just say, what am I supposed to be doing here? Someone else may have something that I admire that they do more, but it may not be really, in the grand scheme of things, more important than what I do.

No part of your body is truly expendable. There are no vestigial organs left over from failed evolutionary paths. Those things that were once thought to be vestigial organs in the human body have all been found to be useful after all.

It's just that science didn't know what their uses were for a while, so they thought, oh, there's no use for that. That tailbone of yours is not useful for anything. Sure it is.

It has a use, and we know what it is. Tonsils likewise and others used to be considered to be vestigial, useless organs. There aren't any.

God doesn't make useless organs, and He didn't in the body of Christ either. You might not even know yet what your use is, but that doesn't mean you're not being used. Sometimes churches try to give out these spiritual gift seminar evaluations where you take this test, and they'll try to tell you what your spiritual gift is.

And in many cases, they encourage you, you need to find out what your spiritual gift is so you can do it. I actually disagree with that mentality. I don't think you need to find out what your gift is and do it.

I think you just need to do what the Holy Spirit leads you to do, and that will be what your gift is. You may not even know a name for it. It may not be one of the ones in the list.

This list is different than the list in 1 Corinthians. Put both lists together, you've got about 15 or more gifts there, and they're probably not an exhaustive list even combined. God has many parts of the body.

Paul gives examples of some of them in Romans 12, and other examples of some of them in 1 Corinthians 12. He's just giving samples to make the point. Each one has something different to contribute.

And whatever it is you have to contribute, do it. And then the body will function. Don't be so self-conscious about how you measure up and how important you are and how indispensable you are.

Just walk in the Spirit. Let the Spirit do through whatever He's going to do, and that will be your gift even if you are not even noticing what it is. Others may know what your gift is before you do.

You don't have to identify it so you can do it. You just do the next thing that the Holy Spirit leads you to do. In relationships, people say, Well, you're a real encourager.

Oh, I never knew that. Maybe that's my gift. I guess it is.

Or, you know, you really are a servant. Well, I didn't know that. I was just doing what I do.

Well, that's serving, you know. Your gift of serving, your gift of exhorting, your gift of teaching, your gift of giving, all those things, those are just things you do as you're led by the Spirit, and it turns out that there is a description for them. You may know the label for it or not, but it won't change anything about you doing it.

You just do what the Spirit leads and don't worry about what it's called and whether it stands in some hierarchy of some list of gifts. This one's, I think, more important than this one over here. Mine's more important.

Oh, shucks, I got a less important gift than someone else has. The value of the gifts is not emphasized here. That is a relative value.

What is emphasized whenever Paul talks about the body is that all the gifts are necessary. Think of a part of your body that is really dispensable. You might say your little toe.

You know, your little toe is small. You got nine more where that came from. You don't need that.

You can get along without it. Yes, you can get along without it, but you can't play tennis very well without it. There are certain things you can't do as well.

You can't walk as well. You're not as athletic. You're not as balanced.

That little toe actually has a function. All of them do. There are people who've had parts of their bodies removed that you can survive without, but very seldom does it make no difference at all.

And so that's what Paul's saying. One of the ways that our minds have to be changed is to see ourselves as part of a community, part of a body. It's not all about me, and everything in the world doesn't revolve around me and my needs.

I am one of the electrons orbiting around a nucleus, and the whole nucleus and electron structure is the atom, the body of Christ. There's different parts, and I'm not in the middle of it, but I'm just supposed to do the thing God made me to do, just do well and do diligently the thing that God has me do. And whether I know the name of it or not, whether it's called the gift of this or the gift of that or not, is irrelevant.

It's more important that you do what God wants done and that the body has a function before someone has come up with a name for the organ. How many organs of the body were functioning in human bodies before people came up with names for them? You don't need to know the name. You need to have the function.

So to be body-minded, to be corporate-minded, to be community-minded, to realize that you're a cog in a wheel. Lots of people think being a cog in a wheel is an insult. Well, only if you want to be famously individualistically standing out above others and make a name for yourself.

But if you are not thinking of yourself better than you ought to, then you don't mind being just part of Christ's body and serving in whatever capacity he's enabled you to serve. And so that's what Paul comes to by verse 8. We take a break here then, and we will take the rest of this chapter in our next session. Lord willing.