Episode 120 - Make a Resolution to Be Transformed! - Be Transformed Part 1

With a new year comes new year's resolutions! So many make resolutions that involve a change in their lives. But true change or transformation can only come with hard work and consistency.  Whether you want to be a premier athlete or just get healthy, a real commitment is required. The same is true with our growth as a Christian. We may not aspire to become a brilliant theologian, but if we are truly saved, there should be a hunger in us to get to know the God who saved us. Truly understanding our salvation, all that it cost, and what is expected of us now that we are a child of God is exactly what matures us as a Christian. It is what keeps us from being rocked when a crisis arises, it’s what keeps us from being mislead by false teachers, its what makes us able to witness an accurate and complete Gospel message to others, and its what makes us more and more resemble Jesus – the very goal of sanctification.

Join us on the transformation journey as we begin in this episode answering questions like, How are we transformed? Why does Jesus divide us His people from the world? How do we cooperate with the Holy Spirit? Why does who we are closest to matter in our transformation? Why does what we put in our minds and how we spend our time matter in our transformation? 

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Transcript

Episode 120 – Be Transformed

         Welcome back and Happy New Year! Chris, I am going to start off with giving you a little New Year’s quiz. Can you name the top 3 most common New Year resolutions?

I’m going to guess lose weight, cuss less, and drink less.

You got one! The answer is exercise more, lose weight and get organized. Notice the theme in all of them – people want change. Change in their health, change in their weight, or change in their surroundings. Change is the same reason all of those home renovation shows on tv are so popular. People love seeing a disorderly, dated, or completely trashed house transform into a beautiful home anyone would be proud to show.

Sometimes change is good. But you know one thing in common with all that you mentioned is that they all require continual work – exercising once or twice isn’t going to make you healthier. Losing 10 lbs. and then going back to your old eating habits will quickly make you put the weight back on. And you can spend days organizing your house or office, but if you don’t stay on top of it, it will be a cluttered mess again in no time. Even beautiful house renovations can quickly turn bad if you don’t maintain things in your home or mistreat your furniture, appliances, floors, etc.

     So the moral of the story is that initial change can be wonderful, but true transformation only comes with hard work and consistency. And I’m sure everyone has probably figured out where we are going with this. For those of us who have been saved, our salvation bought about an initial change in us. As Paul tells us in 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God.”

You could say that at our salvation, God fulfilled for us all 3 of the top resolutions – we have lost the weight of unforgiven sin, we’ve been brought to life by the Holy Spirit (that definitely qualifies for getting healthier!) and our lives are more organized because we now have a manual to look to for anything we need to know! But . . . if we don’t put the work in and cooperate with the Holy Spirit in our sanctification we can easily forget what having our sin forgiven cost Jesus and take future sin too lightly. While we won’t lose our salvation, without making consistent effort, we could neglect pursuing a godly lifestyle (definitely unhealthy) and The Bible is only an effective manual to life if we actually read it and understand it.

And since we are being so clever linking the secular transformations to the spiritual, think of it this way. We were all that run down, dilapidated house. But when God got a hold of us, He turned us into a beautifully remodeled home. But, if we don’t keep up on the maintenance, the house can start to have cracks. So all this to say that our continual spiritual transformation is crucial to our sanctification and our walk with Jesus. Now let’s look at the other side of this. When I was a teenager, I loved to watch Julius Erving play basketball. I watched the 76ers play every night. Dr. J., as he’s known, had this move call the finger roll. If you’ve ever seen it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It appeared like he glided toward the basket, flew in the air, and had the basketball roll down his hand to the tip of his finger and just swoosh in the net. It really was a thing of beauty. And he made it look so easy!

That’s what premier athletes do – they make what they do look easy. But just ask them. It’s anything but easy. We see the net result, but what we don’t see is the hours, days, weeks, months, and years of training it took to get them to a place where they are so good at what they do, they make it look easy. You know, Rose, it can be the same with the great theologians – Calvin, Spurgeon, Edwards, even some current ones like R.C. Sproul, Voddie Baucham and others. The way brillians Biblical Truth and Biblical insight just rolls off their tongues, we would think they have received a special gift from the Holy Spirit that the rest of us haven’t.

And, while there is no doubt they have been gifted by the Holy Spirit with intellect and the ability to effectively communicate, they all started at the same place we did. They didn’t just wake up one day and were brilliant. They, like premier athletes, put hours, days, weeks, months, and years of work in. I’ll give you an example. Dr. R.C. Sproul tells a story. After he graduated from seminary, he was done with school. He was tired of school. He had a wife and a baby. They were really poor from his going to seminary, and he just wanted to get a pastor’s job somewhere, serve God, and provide for his family. But his advisor at the seminary told him he needed to go to Amsterdam to study with Dr. G.C. Berkouwer (a renown theologian) who was the chair of systematic theology at the Free University in Amsterdam, and who his advisor personally knew and thought R.C. would benefit greatly from in his post graduate work.

The advisor talked R.C. into it, and he packed up his little family and moved them into a tiny apartment in Amsterdam. He went to meet with Dr. Berkouwer only to be given a stack of books that he was told to read and study and be ready to discuss. The problem was that all of the books were in Dutch and French, and Dutch was the language Dr. Berkouwer taught in -  something R.C.’s advisor never told him. R.C. didn’t speak a word of Dutch or French. So what did he do? He sat at his little metal kitchen table 14 hours every day with his books with a dutch – English and a French – English dictionary. He would take a page at a time going through looking up each and every word and writing it on another paper. And he did this for every book. How’s that for putting the work in?

And he finishes that story by saying that the education he got under Dr. Berkouwer has benefitted him his whole life. Plus, he became pretty fluent in Dutch and French! The point is not that we all will need to spend 14 hours a day studying theology books in foreign languages – but we should be grateful that there are those who are willing to – the point is that to get any substantial results in anything, we have to be willing to put in the work. 

That’s why we decided to start the year off with a series called, “Be Transformed.” So we can all begin the work of looking deeply at some truly transforming Biblical Truths, so we can be transformed. And spoiler alert, we have made a preliminary topic list, and there may be some that cause an “ouchy” for some of us.  

But cooperating with the Holy Spirit in our sanctification means that we are actively seeking to be transformed by studying Biblical Truth and doctrine. It’s where we need to begin, continue, and end. As Paul tells us in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you will be able to discern what is the will of God. What is good and acceptable and perfect.” 

And that’s exactly why that Romans 12:2 verse is the theme of this whole series. We are going to start this week with an overview and answer some questions like, How are we transformed? Why does Jesus divide us His people from the world? How do we cooperate with the Holy Spirit? Why does who we are closest to matter in our transformation? Why does what we put in our minds and how we spend our time matter in our transformation?Next week, we will delve into specific truths. So let’s get started with the first question, how are we transformed, and I’ll add, why do we need to be transformed. We don’t have to study Scripture or even actively pursue our sanctification to be saved. They are 2 separate issues. Once saved, always saved, even if you never crack open your Bible. However . . .

However, for those truly saved, there should be a hunger to get to know the God who saved you. And truly understanding your salvation, all that it cost, and what is now expected of you now that you are a child of God is exactly what matures you as a Christian. It is what keeps you from being rocked when a crisis arises, it’s what keeps you from being mislead by false teachers, its what makes you able to witness an accurate and complete Gospel message to others, and its what makes you more and more resemble Jesus – the very goal of sanctification.

That’s right. And while you don’t need it to be saved. But if someone has no desire to grow at all, no desire to know what God says to them in His Word, no desire to serve God, and no desire to get to know God more intimately, they really need to examine if they are truly saved. Because those desires are fruits of salvation. And as with everything, the first day is always the hardest. We’ve all had those aches and pains after we start exercising for the first time in a long time. I’m sure Dr. Sproul that first day of translating, looked at the mountain of books before him, and felt very intimidated. But we need to just do it. And that leads nicely into the next question of Why does Jesus divide us His people from the world?

We can start answering that by going back to Romans 12:2 – “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may discern the will of God. What is good and acceptable and perfect.” The prefix “con” means “with.” So, conformed means formed with. When Paul says do not be conformed to this world, he is saying to not be formed by this world. Do not accept its values as your values; its standards as your standards; its morals as your morals. Instead, we are to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” The prefix “trans” means “change.” Transformed means formed by change. As we read earlier in the Colossians verse, when we are saved, God makes us a new (or changed) creation. It is in this change that we are to be formed.

And that means that we are formed by God’s Word. God’s values become our values; God’s standards become our standards; and God’s morals become our morals. And the only way to effectively do that and avoid idol worship (meaning we are looking to something other than God as our God) or syncretism (meaning we are blending the worlds values, standards, and morals with God’s) is for us to be separate. Chris, we’ve talked about this a lot in the last few episodes, but from Genesis to Revelation, God makes a distinct divide between His people and those who are not His people. This is called the Doctrine of Separation. It begins in Gen. 4:4, “And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, 5 but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” Obviously, we don’t have time to fully exposit this passage, but basically, both Cain and Abel brought an offering to God. God accepted Abel’s, but not Cain’s. There’s been debate that it was because Abel’s was a better offering. But it is not about the offering as it is about the heart condition. 

As Romans 8:28 – 30 tells us, And He is going to transform His chosen people, through the work of the Holy Spirit, into God-honoring, God-glorifying people. And we see that this is not what God did with Cain by his response to God confronting him about his anger. When God confronts Cain about his anger, the Lord tells Cain, if he does well he will be acceptable, but warns him about the sin forming in his mind. If you had God Himself telling you, look, do what’s right in my eyes and you will be acceptable, wouldn’t you do it?! But Cain doesn’t – in fact the Old Testament is full of people who didn’t – instead, in this case, Cain kills his brother. And that was really stupid, because killing Abel in no way helped his situation out.

You bring up a good point, Chris, why didn’t Cain, or the Israelites throughout the Old Testament just do what God told them to do? Paul gives us the very graphic reason in Romans 3:10 – 18, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips.
 Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood;
  in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.
 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” This was every single one of us before God got a hold of us and the Holy Spirit regenerated our heart making us a new creation.

We talked about in the episode on parables how Jesus obscured secrets of the Kingdom of God from unbelievers because they are enemies of God and aren’t going to be privileged to the secrets of the Kingdom. The separation of God’s people from those that aren’t is the same concept. Why would God want His people immersed with His enemies, being influenced by His enemies, being coerced by His enemies, being corrupted by His enemies? And we see this in that Genesis passage. God sends Cain away, Adam and Eve have Seth – who is of the godly line. Throughout Genesis, Moses goes back and forth between the godly line and ungodly line showing the distinct differences, the vast divide between the two.

     And this continues. It’s exactly why God instructed Joshua to completely annihilate or completely drive out the pagan inhabitants of the Promised Land. God did not want His people mixing with His enemies because He knows the danger that puts His people in. And they are in danger from all the reasons we’ve already said – they will be corrupted, coerced, and influenced by them. As Paul tells us in 1Cor. 15:33, Do not be deceived: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” We only need to see the spiritual downfall of so many churches who have forsaken solid Biblical Truth for moral relativism. And in case you aren’t familiar with that term, it means, that there are no absolutes. Well there is one absolute, and that is there are no absolutes. There is no absolute truth. Truth is relative to each person. My truth may be different than your truth because of our different experiences. But here’s what moral relativism really is, it is really just a license to sin.

And that is the exact reason we are to be separate from those in the world. Like we said, the divide continues throughout all 66 books. We’ll give a quick new testament example. Paul tells us in 2 Cor. 6:14 – 15, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? 15 What accord has Christ with Belial?[b] Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” And, of course, the entire theme of the book of Revelation is Jesus bringing to completion His victory of Satan, sin, and death for His people, and God the Father bringing to completion His judgement on those that aren’t His people.

Now we all know that complete division is impossible, not to mention, that we are called to interact with unbelievers so we can witness to them. Afterall, we have no idea whose heart the Holy Spirit is regenerating at any given moment. So when we are called to be separate, it doesn’t mean we live like the Amish, shutting out the outside world. That’s not only impractical, its against Scripture, since Jesus tells us to go and preach the Gospel to all nations and peoples. So how do we stay separate, yet not be separate? The answer is that we stay spiritually and mentally separate from the world, while remaining physically connected to the world. 

And the more we are transformed by the renewing of our mind, the easier this will be to do. Okay, so then let’s answer the question, How do we cooperate with the Holy Spirit in being transformed? We already starting answering this. Just like salvation, God is sovereign over our sanctification. However, we still have free will. Arminians think Reformed people don’t believe in free will, but that’s not true. We will probably look at this in depth in an upcoming episode, but you can believe in God’s sovereignty and free will. No one is holding a gun to your head to make you do something. You are making decisions and choices freely. So while the Holy Spirit is sovereign over your sanctification, you are making the decision to open your Bible to read and study. You are making the decision to strive to put everything you believe up against Scripture and if there is a contradiction, you are making the decision to change your thinking.

And that is exactly how we cooperate with The Holy Spirit in our sanctification. We don’t need to know how it all works – sovereignty and free will. We just need to know what our responsibility is and to do it. Let God do the rest. And the last 2 questions we posed at the beginning fall into this. First, why does who we are closest to matter in our transformation? First, understand, we are saying why does it matter who we are closest to. We aren’t saying you shouldn’t mix with neighbors, coworkers, family, even friends that aren’t Christian. It does matter, though, that if those you are closest to – your confidants – are Christian or now. 

And we will go back to Paul’s verse in 2 Cor. 6:14 – 15 for the reason, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? 15 What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols?”

          What Paul means here is that for the Christian, Jesus Christ and God’s Word are the supreme authorities in our life, while it’s foolishness for the unbeliever. Simple logic will tell you that it is not a good idea to be in a close relationship with someone who thinks the single, most important thing in your life is foolishness. And again, goes back to the possibility of the believer being influenced, coerced, or corrupted by the unbeliever. That’s why who you are closest to matters. You don’t want to be asking advice on important matters from someone whose entire world view clashes with yours. Again, be friendly with unbelievers for sure! Show them the love of Christ whenever you can. Establish a relationship of sorts where they know you genuinely care about them and they trust you so you can effectively witness to them. As Augustine said, those who are weeds today, may be wheat tomorrow.

 And from a practical standpoint – Chris you and I are more than just partners in our ministry. We are very close friends. We tell each other things we wouldn’t tell anyone else – except our husbands. We study Scripture together, we challenge each other, we even at times push each other. The beauty of our relationship is that even if I don’t like what you may tell me, because I know where its coming from – from a place of Christian wisdom and love, I listen. And I take it to heart. I step back and rethink my position or the situation or whatever. And, usually, I find that your advice or insight is exactly what I needed.

 And that’s how it is suppose to work. God never tells us our sanctification and being transformed is a solo mission. Ecclesiastes 4:9 – 12 says, “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! 11 Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? 12 And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken. 

 Hebrews 10:24 – 25 reiterates this. It says, “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

And let me throw in here that we have all seen corruption in the world and in some churches escalate dramatically just in the last few years. That trend is not going to stop. In fact, according to the book of Revelation, the closer we get to Jesus’ Second Coming, the more it will intensify. As believers, we need each other! We need to lean on each other, we need to support each other, and we need to encourage each other. That’s exactly what the writer of that Hebrews verse is saying. That’s why Pastors fought back against the mandate prohibiting them from meeting in their church. They saw the danger of not meeting far outweighed any consequence they would pay for disobeying a law. It’s why there are underground churches all over the world where Christianity is forbidden. It’s why people put their life on the line to smuggle Bibles to people and to disciple people when the government punishes those acts with death or imprisonment in a labor camp.

 That is exactly right. Chris, before we move onto the last question, we should say something about spouses where one is a believer and one isn’t. If you are a Christian and not yet married, listen to Paul’s words – God’s Words. Add being a Christian a priority on your list for qualities in a potential husband or wife. It will save a lot of heartache and a lot of possible trouble for the same reasons why being an intimate friend with an unbeliever is a bad idea. But if you are already married, Paul has advice for you, too. 1 Cor. 7:12 – 16, “To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?” I’m going to confess here that this was the case with my husband and me. I was not a believer and he was. He married me anyway – he shouldn’t have, but he did. And well, as you can see, God was gracious and worked it out.

Okay, onto the last question - Why does what we put in our minds and how we spend our time matter in our transformation? This is going to be a tough answer for some of us, but Paul address this very thing in Ephesians chapter 4. It’s even captioned “The New Life.” He says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self,[f] which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

I’ll finish up, starting at verse 25, “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. 26 Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27 and give no opportunity to the devil. 28 Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. 29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Paul is giving us directives on how we are to behave, not on what we watch or how we spend our time. However, there is definitely a correlation between the two. When an alcoholic decides to get sober, the very first thing he or she is told is to get rid of all the alcohol in the house and stay away from bars or situations where drinking will be prevalent. That’s because a newly sober alcoholic is still weak and easily led into temptation, so they need to stay away from all temptation whenever possible. The same is true for us. When we are saved, we are no longer an unbeliever (that’s what Paul means by the term Gentile). Just like the condition of sobriety for an alcoholic is to not drink, our condition for being a new creation is to not behave like an unbeliever or how we used to behave before we were saved. We can’t expect unbelievers to care about God’s Word. And obviously they don’t. You need only turn the tv on to see them mocking God by completely emasculating men, flaunting homosexuality, treating gender changing and gender mutilation as a badge of courage, devaluing the family, devaluing babies, devaluing parenting our children, making putting our own wants and desires before all else and obtaining them at any cost. We could go on and on.

Yep. And we should expect nothing less – although its definitely getting worse and is pretty disgusting to see simple morals being tossed aside. But that is not who we are to be. And just like being immersed in the world can influence or corrupt us, what we put in our minds or how we spend our time can, too. Have you ever watched a movie that cursed a lot – said the f word a lot. For a short time after, that is in your head and you find yourself thinking it. Imagine if you constantly watched movies and shows like that. It would definitely get to you and cause your own language to degenerate. And constantly watching shows where transgenderism and homosexual relationships are the norm and celebrated. Especially if you are a new Christian, it could definitely affect your thinking on these subjects. Being around or constantly watching things like crudeness and anger can be toxic to us. Paul is warning us about being careful how we spend our time and what we put into our minds, i.e. what we watch on t.v. And obviously, the more mature we become as a Christian, the less these things will affect us. But, it is also true that the more mature we become as a Christian, the less we should want to be around or watch this stuff – and that’s a good thing! 

Let’s wrap up this episode on being transformed with a quote from Dr. R.C. Sproul – afterall the work he put in, he deserves to be quoted! He said, “It’s not enough to read your Bible, we need to study it. Real devotionals include studying and being “devoted” to what you are reading. It’s not about punching a time clock and getting your “devotional reading” in. If we want to be transformed , we have to think like God. As a man thinks, there he goes. The way your life is transformed is to have your mind transformed. We have to be trained by the word of God. It’s not about tickling our intellect, it’s about truly wanting to be transformed. “Whatever is good, whatever is lovely . . . “

That is a great place to end. Have a blessed day everyone!