Transformed: The Mind of Christ - Week 3: April 26, 2026

Pastor Nate Rovenstine

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Well, good morning. Welcome to Connect Church. I'm Nate Rovenstein and I still work here. Been gone the last couple weeks visiting churches across the state of Kansas, but it's so good to be back. I before I start preaching, I just want to publicly say what I've told my friend in communication with him, how grateful I am for Leo Barbie. If you don't know Leo, Leo's been in our community. He's been in the ministry for 69 years. And not all of those here in Lawrence, but he recently retired and there was a big celebration yesterday for him. And I just publicly want to say that. This is online, so if Leo happens to see this, I respect him so much, and he means so much to me personally. He's taught me so much. He's been a mentor in my life, a praying partner, uh prayer partner through the years. And uh, so anyway, as Victory Bible transfers their leadership to another leader, I just want to publicly say how much I appreciate Leo. All right. In this series, we've been starting each sermon with reading Romans 12, 1 and 2 in different versions. We're going to continue that today. I'm going to read first of all in the King James Version. Those of you that are kind of in my age or a little younger, maybe certainly a little older, this might have been how you learned at a vacation Bible school. Let me just read this to you, Romans 12, 1 and 2. I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world. But be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may know, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. I love the word beseech. I'm not you sure I've used it recently, but Paul is urging us to pay attention to the renewing of our mind and the offering of our bodies. Romans 12, 1 and 2, and a much more recent the message which expands everything a lot. If you're going to read the Bible through the mess with the message version, it's going to take you a little longer. But I love what G. Jean Peterson did with this verse. And practic at a practical level, some of what he says here lines up exactly with what I want to say. Romans 12, 1 and 2 in the message. So here's what I want you to do. I guess that's what it means to beseech. Here's what I want you to do. God helping you take your everyday, ordinary life, your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking around life, and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. What a powerful phrase. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the bust out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. So in this series, we are considering what it means that God wants to transform our minds and how we can participate in that process. C.S. Lewis, who we've quoted both weeks now, I want to quote a long quote from him to show the power of changing our minds and transforming our minds. Lewis says, every time you make a choice, you are turning a part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all its innumerable choices, all your life long, you are slowly turning the central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature. Either into a creature that is in harmony with God and with other creatures and with itself, or else into that, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the other kind means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing towards one or the other. Last week, Pastor John did a great job of reminding us that our minds and bodies are connected. And that this transformation of our minds can happen from the top down. Remember that idea, this rational choice that we can make about how we think about things. The cerebral cortex of our mind, which makes choices, and that's so critical if we're going to renew our mind. This is what Lewis is saying this this ability to choose. We talked about then also how from this transformation of our mind can happen kind of from the lower mind up, the response of what's happening around us and what happens either positively or negatively. I don't know if you've ever been, as John was preaching, I was thinking just in my own life, the things that I sometimes do that I'm like, why did I do that? Well, it's probably because there was something in my lower mind. There was something in my that surfaced because of past experiences or past trauma. I've talked before, just briefly about now that I'm riding bikes, the the fear that I have about falling because of a wreck I had when I was 12. And I never put those together until I started thinking about how this mind of ours can work and that God wants to renew both our frontal cortex, that top-down thinking, so that we think intentionally differently, but he also wants to reform that bottom-up thinking and he wants to heal all of that and how our bodies are tied to that. I would encourage you to listen to the sermons in this series. And by the way, we've sort of added a way for you to do that. You can go to YouTube and find it. But if you go, if you just want to listen to uh the sermon without just to hear it in a higher quality, frankly, a much higher quality version, just go to wherever we get your podcast or go to our webpage and you can just watch this here, listen to the series. And I would encourage you to do that if you haven't heard both Laura and John's sermons to lead us up to this point. So, as we've been exploring the complex, integrated, embodied mind, that's an idea that the mind and body are connected. This embodied mind that God has given us, we now focus on paying attention to being mindful, to being mindful of the information that our minds gather from both outside and inside. So I want us to talk today about what being transformed in our mind and how we are mindful, intentional mindfulness of our circumstances and what's going on inside us. So I don't know if you noticed, but there's a green light shining right there. How many of you noticed that? All right? Here was the alternative. I came in here on Thursday, and the staff or Tuesday, I don't remember, I walked into the sanctuary, nobody was around. I'm like, of course, everybody that came in here, the staff that was here, these lights were flashing like a discotheque. I mean, unbelievable. And it was just like I mean, I thought we were gonna have a dance party in here, and we couldn't stop it. So our whole sound, our whole light board is down this morning, and we just have the lights that are available to us, but we couldn't get that one off. Hopefully, we'll get it fixed this week. We worked really hard, and hopefully next week it'll be back to normal. But that light's there, and some of you noticed it and some of you didn't, because some of you are mindful about those kinds of things, and some of you aren't. That's not good or bad. It's how our minds are wired. Did anybody notice this guitar case from this side over here? Did that bother anybody? Well, I told them to leave it here because this kind of stuff irritates the snot out of me. Have you ever had the snot irritated out of you? It can get messy. When I see clutter, when I see things that aren't when they should be, particularly if I'm in charge, it just bothers me so much because I'm mindful of how I'm wired, I'm mindful of those kinds of things. Some of you aren't. And that's fine. I'm gonna tell you something that I didn't really want to share today. But if you go into our lobby and if you look up, you'll see about right over there, just outside these doors, that we had to replace and repair our ceilings because we had a leak. And they patched it, and it looks horrible. But I bet most of you have never noticed that. I'm mindful of that. On the other hand, I walked into Barb's office recently, and I asked her, when did you get all those plants in the corner? And she said, those have been there for a month. We're mindful of different things. When my dad walks into a room, he's looking for someone who needs a friend. And he's looking for someone to connect with because he's mindful of relationships. You get what I'm saying. I'm using personal examples, but we are mindful. Our minds are always working, and whether it's personality or how we were raised or what we're thinking about, whatever it is, we're mindful of different things. Different things will encourage us, different things will bother us, different things will make us happy or make us angry, right? We're mindful of different things. And what scripture does is it invites us to be mindful of the spirit of God that resides in those of us who've trusted Jesus as our Savior. And the Spirit calls us to be mindful of the Spirit. And quite honestly, that's a bit of a challenge because we're mindful of guitar cases and green lights and tears in the roof and our stresses at home and finances and sports teams and politics. And you know, you get we're mindful of so many things, but the spirit says if we're going to renew our minds, the invitation, not the not the shameful, you know, uh mandate, but the invitation to recognize that the spirit of Christ dwells in you. Pay attention to the Spirit. Earlier in Romans, Paul talks about this in Romans 8. We had a series on this last year, but I love this this version is the voice. I love, listen to this. If you live your life animated by the flesh, namely your fallen, corrupt nature, then your mind is focused on the matters of the flesh. That sounds a little bit like the Lewis quote, right? But if you live your life animated by the Spirit, namely God's indwelling presence, then your focus is on the work of the Spirit. A mind focused on the flesh is doomed to death. But a mind focused on the spirit, but a mind focused on the spirit will find full life in complete peace. You see, a mind focused on the flesh is declaring war against God. It defies the authority of God's law and is incapable of following Him. Philippians, Paul also urges, finally, brothers and sisters, fill your minds with beauty and truth. Meditate on whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is good, whatever is virtuous and praiseworthy. Mindfulness. Kurt Thompson refers to this as paying attention to what you're paying attention to. I think that's where it starts. What's filling my mind? What am I thinking about? Now, the reality is our life is full of demands. Like there's things, like here's what you should be paying attention to when you're driving. Driving. Right? It's not that we just sit around all the days of our lives just meditating on God, but how could we be more mindful of the spirit of Christ in us and what the spirit of Christ in us is doing to transform our minds and our bodies? How could we be more mindful, more, how can we pay more attention to what we're paying attention to? And so that's what I want to talk about today. How do we do that? Thompson goes on to say in the book, The Soul of Shame, attention is the engine of the mind's, of the mind's train that pulls along the rest of the functional cars. Ultimately, we become what we pay attention to, and the options available to us at any time are myriad, the most important of which is being located within us. So Thompson invites us, as Paul invited us, to pay attention to what the spirit is doing in us. In a world full of noise and distractions, with issues in our own lives and emotions and mental challenges and all the things that go along with it. This invitation is to pay attention to what we're paying attention to and to pay attention to the spirit. So there's multiple biblical examples of this. You see this over and over again in scripture when men and women at certain times in their lives were paying attention to God's voice, God's call, God's direction. And then other times in their life, you're like, you weren't paying attention at all. I think of Abraham. Remember Abraham in the Old Testament? God called him and said, Abraham, I'm going to make a nation out of you. I want you to leave and go somewhere, but I'm not even going to tell you where it is, just follow me. And listen to what Genesis 12 says. So Abram, at this point his name was still Abram, Abram departed as the Lord had instructed. And the Lord had instructed to just go and I'll clarify along the way. He had paid attention. And he and he uprooted his life. And to move locations in those, I mean, he didn't call a moving company. I mean, this is a whole change. Like he was never coming back. So Abram departed as the Lord had instructed, and Lot went with him. Abraham was Abram was 75 years old. It's never too late to pay attention to God. He was 75 years old when he left Haran. He took his wife, sorry, Sarah, his nephew Lot and all his life, and all his wealth, his livestock, and all the people he had taken into his household at Haran and headed for the land of Canaan. And just a few verses later, listen to what Abraham did. At that time there was a severe famine that struck the land of Canaan, forcing Abram to go down to Egypt, where he lived as a foreigner. And as he was approaching the border of Egypt, Abram said to his wife, Sarah, look, you are very beautiful. And when the Egyptians see you, they will say, This is his wife. Let's kill him, then we can have her. So please tell them that you are my sister. Then they will spare my life and treat me well because of their interest in you. Now that's a complex story with all kinds of cultural things going on. But that isn't good. In any culture, at any time. Wives, do you agree? This is bad. And this is this man was afraid of the Egyptians. This man who God had spoken to, who had the courage to follow, to pay attention to what God had asked him to do, and uprooted his family and took them towards the promised land. Who had been promised to be made into a great nation, couldn't stand up to the fear of man. He wasn't paying attention to what he should have been paying attention to. Over and over again. Peter denying Jesus, right? Over and over again. Jonah. You name it. Almost every biblical story has a has a time where these characters did heroic things and then they did things where they clearly weren't paying attention. And the results of not paying attention to God can have negative impact for generations. And the results of paying attention to God can have positive impact for generations. And I'm going to tell you that no matter where you are on the generational line of your family's story, you can change the future for your family. They all have to decide. I'm not saying you're going to just lock them up and they're going to heaven and their lives are going to be perfect. But no matter where you come from, or you're part, where you are in this generational story of yours, we all have one, we're all part of one, we're all leaving one. A legacy, we have a history and a legacy. No matter where you are, if we learn to pay attention to what we're paying attention to, and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, we can impact generations. I have all kinds of stories about that, but you know it's true, you don't need my illustration. It's kind of the difference. This this thing of paying attention to what we should be paying attention to is kind of the difference between debt and investment financially. Just a little bit of debt early that you don't address or continue to lean into can lead to devastation financial, devastating financial choices later, right? The flip side is equally true. This life lesson, particularly if you're younger, start now to set something aside for later. It grows. Okay, that's the illustration. The point is even in the littlest of details, start now wherever you are. It's never too late to pay attention to the spirit in your life. So that sounds great, but how do we do it? Because there's some barriers, aren't there? And I'm gonna mention three, and there's a whole lot more. But three that I want to mention today. That keep us from paying attention to what we should be paying attention to, to hearing the voice of the spirit as we walk through life. This first one's gonna seem strange, but it's so much a part of our culture now, and it's simply a screen. I'm telling you that as I'm reading from a screen. Our phones, our televisions, our computers, our iPads, our whatever's next. They're sapping our attention. We did a whole series on this. I don't want to spend a ton of time with this, but I just want to encourage all of us to put down our phones, step away from our televisions, turn off our iPads. You don't have to answer the computers, the emails at home for work. I get it. I'm not asking you to destroy them. We live in a it'd be like we l it'd be like telling someone in the 80s to not have a landline. I'm I understand technology is deeply and rooted in life. AI, all of it. I get it, I get it. And I'm not, I hope you don't hear shame and condemnation. I'm I battle this myself all the time. In fact, somebody walked in this morning, and I don't know who you were, I don't remember who it was. I think it's someone newer to the church, and I was looking down at my phone. It was an update from my daughter on her pregnancy, if that helps, right? So that seems exciting. She's 20 weeks, yay! Halfway to a baby, is what she said. But why? Why did I have to look at that text when somebody was walking by me? You get it? Like, I understand the struggle, struggle's real. But unplug. With no shame at all, but just a reminder that this is sapping us. And listen, don't be thinking about the other person that you see, the parent that's not paying attention to their child at the playground. Don't be thinking about them. It's so easy for us to get critical of others. What is God saying to you about screen time? All right. Here's another one lack of quiet, time, and space to be mindful. Now the comma matters here not quiet time and space, but quiet, time and space. We're so loud in our culture. Most of us can't stand silence. We're listening, we have our earbuds in. I get it again, I understand. But I I wonder if God is inviting us. I wonder if what he's I wonder with what he wants us to pay attention to is heard when the noise is turned down. And we find some time to be in his presence. And some space for us to just think. And certainly I'm talking about prayer, but I'm just just space to think, just space for the spirit. Can the Holy Spirit speak to us when everything's loud around us? You better, I hope. And he has and he will, and that's awesome. But I wonder, again, our part here, we're we're we can't transform our minds. I love the analogy that. Laura's been sharing and John shared it last week of a ski lift that just makes so much sense to me. We can't make the ski lift take us to the top. All we can do is make get on the ski lift that takes us to the top. We did, we and the Holy Spirit's just saying, could you find some time? Could you find some space? Could you prioritize your schedule to find focused time for prayer and meditation? Could you find time to open up your Bible, to do something like the Bible recap? And if you listen to the Bible recap, you'll hear these things from Terry Lee Cobble, who does this. She says, when you read scripture, look for God instead of looking for yourself. She'll say, He's where the joy is. She'll say, preach the truth yourself. Like, is there a way for you to find a little bit of time to be in God's presence, a little bit more than you are now? Now listen, whenever I preach on this issue, I want to tell you, you don't have to be your grandma. Your praying grandma that prayed for you all the time. You don't have to be your pastor or anyone else. The question is not what is required of me and you know, 30 minutes? Are you talking 15 minutes? Are you talking five minutes? Is it in the morning? Is it neat? We get all legalistic about all this stuff. I'm just, it's an invitation. Is there a way for you to block off a little bit more time? Susanna Wesley, who was the mother of John and Charles Wesley, you know, we're a Wesleyan church, so our tradition goes back to John and Charles. Charles was the hymn writer. Susanna Wesley had Wesley had 19 kids. Not all of them survived to adulthood, but she had 19 kids. So that means I don't know how many she had at a time. Some of them were clearly gone before others were coming along, but it was a houseful. And she would famously, in the middle of the day, whenever she needed to, she would sit down in a chair. She would take her apron up over her head and put it over her head, and she would pray in that moment. And the kids knew. I think John said to Charles, Mama be praying now. Leave her alone. I think it's actually, you know, Wesley wrote a lot of hymns, but he also wrote some folk songs. He wrote a folk song about Mama be praying. You should look it up. He didn't. That was a really bad joke, but here's Susanna Wesley and saying here's Susanna Wesley saying, I want to find a space in the middle of raising 19 kids. And again, I'm so sensitive. It's a father to three beautiful girls. One of them has three children, but they're at the age they're demanding of her time. I get it. I remember my life is much different pace. So apply this in your own world. What does this look like for you to get a little bit more time to hear God's voice? But what would it look like not to just reclaim some time on your schedule, but just even redeem the moments you already have? What would it look like to redeem your schedule by practicing slowing? John Mark Homer calls it the ruthless elimination of hurry. What if we learned to slow our lives down just a little bit in the moments we have? What if we slowed our lives down so we could be in a position for the Holy Spirit to refine and mold us? See, we are often going faster than Jesus is. We are moving at a pace that faster than he did. He walked through the crowds. He stopped and listened. He looked for friends that needed help. Jesus had a lot to do, but he never failed to love those that the Father put in front of them in the hurriedness and busyness of life. And again, this can be challenging. But here's some ideas. Now, don't put these up here yet, guys. I'm going to tell you this list of ten that I did not create. Some of them, if you know me, know I'm never going to do. I was just not. I'm just telling you right now, I'm not going to do some of this. But I looked on some of the things on this list and I thought, that could be a way for me to slow down, to be more attentive, to be more aware of what's around me and what's going on inside of me. These are just some suggestions. What does it look like in your life to slow down? So here's some of them. All right, pop them up there. Drive in the slow lane. Not gonna happen. Not for this guy. Speak more slowly. Or should I say, speak more slowly? Look people in the eyes when in conversation. Chew your food more slowly. Walk more slowly. Show up to your meetings or appointments early and don't take your phone out. Build a five-minute buffer in between all the scheduled activities and sit in silence and pray. Wait for 60 seconds before getting out of your car. Pick the longest line in the grocery store. Not gonna happen. All these others I'm willing to put on the table. I've told you the two that are non-starters for me. But maybe they are for you. Focus and complete one task at a time before switching to the next task. That's interesting. Again, this is just a list. What happens in that moment? Are you gonna have a great aha moment from God? Is the Holy Spirit gonna come down and you start saying, No, but I wonder if in some of those spaces where we make a little more time, we might see someone around us that just needs a smile. Or a short conversation, or we could pray for them. The idea is to slow down in your schedule. Now, again, that's gonna look different where you are in life, but what would it look like to slow down and pay attention to what you're paying attention to? So screams, this, this, this, this slowing down point, and then the last one is mental health issues, anxiety or intrusive thoughts, depression, ADHD. You know, here at Connect Church, we're very sensitive to the fact that some of these things are challenging because you're dealing, some of us are dealing with mental health issues. Um in fact, there's, you know, so so I would think in this situation, if this is you, that you're you these tactics don't work, there's other stuff. Seek out mental health interventions, maybe even properly prescribed medication, seek to seek professional help to help you understand why your mind won't slow down. And we always, you know, if you go to our current series on the webpage, you'll see some extra resources on all these points. And we're gonna put those up after every sermon that you can dig deeper on on some of these slowing down techniques. And always on our webpage there's a list of community resources for mental health intervention. Here's what I want to close with, or the I the point I want to close with, and a few more thoughts. We become more mindful of God, not simply so we can find inner peace, rather so that we can be transformed by his love so that we can love others. This is not um this is not a seminar on how to find fulfillment. This is a sermon on how to let the Holy Spirit renew your mind so that his love can transform you, so that you can love those people that don't drive in the slow lane. Right? Susannah Wesley came out from under that apron to love and train her children. The path to transformation was built with love. Romans 5.8. But God demonstrates his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us and we are transformed for the purpose of love. Matthew 22 says, Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. This renewing of our mind is so that the love of Christ can transform us and that we can begin to love others in a deeper and deeper way. But I know some of you are, and I know going to a fine restaurant, I don't know, a Michelin restaurant, I heard what's what they call it. I was thinking that's something to do with tires, but apparently that's a rating for restaurants. I want to tell you about my three greatest meals in corporate worship. One was in Haiti, uh, a place that I I won't go into all the details. All I can tell you is the night of that service with the little sanctuary full of people. You know, the old story you hear about people hanging out the windows, people looking in the windows, standing at the back, it was packed. The presence of God was so powerful that night. I didn't understand a word that was being spoken. And I'll never forget my friend Pape, who who called me Mr. Preacher. Um, I was a 20-year-old college student. He said, Go pray with him. Go pray with him. Okay, so I started praying over people, and it was so powerful. The second Michelin dining experience spiritually was youth camp. When I was 25 years old. Foot washing service. I was not a youth pastor. We didn't have a youth pastor at the time. I took our kids. The presence of God was so, so thick there. Unbelievable. The third was youth camp last year down in Oklahoma. When God's presence arrested that came, fell on that place. By the way, we're going to be asking for you to help us get our kids to youth camp next year. I highly encourage you to help us do that because God's presence does such great work there. And I love when that happens. I love when the Spirit of God is so evident. But you know what? That was three meals of my life. You can't exist on Michelin restaurant experiences with God. Good meals. They carried me maybe farther than some of the other meals. But you know what you and I need? We need to be fed daily, multiple times a day. When God chooses to take us to that restaurant, yea, God. But he invites us every day to be more aware of what we're aware of. And to invite the Holy Spirit, either by making intentional times, putting down our screens, or just finding space in our existing day to listen to what the Spirit would say to us. And so that's what we're gonna do. It's gonna feel awkward, that's okay. It's gonna be an extended time, that's okay. But we want you after I pray a short prayer, is just sit in the presence of God and give attention to what you're giving attention to. Some of you, if anybody wearing an apron by any chance today, that'd be fun. Maybe you want to kneel. Maybe you want to sit there with your arms at some of the things that John talked last week, but this let the Holy Spirit feed us in this moment. Holy Spirit, come and show us who you are and remind us that you don't change, that you invite us consistently to end your presence in this way. Help us to listen to what you might teach us, what you might say to us, what you might ask us, how you might show us your love. I dare not say much more except to say the Holy Spirit speak. Amen.