Living a Life Set Apart: Insights from Romans 12:2

SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

So we are pondering this verse in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And look at that word holy. Does that mean some people are so purified and so sinless and so faultless that they are the only ones who are worthy of presenting themselves before God? No. What it means, the word holy means set apart. Set apart. Now, you may say, well, yeah, but I work in a secular job. I can’t set myself apart. Yes, you can. By faith, we set ourselves apart. We consider ourselves that we are God’s army, as it were. We are the children of God. We are presented before God as redeemed. It doesn’t mean we separate ourselves from the world and live in isolation, as many as some fanatical Christians have done, by the way, over the years, over the centuries. No, we live in the world, but we seek to be separated from its values. And this is where verse 2 comes in. And do not be conformed to this world. but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now, the idea of being conformed suggests the idea of slowly being pressured by the values and the systems of the world. But transformed suggests the idea of being pressured from the inside outwards. Do you get the idea? The world presses us in from the outside inwards, but we, by faith in Jesus and by the Word of God, we are slowly transforming and being renewed in our minds. Now, there are many people who have preached and taught on the renewal of the mind. What is the renewal of the mind? I grant you that there are many ways of exploring that, but the one that I feel safe with is within the context of the book of Romans itself. When we are transformed by the renewing of our mind, we’re looking back at what Paul has said, and I referred to the other day, about what it’s like to live in the kingdom of God. Paul has described that. He’s described it in chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 of Romans. In chapter 5, Paul has described what it is like to be freed from God’s judgment. We’re reconciled to his heart. We have access to the Father by this grace in which we now stand. Before we were on the outs. We were outside of the grace of God. But now we’ve been brought home. We’ve been brought into his house. into his kingdom by Jesus Christ, who has taken God’s judgment for us, so that we are now reconciled to the heart of the Father. Now, if you keep that in mind by faith every day, it will slowly transform you. It will be a renewing of your mind. You see, because our heart and our mind is so frequently filled with guilt and shame and fear, we don’t even know how to relate to our own family. We all wear masks, as it were. We’re pretenders. and we don’t want to have our inner most intimate and secret thoughts revealed. But we now know that it is safe to reveal those thoughts and intimate most feelings to God, because He does not condemn us. He does not judge us under His wrath. He has taken that judgment upon Himself. So in our heart of hearts, we can say, Father, thank you that I am not under your judgment. Thank you that all things are open to you and that I am. And therefore, there’s a new conversation that starts between us and God. Yes, our natural mind still wants to feel guilty, still wants to feel ashamed and afraid, but faith surmounts it and says, Father, though I feel the guilt, I praise you that I am not condemned. I praise you, dear God, that I’m counted as freed from your judgment. So you see, Paul has already told us and explained to us in chapter 5 what it’s like to have our mind renewed. He didn’t say it there, but it is implied very, very clearly. Now then, there’s more to it than that, of course. We are the new generation of human beings. We are the new children of God because, according to Romans 5, the latter part of it, as in the truth about Adam was that he brought sin and death. But the truth about Christ is that everybody is counted as justified, freed from God’s judgment. So Romans 5 helps you to renew your mind. But what about Romans 6? Romans 6 talks about life in the kingdom as freedom from sin. Now, of course, we know that doesn’t mean the actual intrinsic experience of never sinning again. What it means is that we are no longer under the judgment of sin or the power— or its power to condemn us. Now, when we are tempted, we may remind ourselves of that. I thank you, dear God, I’m no longer defined as a sinner. I’m no longer under its condemnation, its judgment. I praise you that I’m a new person in Christ. Sometimes that will lead you to walk away from a sin. Even though sometimes it will not have that effect and you will still sin, but you will bounce back more readily and easily because you won’t stay under the cloud of that sin definition. You will say, Father, forgive me, I have sinned. And then you will say, and I thank you that you do not charge this sin against me. This, you see, is the renewing of our mind. And then there’s chapter 7, freedom from the law. That seems such a strange concept because Christians always think about being obedient to the law. But Paul makes it clear in the book of Romans chapter 7 that the law has become our enemy. The law itself, there’s nothing wrong with it. It is good and righteous and just. But because we’re on the wrong side of the law, it continually stimulates guilt and shame and fear in our minds. And Paul wants us to know that we are freed from guilt and shame and fear by Christ who has become our righteousness. Jesus was the only one who perfectly conformed to the law of God. He loved God with all his heart. And because his life was counted as ours, because he came to this world as a substitute for us, therefore in him we are counted as if we were righteous. Now get that right. counted as if we are righteous. We’re not intrinsically, naturally, innately righteous, but we’re treated as if we are. And that means our mind is renewed by that thought. Suppose the day goes by and you feel you’re tainted by the sins of your work that you’ve just come home from, or you have a dysfunctional family and things never work out well for you. And you just feel tarnished by the corruption of your family or the corruption of your work. And so you feel that you’re under the law’s condemnation. But in Christ you are able to say, Father in heaven, I thank you that I’m no longer under the judgment of the law. I thank you that my mind is counted as if it were innocent before you. I praise you that you do not charge the judgment of the law against me. You see, that’s the renewing of your mind. And as you go forward with this renewed mind, this faith mind, it’s not the natural mind. The natural mind will still condemn you. But as you go forward… you will find yourself more confident, more like I mentioned the other day, the salt of the earth. You will give hope to people. You will cheer their hearts with the good news of the gospel, and you will love them more freely because your emotions will no longer be bound up with worries about yourself. You will have emotional room in your heart to love other people. And then Romans chapter 8, freed from the power of death. When we live in this world without God, everything seems to ultimately die. Yes, as young people, we think we own the world and we can conquer the world, and life is really life. But then, as we get a bit older, we realize that everything we do seems to turn to ashes. Everything we do has an element of death in it. All the goals we aspire to seem to fritter away. Well, those are the mini-deaths that we go through, and of course we die at the end of our lives. But in Christ, we are counted as resurrected. We are counted as if there is no power of death upon us. We’re not under delusion. We know that our bodies are subject to death and we are dying as we live. But we know that we are being renewed daily in our faith mind and that faith mind knows that ultimately life comes to all we touch, even if it is through suffering. And life comes ultimately to our bodies where we are made immortal when Christ comes. So you see, the power of death has been broken. And that truth, when we keep affirming it before God, renews our mind. So you see, Paul has actually explained to us what the renewal of our mind means. Being transformed… is a process of learning how to think the life of faith in the kingdom of God. We’re not there yet in ultimate reality, but we’re there by faith. And so we live as if we were in the kingdom of God now. And when we do that, daily we are renewing our minds. Let’s see, let’s say, suppose you have a terrible grief, the loss of a loved one in your family, and it is such an overwhelming sorrow for you. But in your pain… you lift up your heart and you are able to say, Father, I thank you that even this pain is a life to me because it is bringing me in touch with you. It is giving me, concentrating me on the hope that I have ahead of me when Jesus comes and I shall enter your eternal home. And Father, I thank you that I can praise you that my loved one is with you. And so, you see, each time this feeling of heaviness and grief and sorrow and loss and fear comes over us, we lift our hearts in faith because our minds are being renewed and we learn to praise God that the ultimate will be blessing for us. This is how we renew our mind. Thank you everyone for joining me today. Colin Cook here. You’ve been listening to How It Happens. 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