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Ecclesia Princeton
Ecclesia Princeton
Romans [Season Two]- Ian Graham-Romans 12vv1-2: The Logical Response To Mercy
Pastor Ian Graham looks at Paul’s exhortation to offer our bodies as living sacrifices.
Good morning, hello friends. Hello, good to see you. We've got some friends that were early day Ecclesia people and we've got some people that are brand new. It's so lovely to see you wherever you fall on that spectrum. So what a gift it is to be together today. We've been in a teaching series on the book of Romans, a famously easy book to read. So we've just been swimming right along and we've been in Romans 9 through 11, which is probably the most famously easy portion of a very famously easy book. And now I am done with Romans 9 through 11. So we're moving to 12 and it's going to be great.
Speaker 1:We're going to touch on 11 a little bit today, but just to get into something a little less conceptual that feels a little less heady. Are you with me? All right, you don't really have a choice, because this is just where we are All right. We are beginning in Romans 12, verse 1. A beautiful verse. Make it your life verse. The invitation is from God for you. Let's hear the word of the Lord together. I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, 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 renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Okay, so we start with a, therefore, which then leads us back into what has come before. So we're going to touch on the very end of chapter 11.
Speaker 1:I want to read some verses for you that came just before our verse that we read here in Romans 12. Paul writes as regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake, but as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their ancestors. Do you see what I mean by Romans 11? All right, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they also may now receive mercy For God. So I want to highlight that we have indeed spent a considerable amount of time in Romans 9-11. That is available on our podcast, which is just a fancy way of saying you can go listen to what came before at your own leisure.
Speaker 1:This section summarizes what Paul has been saying throughout Romans 9-11 and then moves us into chapter 12. Romans 11-29 answers the question of Romans 9-6 resoundingly, the question of Romans 9, verse 6, resoundingly, and I just want to put up a very oversimplified sequence of events from Romans 9 through 11 that helps us trace. Here's what's going on here. So Paul is talking about the situation with the covenant people of Israel, the Jewish people, and he's describing the fulfillment of ancient promises in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But he's also aware that most of his countrymen and countrywomen, that being ethnic Israel, have not received Jesus as their Messiah. And so he's saying if God has fulfilled his promises, and yet all the people that were the original recipients of these promises have not responded to them, the question that he then beckons in Romans 9, verse 6, is has God's word failed or did God change his mind? Did God say hey, you know, we tried the covenant people thing, we tried doing the thing with the law, but none of that was working. So now, in the middle of history, plan B Jesus, get down there, get in there. We need the Son of God. Nobody else will do. And Paul's saying absolutely not, that the incarnation was always the purpose that God was outlining in the story and so that's kind of a very broad overview.
Speaker 1:Again, you can go back to those previous chapters. So has God's word failed? No, the gifts and calling Romans 11, verse 29, of God are irrevocable. The summary is then offered in verse 30. And I want to read that for you just briefly here Just as you were once disobedient to God, meaning you Gentiles, you people who were not the covenant people Again Paul's talking to a mixed orientation, church, jews and Gentiles, broad people groups at issue here and he's saying just as you Gentiles were once disobedient to God, but now you have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they now have been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they may now receive mercy.
Speaker 1:Paul says elsewhere in this little section of scripture I hope that the Gentile response to the gospel makes my people jealous, and so this is kind of what he's doing here. And then to gather it all into the mystery and the wisdom of God, romans 11 verse, verse 32. Everybody is invited to receive this mercy. Yes, we have free agency, we have free will. We can harden our hearts, but Jesus' mercy, his arms extended on the cross are extended to every single person, wrapping the entire world in an embrace. This leads us into this beautiful exhortation doxology that Paul.
Speaker 1:It's almost like he's writing, and those of you who are creators maybe you've had this experience where you're working at your craft and all of a sudden things are falling into place. It does have this feeling where you just want to stand up and be like that's it, that is it. And if you toiled at it for a long time you get that sense even greater lengths. And I think Paul is just he's writing this letter. Phoebe's reading this letter and I think she has this intonation in mind.
Speaker 1:As Paul outlines all these things, he comes to verse 33, and he can't help but stand up and say this is who Jesus is. Listen to this. Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments, how inscrutable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor, or who has given a gift to him to receive a gift in return? For from him and through him, and and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever, amen.
Speaker 1:This section started with Paul's absolute destitution. He's saying I wish I could be cut off for the sake of my people. The fact that they haven't responded to the gospel fills me with such despair and sadness. And now this section that started with destitution ends in exaltation. Verse 36 is one of my favorite in all of the scriptures. It is the foundation of all philosophy, the shorthand of the very purpose of the entire universe and the purpose of every human soul, which includes every single one of you, that the world exists through the exuberance and the sustenance of God. It is from him as a gift, it is through him, by his power, and it is to him that he is worthy to receive everything that we have heart, soul, mind and strength. Back in worship, that is good news.
Speaker 1:Ecclesia, paul has essentially taken us up to a high mountain and said look at it, look how beautiful this good news is, so that we can survey all that came before. And then he leads us into our passage for today. Therefore, in light of that kind of beauty, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Now I've taken two different translations and kind of melded them together, the NIV and the NRSV, because I think there are important word choices in each section.
Speaker 1:Paul says here that the only reasonable thing to do in light of all that he said, in view of the stunning mercy that has been unveiled in Jesus, the Messiah, is to climb up on the altar and to be set ablaze. Now, if you're following the logic, I love that. He says this is your reasonable act of worship, this is the logical thing to do. What is the problem with sacrifices Is that you kill them, right, like? That's a fundamental problem. And Paul's saying listen, the only reasonable thing to do is to offer your entire life on this altar. Or, to use a previous analogy, it's almost as if Paul has brought us up to a high mountain to show us all that he could see the flowery fields of God's mercy below. And now he's saying the only reasonable thing to do is to jump off this mountain and find that you can fly In the language of sacrifice, climb on the altar, realize that you are not consumed, but rather that you are infused with more and more life. The language of sacrifice here is obviously temple language.
Speaker 1:For the Jewish people, sacrifices were offered daily at the temple in line with the Levitical commands, the fire on the altar burning day and night. One of the great Jewish hopes during this first century of the new millennia was that God would renew and restore proper worship to the temple and that the renewal of God's presence at the temple, that the glory of the Lord would descend upon it in smoke and fire and thundercloud, as it did when Moses would enter the tabernacle, the tent of meeting, or as it did when Solomon dedicated the temple. The temple, for most of its first century existence, before it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, was largely a compromised institution in the eyes of most Jewish people, under the control of Roman-sponsored Jewish aristocrats, a character in the gospel stories we know as the Sadducees. Jesus judged the temple during the last week of his life for its many excesses, but he also was doing something very subtle, in a way that was only clear, as John points out, after his resurrection. He is not only judging the temple for its excesses, he is reorienting the temple around his very life, his work and his story. In John 15, jesus tells us he is the vine and that we are the branches to remain in him.
Speaker 1:As today, as we've discussed throughout our worship time together, is Pentecost Sunday. We can hear the story in Acts 2 in the key of Romans 12. We read this earlier Acts 2, beginning in verse 3. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them of Romans 12. We read this earlier Acts 2, beginning in verse 3. This reorientation around Jesus' body, his story, his work, is then made manifest here at Pentecost in the giving of the Spirit. Our lives, our bodies, our minds are now altars of God's presence. No longer is the height of worship on the Temple Mount in a specific place, but now is offered in Jesus' words, in spirit and in truth, within the confines of everyday life as we consecrate our lives to Him.
Speaker 1:Just as the day of Pentecost is defined by a unity of diverse languages given by the power of spirit, paul highlights here in Romans 12, the church will be a unity of witness of diverse gifts by the power of the Holy Spirit. Look at Romans 12, beginning in verse 4. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we who are many are one body in Christ and individually we are members of one another body in Christ and individually we are members of one another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us prophecy in proportion to faith, ministry in ministering, the teacher in teaching, the encourager in encouragement, the giver in sincerity, the leader in diligence, the compassionate in cheerfulness. As Scott McKnight says, the gifts are what happens when the Spirit of God takes the sacrifice of an embodied Christian and uses it for the good of the body of Christ. Douglas Moo points out that none of these gifts are possessions. They're practices, which is a beautiful thing. We think of gifts as wow, that person has been gifted with abilities that we can all stand back and remark on. But in the economy of the scriptures, gifts are given to be used in service of others, and anything short of that is a failure to bear witness to the gift that God has given.
Speaker 1:One of Paul's core criticisms of the world, apart from knowledge of God, is that the very lens through which we process and decide in the world doesn't work properly. It is clouded, it is muddled, it is distorted. In Romans 1, this is conveyed as the judgment of God. Romans 1, verse 28, says this and since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, god gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done. God giving us over ecclesia is the language of God, withdrawing, the language of judgment, removing himself.
Speaker 1:The judgment of God is an interesting paradox in that, in my view, it involves this sort of withdrawal, but it's not as if God ever leaves us. We see this viscerally in Ezekiel, chapter 10. Ezekiel is foretelling that there will be exile, there will be doom for the covenant people, and he sees viscerally the presence of God get up from the temple and depart. But the message of Ezekiel is not simply about God washing his hands of his people and saying good luck to you. The message of Ezekiel is that even through exile, even through your destitution, I will be drawing you back to myself, that these valleys of dry bones will live again, that they will rise up. And so there's a paradox. There are two parallel movements that are happening. God will respect our wishes and that should scare us at times. Right, if we say God, we don't want you here, he will say absolutely, I take a step back. But at the same time, his steps away from us are never him saying well, good luck to you, let's see how that goes. He, still in the midst of judgment, is faithful even when we are faithless. And here Paul's invitation is that by offering our lives as blazing sacrifices, as portable altars, we are finding the renewal of our mind, as Romans 8, verse 6, reminds us, is life and peace. The juxtaposition here is being conformed to be pressed into the mold of the world, versus being conformed to what Romans 8 calls the image of Christ and what Paul uses here. He says don't be conformed to the mold of this world, don't be pressed into its shape any longer, but rather be transformed, the Greek menomorphao to be moved anew, to be made something new.
Speaker 1:We got one of those butterfly gardens that you can order online, which is I don't know. It's very funny to order living creatures that are delivered to your door, but we got them as caterpillars. You get this little enclosure that is a net zipper, where the caterpillars will have a habitat to grow in. And we got the caterpillars and you're like, as they arrive in this packaging, you're asking yourself are they dead, are they alive? We had a mishap with an ant farm that we don't talk about anymore, but the caterpillars, thankfully, as far as we could tell, were alive and they have begun to form into chrysalises, which I think is the plural. They're definitely not cocoons, as my kids have readily informed me.
Speaker 1:Chrysalis, chrysalis, and it's amazing to watch these transformations take place. And you're seeing the caterpillar gets into this chrysalis and goes into the shell and you can observe the transformation that's happening externally. But then I was curious. I was like what happens internally? What sort of change is going to happen? Does this caterpillar just sprout wings? That's not at all what happens. Do you know, a caterpillar inside a chrysalis is completely liquefied, like it breaks down to these subsequent parts and then out of that raw material, god, through his artistry, and nature through its motions, is creating this butterfly. We see these transformations on the exterior. We see them often at much slower paces than we see these transformations on the exterior. We see them often at much slower paces than we see the caterpillar transform.
Speaker 1:But the sort of transformation that Paul is talking about here is the transformation that God undertakes when he takes up residence in our lives, when the Holy Spirit is present on the altar of our lives given to Him as a living sacrifice. God is doing so much more than we could see and so much of it is happening subtly, and it's only at moments, fits and starts, that we can see it externally, that other people can see God's life in us, and I want today just to focus on a couple of points of what a renewed mind looks like, of what God is trying to transform in us individually. And anytime we're talking about altars of God's presence, we have this dichotomy, these two things that are held at once, that God is doing something with us individually, but also in something in us collectively. And so what are the things that God is doing in renewing our minds and resisting confirmation to the pattern of this world? A couple of things I kept thinking about.
Speaker 1:If I were just to describe our world in sort of one phrase, one word, what word would I use? And really the word that has come to me often in this setting is the word shallow. There's just so much that's so shallow, so attention deficit in our world. It forms a lot of our vision as Ecclesia. Our vision as a church is that people would have a deep life with God and a deep love for the world. That we would be a people that, because of our life with God, we're drawn in not only into his story but into the way that God feels about our place, our people. That we would be drawn into God's aching yearning for people to come home. And this is who we are as Ecclesia. But in contrast to the shallowness that is so often evident in our world, I want to offer just a couple of thoughts about how we are being transformed by the power of the Spirit. In a world of shallow waters, we are plumbing the depths.
Speaker 1:Nicholas Carr, in his book called the Shallows, says this. He says what the net and he means internet seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it In a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski. Jet skis are fun. I don't know if you've had this experience. Has your ability to interact with information changed in, let's say, the last 15 years? I don't know what happened in that time frame.
Speaker 1:2009, steve Jobs stands up at Apple Con and is like here's an iPhone, it's going to be awesome, it's going to be great for you and there are great things about it, right, but we have had a fundamental shift in our technological approach to the world that's been dropped into the middle of most of our lifetimes and, for some of you who are younger, the whole of your lifetimes. And so how do we live in a world that is constantly drawing us towards the shallows? Well, first of all, we are rivers, not floods. Rivers are deep, narrow and good for so many areas of life power, food play, irrigation, beauty, life power, food play, irrigation, beauty. Floods are very, very shallow, but very wide and destructive. Our world of gamified technology, endless connection to our work, emails, consumerist fantasies that Instagram delivers us non-stop, the revenue strategy is all according to what cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Scholl calls addiction by design, and we were designed to be addicted to God.
Speaker 1:Jacques Eliel foresaw much of what became of our current scraps with technology. In his books the Technological Society, the Ethics of Freedom, eliel writes about our struggle with technology. He says man no longer organizes the object, about our struggle with technology. He says man no longer organizes the object. The object has its own life and develops like a true organism according to its own necessity. The more it obeys this law of its own development, the more it forces itself on man and becomes a necessity for him. He's talking about our relation to technology. Right, and at first, technology is posited as something that will help us, that will serve us. But Eliel talks about inevitably, we begin becoming acclimated to the technology in such a way that it sort of takes on a life of its own. This is the plot of the movie Terminator, just in case you're wondering. Skynet takes on, becomes conscious, right, but it doesn't have to be that extreme. The promise of technology must always be discerned in light of who is it serving and what is it conforming, what is it making its way into?
Speaker 1:There's an old, old movie came out in 1927, called Metropolis, by a man named Fritz Lang, and Fritz Lang paints this striking picture of this industrial machine and he shows these workers, mindless workers, marching off to serve this machine. And the great reveal at the end of the movie because I know you're probably not going to watch a movie that's almost 100 years old is that this machine is actually the Canaanite god Moloch that is consuming his victims. And as these mindless workers are droning off to work, they're actually being fed to this beast. Christopher Walken describes this as all devouring them in its powerful industrial draws. He says to the machine the Moloch machine shapes and figures the bodily movements of the workers that tended just as our own habits, attitudes and movements are increasingly molded by the human shaping power of smartphones and social media.
Speaker 1:Now, I say all that to say I am not a Luddite, I am not Amish. I use social media. Our church uses social media. Some of you may have found us initially on social media. Welcome, we're so glad you're here, or at least on our website. But at the same time, paul says so that you will be able to discern what is good.
Speaker 1:And so we pay attention to the way these technologies both are shaping us and are trying to shape us, that we understand that not everything that posits itself as neutral is actually neutral, and that we're trying to pay attention to the way the world is trying to draw us into being conformed to this present age. We have been invited not to be conformed but to be transformed by delighting in God's words to us, by devoting ourselves to worship and obedience, by encountering both the spiritual classics and the myriad of beautiful books that have been written in the last several years. Do you ever have this anxiety? I have this anxiety about all the books I haven't read. Do you guys get that? No, no, that's what heaven's for, though, friends, that's what it's for I know some of us don't feel like intellectuals in here, that our idea of a good time is not sitting with a book in a quiet room. But Paul is not trying to make us all into literature professors or insufferable pastors who spend all their time with books. What are you laughing at? He's trying to lift us out of the fray of the pattern of this world.
Speaker 1:Some of the greatest intellects are those formed in the hours working with one's hands. Brother Lawrence, a 17th century French monk which you may say, okay, he's got time to sit around and read books, but that wasn't his day-to-day. He spent his day as a cook was assigned the role of cooking for the other monks as such a great model of a life with God. Because what Brother Lawrence did wasn't like, hey, I need eight hours to go think. He said God is present in my work and what I'm going to do is I'm going to invite him into everything that I'm doing and I'm going to acknowledge God's presence in everything that I do. And Brother Lawrence has so many beautiful insights from his life with God. But he says this. He says this is what Paul talks about when he talks about praying without ceasing. This is the kind of life, this kind of openness, and this will absolve a lot of our sinfulness, of the mythology that it needs to survive. We need to be covert, hidden in secret for a lot of these things to have the allure that they have upon us. But if we just acknowledge God's presence, so much of that is immediately stripped away.
Speaker 1:The scriptures make it clear that we become like what we behold. This is the fundamental to our human architecture. It's the way that God designed us. We were designed to behold the face of God, just as a little child, a little baby, is formed by the face that is looking back at them, for good or for ill. Psychologists talk about the ways that babies learn to love, learn to be emotionally safe in the world because they see a face that is beaming over them, and they also talk about the lack of that and what that does to our psyches and to our emotional strength. But you, every single one of us, were designed to stare back into the face of love that has never once taken its eyes off of you. This is who we were made to be. But the other side, the shadow side, of that architecture, is when we behold idols, we become like them. Idols can't see, idols can't speak, they can't think, they can't reason, they can't do anything. And we become hardened in heart, we become calloused, when we fix our eyes on things that are less than God.
Speaker 1:Look at what Paul says in 2 Corinthians, chapter 3, one of the just really beautiful sections of scripture. Here Now, the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord, as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. As we behold God, you are becoming like Him. This the Orthodox call theosis. You are being made like God. Amen, in a world all right. Second point In a world with shallow roots, we are deeply rooted in Christ and with one another. A transition point we are at in Romans is that Paul's folding has all this gone before in Romans 1 through 11 into his reflections on how the church should function as a body. So Paul's brilliant at transitions and he's sort of drawing us into what he's doing here in Romans 12.
Speaker 1:Pentecost, as we've talked about, is the birthday of the church, the body of Christ, with Christ as the head, which tells us that we are not isolated individuals. Elsewhere, Paul will say a toe can't say to the body I have no need of you, or the body can't say to a finger I don't have any use for you. We need each other. We are not isolated individuals coming here to get our religious fill. We are a living organism, an ecclesia of different parts, different gifts, and we all reflect the manifold wisdom of Christ. The world tells us that we should take our claim into individuality, that we have to find ourselves at all costs and that this is a mission of isolated discovery, where we are left on our own.
Speaker 1:Christ tells you good news there's nothing to find. You don't have to go looking for an identity. That is some far-flung thing. You have to discover. You don't have to find anything. There's only a gift to receive. We receive the gift of our identities in Christ, but we do so through the paradox of dying to ourselves. Those who want to find their lives, jesus of Nazareth says, must lose it. In losing ourselves to Jesus, we receive ourselves fully alive. In climbing up onto the altar as living sacrifices, we find that we are not consumed but rather infused with divine life, and we can only do this together, in community, in mutuality.
Speaker 1:This is why Paul will instruct the church just a few verses later, here in Romans 12, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly. Do not claim to be wiser than you are. So our primary allegiance and orientation becomes not our preferences, our projects, but our Lord Jesus and his body. This means that when dear brothers and sisters are fearing for their livelihoods and that of their family because of increased immigration enforcement, we don't throw the laws of the United States at them. We appeal to a higher law, the law of the Spirit of God that unites us, because our allegiance is not to this nation. Our allegiance is to King Jesus and his eternal kingdom that has no borders, that is not defined by a place, but it's defined by worship, in spirit and in truth.
Speaker 1:In a world that so often is trying to pull us into different corners, we don't just simply run up the middle and say, okay, we're holding all these things at once. We say, jesus, I want to offer my body as a living sacrifice so that I can discern what is God's perfect will, his pleasing, acceptable holy will, and we try to be his people. And that is our call to be deeply rooted, to be identified by our sisterhood, brotherhood to one another under the lordship of Jesus Christ. Deeply rooted means that we are rooted in Christ and what he's done, all right. Last point In a world of shallow soil, oh, can you put the thank you very much In a world of Thank you very much In a world of One more? The last one, ah, there we go. In a world of shallow selves, we receive our true selves as a gift of God. Sanctification is just a fancy word for the complete renovation and transformation that our lives are undergoing by the faithfulness of God, His love for us, the power of His Spirit.
Speaker 1:Paul juxtaposes the pattern of this age, calling it the flesh, with the pattern of the age that will never end, the Spirit. Look at what Paul says in Romans 8, beginning of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason, the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law Indeed, it cannot. And those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God indwells you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, then the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, if we submit ourselves to God's loving care, he is faithful to transform us.
Speaker 1:It may have all the appearances of a hardened little shell, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, but God is doing magnificent things in the interior that will bear witness on the exterior, and this will involve a lot of repentance, a lot of refining, and I want to absolve so many of us in here of the notion that you sort of repent once and at that point you're just like, okay, I shouldn't have to do that anymore, I shouldn't have to say I'm sorry anymore, because, honestly, this is the dynamic that keeps so many of us at arm's length with God. It's not God God's saying I paid for all of your sins, and so often we think that, god, we receive this forgiveness from the Lord. We say thank you, I'm so like, I'm just so filled with life to be forgiven by you, and then we think we're on our own. But sanctification tells us something very different that we reside with the power of the Spirit.
Speaker 1:Some of us have been shaped by the image of this world in such a way that we experience so little freedom, and you've been constantly beating yourself up ever since. For many of us in here, we can identify struggles in our lives, patterns that have been constant in our lives. I want to name one today because I think for so many it has such an eroding effect on our life with God. The demonic scheming that is pornography in the hands of big tech that we talked about gamified addiction for many of us, got its clutches in our tender hearts at the age of 10, 11, 12. You've come to freedom in Christ, but you feel like you can't be free and you carry so much shame because you've tried so many times to put it away and yet find yourself falling down again.
Speaker 1:And I want to say to you plainly that, yes, this is wrong, both systematically wrong, institutionally wrong that you were drawn into this perilous addiction at such a tender age. And wrong, yes, that you participate in it. That it is sinful, yes. And this goes for any other sins, whether habitual or harbored within the darkest corners of our lives. But within all of that, within the systemic institutional wrongness of it, within the wrongness of our participation in it, there is the mercy of God that says yeah, that's what I went to the cross for, that's what it's for, that's what grace is for.
Speaker 1:God delights in giving grace, that's who he is. And so for so many of us, we have this expiration date on God's grace, or we think that it has only so many uses, and then, once you get to five or six times, they're like really, the problem is with you, and I'm here to tell you that that is an absolute lie. That God is faithful to transform us, that he delights in sanctifying us, that he is wanting to transform us into the image of His Son, and he is patient. He will wait as long as it takes. As long as we turn to him, we find mercy and mercy anew. God forgives sinners. God heals those who need a doctor. God delights in repentance. Don't give up. Don't let shame drive you away from the Lord, who is staring down the road waiting for you to come home, because the Lord will not reject any who come to him. As Paul says elsewhere, all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved, and salvation will give birth to sanctification. It may feel painful and slow. You may be embarrassed for how slow your pace is. You may be a 20-minute mile runner. God's like. I'm with you, I'm here. God is transforming us from glory to glory.
Speaker 1:Now, two times in this passage, paul does something so subtle and yet so beautiful. He mentions pleasing God. Now, for many of us, we've been raised on this diet of theological discourse that says you can never please God because pleasing God has all of the appearances of putting God in your debt. You can do something that would merit favor with Him, but that's not the kind of thing we're talking about here. We're talking about pleasing God in light of the kind of Father that he is, the kind of Father that delights in us, that rejoices in us.
Speaker 1:You know, every time I pick up my phone, you know big tech here we go. I've got all these various pictures that just scroll of the people in my life, my wife and my children. And just about every time I mean, look at that, silas, he's like it's just like a chunk like so awesome, just delight. And I pick up the phone and I'm like wow, and oftentimes it's like a moment where I can like sort of remember what was happening or just something. That is a posture that is just so evident of the kind of kid that they are. I pick up my phone and I just laugh, I delight, and Paul is saying here that our attempts at serving God by the power of the Spirit do in fact please God, and he's inviting us to see that the Father delights in us, rejoices over us, and that sanctification is a process that God signed up for and that he is here to walk alongside of us in the power of the Spirit, giving the Spirit without measure what the Spirit of the Lord is.
Speaker 1:There is freedom as we gaze upon His face. He is transforming us from glory to glory. Amen. I'm going to invite the worship team forward. And so we pray, in light of all that God has done, that we would not be conformed to the pressures of our age, that we would not be pressed into its mold, but we would be transformed by the renewing of our mind, and so often the renewing of our mind involves renewing the vision of God that we have. And so I ask you, as we pray, for the Holy Spirit to come, because we are confident, not because we've done anything to merit God's favor, but because God delights in drawing near to His children.
Speaker 1:We are confident that God will meet us here, and I want to invite you, if you are allowing shame, to define your life with God. I almost want to absolve you of that attempt and just say what does God look like? Is he arms folded, arms length, staring at you with disappointment? I mean, for so many of us that's the experience we had with parents or with dear loved ones, and we just project that onto God. Or is he arms open, embracing the world, saying Do not be conformed to the pattern of this age. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind and start with your image of what I look like, what I've done for you, that God delights in you and that he has signed up for the project of renovation, with all of its meandering, with all of its shortfalls, with all the times that it goes over budget, he is in with you. He is faithful when we are faithless, and he delights in our smallest attempts to be faithful to him by the power of his Spirit.
Speaker 1:Let us pray, jesus, we pray.
Speaker 1:Come Holy Spirit, god, will we see that, offering our lives on the altar of your presence, god will not consume us, god, it will not diminish us, lord Jesus, but it will set us free.
Speaker 1:That life with you is life and peace, god, that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, not a little condemnation, not some condemnation, not the condemnation that we sort of allow ourselves to spend some time with our sins, lord, and then come to you after a couple of days. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because of your rich and abundant mercy, because of what you've done on the cross, because we are no longer defined simply by what we do or don't do, but we are defined by what you have done. And so, god, may we see the riches of your mercy here today. God, would you transform our minds, lord, jesus, as a people, individually. God, would you work your presence here in this place that we would never be the same again? Jesus, we pray these things in your name, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We pray Amen. Friends, I'm going to invite you to stand and respond in worship.