I'll be reading from the English Standard Version. If you don't have a Bible with you, you can find that online on your phone very easily, the ESV, and it can be very helpful to have a copy of the Bible in front of you to glance down at during a sermon to help follow along. I'll be pointing out certain words and phrases, and of course you want to check what I'm saying, what I'm preaching against the Word of God because That's what we're after here is submission to the Word of God. I say this sometimes, we're trying to do a very difficult thing here. We are trying to submit ourselves to an ancient text. And that means it can be hard to understand, it can take some work, it can really take some thinking. But we're doing that because this ancient text isn't just any old ancient text. It's the very word of God and it's living and it's active. And so we have to use our minds, we have to be careful to understand it properly. But seeking to submit to this word is always worth it. It's always worth it. So let's give ourselves to the reading of God's word and then I'll pray that God blesses it and then we'll dive in and seek that submission. Let's hear God's word, Revelation 12, verses one and two. Paul says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing, you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Let's pray that God would bless us to understand and accept this word. Lord, we thank you for your great mercy, your mercy that is always, always, always more. And we pray, Lord, that by your mercy, you would bless us to understand and submit to your word, that we would grow in our trust in you and grow in our obedience to you. And so live lives that really are good and acceptable, striving for perfection. And we pray this in Jesus' great name. Amen. So Romans 12, verse... Verse one and two, Paul finally gets around to giving us some commands. It's the 12th chapter, and Paul has not given any commands yet. He has told us the bad news in the first couple chapters about where we are apart from God's mercy and grace. We're left in our sin. And then he spent, from the middle of chapter three all the way through chapter 11, talking to us about the mercy and the grace of God, what God has done for us. And it's only now, after all those chapters, and how many weeks have we been in this? Or is it years? It's over a year. Right? Week after week, passage after passage, all about what God has done. And now finally, we might say, he gets around to giving us some instructions and telling us about what we should do. And that might strike us as a little odd, right? If you're not familiar with the Christian faith, it could definitely strike you as odd. Why did it take so much time for Paul to finally get to what the point is supposed to be, right? Because the point has got to be what we are supposed to do. Isn't that the way we think sometimes? Doesn't God just want us to obey him? Doesn't he just want us to be good people? And in one way, we need to say, no. No, God doesn't just want us to obey Him. He's not up there saying, man, I wish you guys would just, come on, just be nicer to each other. Stop the wars, stop being greedy, just live basic, decent lives where you're not hurting each other so much and it's all gonna be good. Now, that's definitely true. We need to stop the wars and the greed and all that kind of stuff, but God isn't up there just saying, I just want you to get your lives a little together and be good citizens. Just shape up a little bit. No, God wants something far more than that. God wants us to obey him, but he wants us to obey him in a particular way. But the character and approach to that obedience is massively important. God doesn't just want us to obey him. He wants us to obey him as Christians, as people in a relationship with him in Jesus Christ. And he wants our obedience to be Christian obedience, not just some generic kind of following the basic rules. and not hurting other people. We don't want to hurt other people. Following basic generic rules, there's not a big problem there, but the point is, that's not the point. That's not the goal. That's not what God is really after. He wants us to obey him as Christians. He wants Christian obedience. And so what Paul is telling us here in chapter 12, verses one and two, as he gets into talking about what God commands and what our obedience looks like, what he tells us in these first two verses is what basically characterizes Christian obedience. Here's what Christian obedience is in its most basic way, the fundamental character of what it means to obey God as a Christian. And we could summarize it like this. Paul tells us that motivated by God's mercy, we are to give ourselves fully to God by renewing our thinking. And that'll be our three points. It happens to be three points. Motivated by God's mercy, we are to give ourselves fully to God by renewing our thinking. This is the core of what Christian obedience looks like. And notice it starts with the fact that it needs to be motivated by God's mercy. By motivated, I mean it shapes, it characterizes, it encourages, it fuels our pursuit of obedience. And by mercy, Paul means everything that God has done for us in Jesus. That's why he starts this way. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers. Therefore, in light of all that I've said, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God. to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Those words are so important. He's saying, here's the ground of my appeal. It's by the mercies of God in light of all that I've said. It's according to that that you need to strive for obedience. He's saying all that I'm going to tell you, all that I'm going to tell you to do should be done in light of what God has already done for you. All that I'm going to tell you to do has got to be done in light of what God has already done for you. See, that's why he took chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter talking about what God has done for us because Christian obedience doesn't happen apart from what God has done for us, and it's got to be motivated by what God has done for us. Most basically, that means we never pursue obedience in order to achieve our salvation. We only ever pursue obedience because we've already received salvation. We don't pursue obedience to achieve salvation, we pursue it because we've received salvation from God. And so that means in our lives, as we're striving to obey God, we never ever leave his mercy behind. That's the first, if we wanna call it a rule, that's the first command, so to speak, that Paul lays out here. Here's the command to start all commands. Never leave God's mercy behind. Never leave God's mercy behind as you pursue God's commands. In other words, you don't put God's mercy down in order to pick up obedience. You're not holding on to God's obedience and you say, oh, well, there's a command. Okay, I guess I'll move on now from the mercy to the commands. I'm at that stage. We pursue God's commands as we are resting in God's mercy. And it's not a matter of balance. It's never a matter of balance. You'll hear that word used. We might say balance is appropriate in terms of like, you know, the pastor's teaching and preaching, right? We wanna preach the entire book of Romans, not just the first half or the second half. But when it comes to the way we live our lives, it is never a matter of balancing God's mercy and our rest in God's mercy and our trust in God's mercy and our delight in God's mercy and our motivation being fueled by God's mercy and then our obedience. It's never a balance between those two things. Oh, you've been living in God's mercy an awful lot. Well, how about your responsibility? I think you need to switch over for a while and focus on your responsibility. No. No, well, you're getting carried, getting a little too carried away with God's mercy. I think you need some real focus on obedience now. Don't worry about God's mercy for a while. Think about your obedience for a while. That would be a basic violation of what God commands, in fact, right here. Therefore, I appeal to you in view of God's mercy, to carry out your obedience. You never put the mercy down. You are to live constantly in the fullness of God's mercy, resting in it, rejoicing in it, as you seek to obey him. So his mercy is always motivating us. It's always fueling and driving us. And think about how amazing that is, to be motivated by God's mercy, for Paul to be explicit about that being the motivation. Think about how amazing that is. See, Paul doesn't ground our obedience in God's authority. Should our obedience be grounded in God's authority? I mean, is part of the reason we obey God is because he's an authority? Absolutely. But right here, Paul doesn't do that. He doesn't say, therefore, I urge you on the basis of God's authority to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Could he have said that? Yeah. Would it have been true? Would it have been right? Yeah. Should we offer ourselves as living sacrifices because of God's authority? Yeah. But that's not the whole story, and it's not what Paul focuses on here. He says it's in view of God's mercy. He doesn't ground our obedience in God's authority. Paul here grounds our obedience in the fact that God forgives our disobedience. This is so amazing. God is saying, obey me because I forgive you when you don't. Obey me because I forgive you when you disobey me. That's a little mind blowing, isn't it? In the history of the Christian church even, That statement has been, a statement like that, I'm not gonna say my statement has been officially condemned, that would be to act like I'm important or something in the history of the Christian church. But that kind of statement has been condemned as dangerous. Because if you're saying we should be motivated to obey God because he always forgives us when we disobey, well, that might also motivate disobedience. And the fact is, yeah, it might. Because we always take good things and twist them. We always take truth and use it for evil. But the only way towards really obeying God truly is to receive this amazing, shocking fact that he is telling us the motivation for obeying me is that I will forgive you every time you disobey. And that's transformative. It's transformative because it means we obey out of thankfulness. We obey God because we are so well loved. We obey this God. We obey this God because he is so worthy of our love. He is not only creator, he's also redeemer. We started the service reading from Revelation chapter 5. Revelation chapter 4 gives praise to God for being creator. You are worthy of praise, oh God, because you created all things. And that's absolutely true fact. Heaven is erupting in praise to God because he created all things. But then there's a new song sung in Revelation chapter five, the passage from which we read. And the song that is sung in praise to God in Revelation chapter five is not a praise to God as creator, it's a praise to God as redeemer. Worthy is the lamb. Jesus, the one who died for us, and by whose blood we've been rescued from every tribe, tongue, and people, and language. Worthy are you, O God, to receive all glory, because you've saved us. And so we come to be truly motivated to love God because he deserves so much love because of his great love for us. He's not only creator, we not only owe him our lives, every breath we take, it is not only right to recognize that he's the one that has created every possibility for us to experience pleasurable sensations. Right, like our bodies have the capacity to experience sinful pleasure because God is the one who in the first place created pleasure. Like all pleasure, all good things, even the things that we twist to our own distorted selfish means and ends, all of that is from him as creator. He deserves to be praised because he created sex. He created alcohol. I mean, he did. You didn't know I was gonna say that, right? You were like, is he gonna go there? He created excitement. He created the joy of a good meal with friends and family. He created a party, right? Achievement, that sense of fulfillment when you do a good job at something and you get rewarded for it, that was God's idea. All of it is from Him, but He's not just the creator. He's also the Redeemer, He's loved us so much that even as we've rejected His good and holy gifts, rejected His inventions of pleasure and distorted and twisted them and rejected the author and giver of life, He says, you know what, I'm gonna die for that. I'm gonna love you anyway, I'm gonna die for that. And I'm gonna forgive you every time you disobey my good and right rules. And that's what motivates our obedience. He is a God that is so worthy of our love. This differs, doesn't it, from false motivations, the motivations of a religious person to obey God. I mean, a merely religious type person. I'm gonna keep God's commands to avoid his anger and to make him owe me. That's a motivation for obedience that some people have, and it resides probably in all of us to some degree, to keep God from being mad at me and so that he owes me. Or the motivations of an arrogant person, I'm gonna obey to build myself up, to make myself a good person and take pride in that. You know, I had someone recently, a week and a half ago or so, I had someone compliment my character. I know, it was a different experience for me because it was like a real sincere, it wasn't just, oh, you're a really good person. I mean, it was like really deep and heartfelt. Now, the person hasn't known me for very long and it wasn't my wife, so let's take everything in perspective, right? And I mention it only because it doesn't happen very often. But what I also realized about myself when someone was like sincerely complimenting my character is I realized I really enjoy being a good person. But you know what I really, really enjoy? Being noticed as a good person. Getting credit for being a good person. That is amazing. But Christian obedience, it's not motivated to exalt ourselves. The believer says, I want to obey God. I want to exalt Him because He's the God that forgives me even when I disobey. I want to obey Him because He has exalted me in Christ. and seated me with him in the heavenly places even though I deserve the opposite of that. I want to obey him because in him I am full, I am complete. I never need to accomplish another thing in my life to be welcomed into glory forever and ever and he guarantees that he's already made my life significant. I want to worship God because he deserves it. I praise him. And here is my life. It belongs to God. And it's that statement, isn't it? Here is my life to you, God, who has loved me so much. It's that statement that is the fundamental act of Christian obedience. Paul is telling us, motivated by God's mercy, we give ourselves fully to God. Look at it again there. I appeal to you brothers, therefore, verse one, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. See, this is the fundamental act of Christian obedience. Motivated by God's mercy, we are to give ourselves fully over to God. That's Paul's language. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Bodies here, likely is not just a reference to merely the physical self, it includes that, but sometimes in the New Testament, the word body is used as a way of referring to the whole person with maybe an emphasis on their actions, right? So this is another way of saying your whole self and all that you do, we are to present our whole selves and all that we do as sacrifices to God. And think about what sacrifice means. To present your bodies as a sacrifice to God. To give yourself as a sacrifice is to give yourself fully. To give yourself fully. So Paul is saying, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, he's saying, present your whole self fully to God. That's what sacrifice means, it's complete. I mean, this is Old Testament language, isn't it? When Paul uses it, it's Old Testament language. When he talks about presenting a sacrifice as a Jewish man who was a, you know, a top level rabbi, had the first five books of the Old Testament most likely memorized. That was the custom in his sect. So when he says, present your bodies as a sacrifice, he's thinking of Old Testament sacrifices. And to sacrifice something in the Old Testament was very often to fully give it. to give that thing in its entirety. So sacrifices would be brought to the tabernacle or temple, and the bull would be killed, and then the bull would be burned, and all of it given to God as a pleasing aroma. Again, language reflected here. It was pleasing to God, and the fire consumed the sacrifice in its entirety. In other words, sacrificing something is very different from sharing or loaning something. If I sacrifice something to you, I'm not just sharing, I'm not just loaning. No one offered a bull in the Old Testament and then came back the next day and was like, yeah, I want my bull back. You know, God's had it for 24 hours, how about? I mean, that didn't happen. You know, the priest would be like, we just, did you not see it go up in smoke? It's God's now, like completely and utterly. And so Paul is saying for us, it's all of you. It's living, it's ongoing, and it's holy and acceptable means it's for him. We are giving ourselves over fully to him in all that we do, living lives that are holy and acceptable. And this is really Really hard. I mean, this is really hard. Every single one of us, every moment of the day, we want to negotiate our obedience, to hold something back. There are some things we just don't want to give up. You know that, don't you? When you read the Ten Commandments, even, in an honest fashion, And you're like, yep, good, good, good. This one. And someone else reads them and they're like, good, good. They got no problem with the one you're really struggling with. They do, but they, you know, don't feel it deeply. And they hit something else and they're like, oh man. We're always wanting to negotiate our obedience. And we feel that if we give ourselves completely to God, that that's the end of our freedom and the end of our happiness. Like it feels too risky to us. But nothing could be further from the truth, could it? It is in no way risky to give ourselves wholly to God. and say, whatever you want at any time with anything I have, with who I am, it is all yours. There's nothing risky about that. And what guarantees that is the fact of His mercy. This is the God who died for us. This is the God who is gonna forgive us and who is forgiving us even as we're hesitating to give ourselves as a living sacrifice. The God who's forgiving us of our hesitation. The God who will never leave us or forsake us. And we still think, I don't know if I can trust you. See, we're deceived in our thinking, aren't we? This is why it's gotta be motivated by God's mercy. Because it's so hard to do. And at the root of our disobedience is a distrust in God. It's a lack of confidence that he really has our best interests at heart. And so it's gotta be done fueled by the cross where we see our best interests put before everything else. He gave his life for us. It's only right that we respond by saying, you can be trusted with my life. You can be trusted with my life. But that takes a particular way of thinking, doesn't it? And this leads us to the third and final point that Paul makes here. He says, motivated by God's mercy, we are to give ourselves fully to God by renewing our thinking. By renewing our thinking, look at verse two with me. Do not be conformed to this world. He's telling us, here's how you pursue giving yourself as a living sacrifice as you're motivated by God's mercy. Here's how you pursue that. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. This is massively practical and hugely important. We avoid conformity to the world and we pursue transformation by thinking carefully. The renewal of the mind doesn't just have to do with thinking in an intellectual way, but that's central with this word he uses. It starts, we might say, and centered on our thoughts. And we gotta be careful. This is not thinking for its own sake. Reformed people, this is not thinking for its own sake. I'm speaking to you good confessional Presbyterians who love theology. Theology is not the end goal. At the same time, It's a key step towards the end goal. Do you understand what I'm saying? Right, if you memorize the entirety of Hermann Bavink's works, you will have done well. But that doesn't mean you're transformed, right? The goal is living sacrifice, motivated by God's mercy. So you don't just read theology and think, I know more than other people, I am done. In fact, We know that knowledge apart from love just puffs up and it can be massively instructive. At the same time, Paul is clearly saying here that on the way to living as a true Christian, in living sacrifice to God, the way you refrain from being conformed to this world is by the renewal of your mind. Good theology is a step along the path towards living a full and good and complete and God-honoring life. It just is. It makes sense, doesn't it? Like, we are shaped by the messages around us, the stories the world is telling us. Google knows this, Facebook knows this. Everybody trying to get in your wallet knows this. So they're spending billions sending you messages. They're trying to shape you. into being a person that will see their product as a solution in your life, and so that you shell out the sacrifice to get what they've talked you into thinking you need. They're telling you a story. And the world does this. The world conforms us to its mold by telling us, here's the way to true fulfillment and happiness. You deserve this. You don't deserve that. Here's how you become important and fulfilled. Here's what you need to look like. And if you look this way, then you'll finally be somebody. On and on and on and on. If a relationship is difficult, that means it's toxic. If it's toxic, you need to get out of that girlfriend, like fast. On and on and on. Truth mixed with lies, twisting us, conforming us to its image. And we are bombarded with this. We are bombarded with this. I mean, the amount of social media the average American takes in, which is shaping us, which is definitely shaping us, not only by advertisers, but by the mob mentality, whether on the left or on the right, it's a powerful force. And God's word is what reshapes us. We've gotta be in the Word. We've got to be learning the Word because it's used by God. So we think about the values of the world. We think about what the world is trying to sell us. We compare that with what God says. And this is part of what we're gonna be doing as we continue in Romans 12. And we pursue all the values that we see God's Word affirming denouncing the world, we pursue all of those, again, fueled by the benefits that are ours as recipients of His mercy. In other words, part of the message we resist from the world is obedience is how you achieve salvation, however salvation is defined. And we have to be reprogrammed again and again. And we're gonna close by being reprogrammed on this again. It's always and only by the mercies of God. But because it's by his mercies, we've got every confidence that he is gonna be transforming us. You think, it is so hard for me to give myself wholly to God in sacrifice. Yeah, it's actually impossible for you, but God is at work in you. I'm not an intellectual person. It's so hard for me to think carefully about the message of the world ascending and to compare that with God's word. It's hard for me to spend time in God's word. Or flip side, you're like, it's hard for me not to be proud about how much of God's word I know. All of this is hard, but we do it because of God's mercy. And we do it confidently because he is at work in us. Notice just two quick things as we close. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed. It's subtle there, but that word be transformed is in the passive. It's saying the transformation is gonna happen. You need to pursue it by the renewal of your mind, but this is a subtle way Paul is saying God is the one that is doing the transformation. And it's because of his grace that we can offer ourselves as a sacrifice that is living, holy, and as it turns out in Jesus, acceptable to God. Be encouraged. God's mercy to you is so big. He not only forgives all the wrongs that you do, He guarantees to accept the good you try to do. Right? Paul lays it out here in this verse. Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. He lays it out here as an aim, as a goal. But what we've learned from the first chapters, chapters three through 11 of this great book, is that we are accepted fully in Jesus Christ. And so that even when we offer to God obedience that is a struggle and that lacks perfection, When we are striving to obey God and looking to him and saying, Lord, I need your mercy, because this is really hard for me to do. We can be assured that he is accepting every bit, even little bit of sacrifice that we make. He's accepting it as acceptable because it's cleansed by the blood of Jesus. and he embraces it and receives it from us, his children, on the basis of what Jesus deserves, not on the basis of what it alone deserves. Isn't that great? It is not hopeless to be pursuing a life that is holy and acceptable to God. It's not hopeless because it's by the mercies of God. No matter how hard it is, he forgives you when you fail, and as part of that forgiving you when you fail, He says, I accept it as successful even when you've barely, barely begun to even partially pull it off. So motivated by the mercies of God, we seek to give ourselves fully to him, trusting him to transform us as we seek to submit our minds to his word. Let's pray. Lord God, thank you for your mercy. And Lord, we pray that our pursuit of obedience would really be the pursuit of Christian obedience not the slavish, burdened obedience of those who don't know your love, who are struggling to climb out of guilt, but Lord, those who have been set free from every bit of guilt and shame and in confidence of that, confident of your great love, Lord, desire to give their lives for you because you can be trusted and you will accept even our struggling pursuit, so great is your love for us and so perfect is the sacrifice of Christ for us, that all of our failure is washed away. Lord, may that truth, may those truths be used by you in the renewal of our minds so that we would grow in our ability to think as we should and live as we should. We need your help. So we are so grateful that you have so fully given your help in Jesus and promise to see us all the way through. And we pray all of this in gratitude in Jesus' great name. Amen.