Today we're reading Romans 12 verses 1 through 2. I appeal to you, therefore brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, and acceptable, and perfect. This is the word of God, for people of God.
Sorry. When Mary and I were recently married, she was going to the store one time, and you know, you always have that question, what is there anything we need, what do you need to get? And I told Mary, I want to magic eight-ball. And she kind of looked at me and that look at spouses give each other sometimes, like seriously?
Like, you want to, why? And I told her, she said, why do you need a magic eight-ball? And I was like, you know, I always wanted one as a kid, and I was just my mom for one of my mama, so we didn't have the money for it. So I wanted to magic eight-ball.
Now, the funny thing is, this is the point in time when Mary and I were living on a combined income of $18,000 a year. And so that idea of we did not have the money to buy a magic eight-ball, but no, Mary, one of her greatest graces is that she humors me, and she puts up with me. And so she came home with the groceries that we needed and a magic eight-ball. And I was really excited because I was a kid, there was this older kid that I would hang out with sometimes, I was raved forward.
And I remember raved forward's magic eight-ball to be this amazing thing. And I got mine, I took out the package, and it was over the course of the 20 years from my original magic eight-ball experience, this magic eight-ball that my wife bought me, and the quality might have gone down a little bit, because no matter what I asked it, and every time I shook it, that little triangle always just popped up with the answer isn't clear. That's kind of math, I got a bum magic eight-ball. We started talking about decisions last week, and about the wrong way that we can make decisions in life.
And we didn't necessarily focus on the wrong or the right itself, but asking the question as followers of Jesus does the way we make decisions make it different? Is that different enough? And is that leading us into a different outcome? And we talked about that brokering thing that we get into with God sometimes, that situation where we say, hey listen, I need you to do this, so I won't do this, or I will do this.
And how that brokering thing, not only is it just a broken, bad way to actually make decisions, but it ends up, it was we're actually living in this pagan worldview that existed thousands of years ago where the only thing that we could do is just try to make God happy, and then God will do nice things for us. And we focused on this idea that the way that we make decisions tells the truth about who we believe God to be. And this week, I want to talk about the right, about our right way to make decisions. And making right decisions isn't necessarily doing things new, but just doing things right.
So let's jump into that. Romans 12, which Sandy read for us earlier, Romans is the apostle Paul, it's almost like his theological magnum opus, it's complicated. He wrote it to the church in Rome, trying to convince him, and let him know that he was bonafied before he shows up to do ministry. And Romans one through 11 is like really complex, but starting in Romans 12, he gets highly practical, and he's talking about how do we actually do this Jesus thing like feet on the ground.
And there are four parts of those two verses, I think really help us understand decisions and how we make decisions as followers of Jesus. The first one is this, we've been talking about a sacrifice. Let us see our lives as a sacrifice. One of Paul's favorite analogies is to talk about the body, that the whole body and the whole body needing to work together.
And we're used in church to talk about this, understanding how we're all different, we do things together, we think about our own lives as well. Like if my arm was cut off, my arm wouldn't be worth that much, would it? You know, we need our whole body together. And when our whole life begins to understand how what one part of it does affects the other part, we're able to understand why these things actually do matter for us, that we're a participant, and that we're willing to be different.
You know, what this willingness does is this willingness begins to shift our moral and our behavioral grounding and understanding that our life is lived as a sacrifice. One of the primary teachings of the early church was that the living a different life was our participation into the sacrifice and into the life of Jesus Christ. And to his suffering. James 1, 23, 24 says this.
For if you listen to the word and don't obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself walk away and forget what you look like. James, half brother of Jesus, the leader of the church in Jerusalem is telling us this and saying, you know, when we look at God, we are, is that we are looking into a mirror. It's a mirror for our own souls.
And if we see this and we see the depth of who God is and the depth of what he asks and invites us into, and we don't do anything about it that is an extremely dangerous place to be. For if you listen to the word and don't obey, it's like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself walk away and forget what you look like. The second thing that Paul talks about in this passage is worship.
J. Edgar Goodspeed was a 20th century pastor and he was one of the first ones to translate the Bible into modern English for people to understand it better. This is Goodspeed's translation of Romans 12. I appeal to you therefore brothers, by this mercy of God to offer your bodies in a living sacrifice that will be wholly acceptable God.
And that is your rational worship. It's kind of rational worship. And worship is rational though. It's a place of response.
It's not just this hour on Sunday, but it's the place where we choose to live. I know the word liturgy. If you're from a more formal church tradition and you grow up a Catholic or high steeple methodist or press material movement, something, you're used to the idea of liturgy, that call and response, that back and forth, that communal participation in worship, liturgy and Latin is where liturgy, it means the work of the people that we see our worship as work. We see our worship as participation.
We see our worship as engagement. And worship orders the world of Jesus in a way that lives through us. Our worship then needs to be reflective of the truth that we know of God and what he's done in our life. And our worship is not moral obedience, but our worship is moral discernment.
So when we're in that place with God, we begin understanding the way that that affects us and affects others. The next thing this patches does, it talks about conformity. JB Phillips is another person early 20th century, trying to translate the Bible in a way that people understand and Phillips translates 12 to is this, we don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold. They'll let God re-mold your minds from within.
So you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all of his demands, and moves towards the goal of true maturity. Now, all we call a thought about that, don't let the world squeeze you into its mold. Grant Oz one says this, the mind is where spiritual growth occurs, and then the mind decisions are made that determine one's spiritual direction and destiny. Now, we think about our behavior, we think about our reactions, we think about our consequences, we think about our conversations, those sorts of things, right?
But do we ever think about how our mind controls things? Far too often, we're either not willing to give our mind away, or we don't realize how much our mind is still being controlled by other things. I think that might be the difference, right there, the biggest difference between a secular decision-making practice, and then a decision-making practice based off of Jesus is where is our mind trying to take us, and where is our mind building and finding its foundations? And the last word really that we find that's past it helps guide us is the word discern.
We have any children in the 80s in here? You all remember Peewee's Playhouse? There's always the word of the day. Ah, yeah.
Like discern is the word of the day. I wish I had cherry up here to do the weird, flippy thing. Like discern is the word of the day. And we hear that word thrown around, but it's also like, I don't think we often know what it means, know what it works, to discern something.
Isn't just to make a decision, but it's to look at it critically, to look at the whole picture, to examine it, and then to determine the genuineness that's involved. It's to look at the inputs and the outputs and the ways it could go and what are my motivations, and this is a healthy motivation, this is an unhealthy motivation who's participating me, but is this a genuine thing? You're putting it to the test. Greek philosophers talked about this, and this where Paul finds his logic and his way of thinking, especially in Romans, but to a Greek philosopher to discern something was about preserving our actions from being meaningless.
You know, do you want to exert a lot of emotional and physical energy in a decision that's actually not going to do anything? Does that sound wasteful? Sometimes we realize the places we let our minds go and the time we spend on something, and it actually doesn't matter whatsoever at all. Discernment's about something not being meaningless.
It speaks to the state of Christian existence. It's about how we make decisions in response to our salvation and its concreteness in everyday life. Jesus is not just a mind exercise, he's an exercise of who we are. Do our decisions make the kingdom of God real in our life and those around us.
So 1 Corinthians 2, 14 through 16, it's more of Paul's thinking here. But people who aren't spiritual can't receive these truths from God's Spirit, it all sounds foolish to them, and they can't understand it. For only those who are spiritual can understand what the Spirit means. Those who are spiritual can evaluate all things, but they themselves cannot be evaluated by others for who can know the Lord's thoughts, who knows enough to teach him.
But we understand these things for we have the mind of Christ. Part of our decision matrix is the fact that Jesus has been put inside of us. And the basics of decision making is simply asking the question, am I joining with God right now? Or am I stepping away from God?
The greatest task we have in this age is our joining. Even though we are living in a broken place that sometimes seems to be filled with hate, with evil, with dysfunction, with anxiousness, with all of these things, we still live in a place where it's been redeemed by the grace of God, and Jesus has offered to us as individuals, and that provides not just individual salvation, but also the remaking of this entire world. Our greatest task in that age, as this place we are right now, is that we get to join with Jesus in what he is doing. And especially when we seem to be living in an age where everything seems to be new, where we are confused because we are confronted with situations that we never thought were possible, with realities that would have seemed absurd a couple of years ago.
We have new questions in our world now. People are asking new things. We are seeing new situations, new things are being created around us that desperately need Jesus, and the answers to these new questions are not old answers. That we need new answers, and this new answer doesn't come through innovation, but it comes through discernment.
We don't necessarily need new things, we need the right thing. And God's activity is this primal truth through which everything flows through, everything will come from, not our just immediate reactions to a situation. So discernment is a powerful, powerful thing that we need in our life, and that our world needs from us. So three ways we can exercise this type of discernment, this type of Holy Spirit decision making that we find.
The first is this, it's about character. Our character and the character of God, Psalm 27, 1-3, says, the Lord is my light and my salvation. So why should I be afraid? The Lord is my fortress, protecting me from danger.
So why should I tremble? When evil people come to devour me, when my enemies and foes attack me, they will stumble and fall. Though a mighty army surrounds me, my heart will not be afraid. Even if I am attacked, I will remain confident.
We know the character of God. Jesus has brought us to that. And the character of God, and the most predominant, pre-eminent part of his character is he will always be with us. Our identity and our existence is completely inside of that.
God is always with us. This is where we kind of pop back into a conversation about worship. This is where worship matters, and not just what we're doing this hour together today, but our own personal worship. These are times when we are letting our soul meet with God and our soul to be transformed by God.
This is where we become known by God and where we grow to know Him. This is a space where scriptures like that, we just read. They cease to just be something that we read, and instead they look as a reality that we become. And it takes us, it takes our decision of this, it moves those decisions into this realm of knowing who God is in a personal way and how we understand that.
It's an outful of his character. That's what our decisions become. They're an outful of who God is instead of an outflow of our own brokenness. And the only way we discover this is our own personal worship.
It's where we develop this deep practice of listening. It's where we learn to pray. It's where we learn to read and to find ourselves in scripture, especially when we find out like in James chapter four, it says, draw near to God and He will draw near to you. So we discover in personal worship.
And we don't do this out of coercion or manipulation, but we know that our own personal life is at prime for a move of God. That we're gonna just be awkwardly stumbling around trying to have any interaction with His presence and it'll be a struggle in our outward life. And we will wanna have power and wanna have truth, but we will actually be powerless and not have any truth. If we're not sitting there seeking the character of God and allowing Him to mold our character into an image of that.
The character is how we discern. Another way that we discern is consistency. Practicing discernment becomes easier the more we do it. It gets easier the more it happens.
It happens more when we begin to realize that there is a shift of thinking from towards we get to join with God and what He is doing. That our decision making, it simply isn't our own awareness of when we're veering off the face. God is present and God is active and we are learning to be awakened to what's happening beyond our vision. Mark Al-Brantson, he says this, this is about this age that we are living in now.
Why decisions matter and who we are, why it matters, why growing with God matters, says this, the relationship between those shaped by Jesus and those shaped exclusively by other cultural forces is not merely a matter of values or doctrine, but it is about a life. The life with God, God who knows reality and who engages in that reality, shaping a community in which blessings are announced and the community is transformed. Discernment's about consistency. One of the places where I get sad sometimes is when I see people become really disappointed and begin to lose faith because they feel like God has been vacant from them.
But if we're gonna be honest about what scripture says, about what Christian experience says, God does not vacate from us. We begin to have a vacancy of listening to God and we begin to have a vacancy of responding to God. Because we have discernment muscles that have been given to us. We have engagement muscles that have been given to us.
We have to exercise them to know their strength and their necessity. Several years ago I spent a lot of time at the gym and I went back for the first time in years, three weeks ago and I was sore for days. I was walking around like John Wayne, it was hilarious to see me like navigating chairs. Those muscles hadn't been used.
I had them. They were there to give you power and strength and flexibility and still build all of those things, but I had not been using them. We were given the power of discernment. But we don't exercise it nearly enough to be able to take advantage of it.
The last thing that we about to start my talk with this morning is call. A few years ago I was at my dad's church for a celebration of his 40th year of ministry there. This is the church I grew up at. And he spent 20 years there in student ministry and then spent 20 years being the senior pastor of this church.
And I was in this place that was familiar to me but also unfamiliar. I left Alexandria in 99, 2000. I'm not going back there. So it was this odd place of familiarity but also unfamiliarity.
That service dad didn't preach but he just shared for a few minutes a time kind of a thankfulness and stuff. But he said something that morning that has impacted me more than almost anything else I've ever learned from him. It's changed the way that I moved through things as this and he told the church and said, listen, I just want to thank you for trusting me for 40 years. And then he said this, I never heard him talk about it before.
He said, no, every morning when I wake up, I pray for it. One thing, I pray to have the courage to make the absolute best decision for this church. He said not to make the best decisions for me, not to make the best decisions for my friends or my family or the staff or a particular group of people there at the church but help me have the courage to make the absolute best decisions for this church. The decisions used to frighten me.
I used to be nervous about them because you're always scared about what's going to happen if and then you kind of create these worlds around you. People like me who like to kind of think through things and be able to anticipate, like, it destroys your decision making process because you're always worried about what's going to go wrong. I'll tell you, in the last year, this idea of what is the best decision for all of us, you know, for me, that began to make decisions significantly easier because I know what I've been called to. When I have to make decisions as a leader of this place, as your pastor, that's what I make decisions off of.
Now it has changed things significantly. It makes the hard things easy. That makes them not harder. It gives you strength inside of it.
It calms the anxiousness. It's there and I want you to, I want to implore you to think about working through your own personal calling. Now, if you have a hard decision to make, what does it mean when we know what God has called us, when we know what God has asked us to do? And we're simply, hey, what is the best decision for the sake of what I have been called to do?
And for us to learn through personal worship and through community, what that decision matrix might be like. You know, for some of us, I'd even been called to anything, just seems out of the realm of possibility. But I cannot imagine through reading scripture, through being with other people, through just watching over the last 15 years of doing this. And just also experiencing the presence of God, not just in my life, but in other people, I cannot imagine not thinking that God has called each and every one of us to special and unique things at times.
You'll call and can be tough. It's also a word that sometimes in the church, we have thrown around to defend our own personal thoughts, our personal privileges, or our own beliefs or passion points. But it's a real world, a real world is a real concept. I mean, I believe God calls us to places.
I believe God calls us to people. I believe God calls us to situations. We've got calls us to be stewards, to be people who are leading through our work and through our worship. I believe that we're sometimes in places that we don't necessarily want to be, but we're supposed to be there by the call of God in our life.
And we need to be pursuing this level of personal clarity because once we have it, and we can begin making decisions based off of that, I will personally tell you, it's a lot easier to do the hard things when you know why you were doing them. And Jesus wants to initiate these things in our lives. And the only thing he asks us to do is respond in faithfulness, that we're stewards of his movement, that we're co-participants alongside of him, and what he is doing, that we take on the call of realizing that lesser is better than greater, because that's how Jesus operates. We want to out remodel this in our behavior.
As Christians, we also form ourselves around Jesus' other favorite teaching that those who are faithful with the little things will be faithful with the big things that will be trusted with the larger. And our understanding of this will either inhibit and decrease our span of care and kingdom in the world, or we can show through our faithfulness that we desire more of Jesus. And more of this responsibility of working, and of keeping alongside of him and what he is doing. And we can't do this as rogue individuals.
In the community of God, this is always a we instead of a me. That we are all called together for holy discernment, for the sake of each other, for the sake of our decisions, and for the sake of the gathered body of Jesus Christ. Right decisions simply mean learning to listen, to what Jesus is saying, and learning to follow what Jesus is doing with the complete confidence that we have been invited along for every single step. Let's pray, Father, we pay for eyes that see clearly who you are, God, to have a clarity of, God to see how our own personal life is affected by you, God to see and to live with the hope and with the expectation that every single thing that we are looking for is found to its fullest in you.
And God, and by this type of just seeking, we're not losing ourself or finding ourself. So as we talk and think about right decisions, we realize that right is just you, that you are always here, that you have always been here. When we pray for veils of our eyes, to be lifted up for veils of our emotions, to be healed, God, we pray for protectionism to fall. God, to instead realize the truth of who you are and who you want us to be.
God, we ask for these things for the life of the world, not for the life of ourselves. God, we also live and we hope and we trust in you, that you are showing us this steadfast hope and purpose. And as your name and pray, amen what a stand.