BETHANY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH SEATTLE WA

youth

adults

Sermons
July 19, 2009 / Jeff Van Duzer

The Great therefore

Well, good morning. I think in deference to the summer, I’d like to invite all of you to loosen your ties.

This morning we’re continuing on in our summer series in the book of Romans, and we come this morning to the 12 th chapter. This is in my estimation the best chapter in the entire book of Romans, so I’m delighted for the chance – the privilege, really – of preaching from this.

If I have any frustration at all this morning it’s that we only have one Sunday in Romans 12 because there really is so much here that we could work on. But we do have today, and so let me invite you – if you can – to stand with me for the reading.

Reading: Romans 12:1-2

Well, this last Friday (just two or three days ago), I had a great day. I had a colleague of mine at work invite me to go out on Puget Sound on his sailboat. And we went sailing, and dropped a crab pot and caught crabs, had a great lunch…you’ll remember the weather was gorgeous…great conversation. It was a great day. A great day to be away from email. A great day to be away from voicemail.

It turned out to be a day when I was also away from not less than 4 calls from Dan that went something like this – “Jeff, have you forgotten to send in the information for the bulletin?”, “Jeff, what is the sermon title?”, “Jeff, it’s 11:45 am. We have to print the bulletin.”

Well, yea, Jeff forgot. So I apologize. But I am here to announce today’s sermon title. It’s so much better when it’s a surprise! I want to call today’s sermon “The Great Therefore”.

You know that Dan has told us several times in this series already that Paul uses this word “therefore” to signify when he’s moving from one argument to the next. In our text today, chapter 12 begins with another one of these “therefores”, but this is really the great therefore. Because on this “therefore”, the whole letter pivots. All of – in a sense – chapters 1 through 11 lead up to this therefore, and then it turns and really runs out for the rest of the epistle. So everything turns on this word; this “therefore”.

If you want to ask in summary, “How does it change?” I want to remind you of what Dan told us last week. He told us about a seminary professor of his that had a sign on his door that said, “It’s all about God, stupid.” And that’s really what we would say about chapters 1-11. They’re about God. They really are just about: what God has done, God’s love, how God has reached out to His people.

I don’t know if your home group has been working through Romans alongside the sermon series. Ours has. And I will tell you that at times it’s been kind of frustrating to do a Bible study in Romans because we’ll read this stuff about God and we’ll say “Yea, yea. That’s about God. But what about us? What difference does it make in our lives? How do we apply it?” And we’ve had to stop several different times and say, “No, really. It’s all about God.”

Until chapter 12. In chapter 12 it’s like the spotlight changes and now it’s about us. Now, of course when I say it’s about us, that in a sense misses the point that even when you and I act faithfully, it’s really God that’s animating that so you could say it’s still all about God. But really there is this change in tone and focus in the letter that comes right here. It starts with all that God has done, and now it turns to say “and how do we respond?”

And so that’s what I want to talk about today – it’s what is the response that is called forth from us to everything that we’ve heard so far in this series in Romans?

Before I do that, though, I want to linger just a couple minutes longer on this word “therefore” – this kind of transition point. Because I think it reminds us of a couple of important truths.

On the one hand, it reminds us that in our faith – in what we believe – it is always God that takes the first step. It’s always God that takes the initiative, that reaches to us. We don’t have a faith or religion that envisions us climbing up to God. We have a faith that envisions a God who reaches down to where we are. A

nd so by structuring his epistle this way (and really by structuring all his epistles this way), he begins with what God does and only after we understand what God does does he then say, “and now here’s what you do” – because it’s a response. God always takes the initiative.

The other thing this “therefore” reminds us that you and I tend to act out of what we believe and know. There are certain things that we perceive to be the way things are. And that perception then animates our action.

And so Paul always begins by trying to create right thinking, right knowing, and then only out of that does he say “and here’s how you would act rightly.” And the “therefore” here – this pivot point – reminds us of that.

I like this “therefore”, though, because to me it signifies this tremendous change in tone in the letter. And this actually reminded me of one of my favorite times from back in law school days. There was a day when it must have been just at the beginning of the semester, because it was late summer.

And any of you that have ever lived in the late summer in New England, and I suppose in the Midwest as well, can know how very hot and muggy those days can be. And this was one of those days. You were sweating as you got out of bed in the morning. And if you’ve never lived in this, it’s almost hard to describe but the air is so thick that it’s hard to breathe in. It’s hard to take it in. And it feels like this heavy, hot thing laying on your shoulders and just pressing on you all day.

And it was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And it was just getting heavier and muggier. And it was also getting darker. I was in our apartment and I was taking notes for some cases, and I noticed it getting dark. I went to the window and I saw what I had not ever seen before. The clouds had become so thick and dense that they were really blocking out the sun from coming through in any sense – any light, not just even sun.

And so they looked black and they covered the whole sky. It was like at 3:00 in the afternoon, it was turning nighttime. And there was a sense that there was something so big, so intense, that the atmosphere just couldn’t hold it much longer. And sure enough within moments these bright, jagged lightning (streaks) against this black backdrop – just gorgeous – and following after that this immense “BOOM” that reverberated through our whole apartment. And for the next 5 minutes lightning and thunder, an incredible storm.

And then, it was gone. The skies were clear. The sun was shining. And the air…all the mugginess was gone. I wouldn’t say it was crisp, but you could breathe sort of deeply, normally.

And to me that’s a little of what it feels like when we move from chapter 11 to chapter 12. I looked back and looked through all the sermons that we’ve done so far (you can do that online), and I realized that for the last 11 weeks in a sense we’ve been hearing Paul tell the same story over and over again in as many ways as he can.

It’s a simple story. It says that you and I – Jews and Gentiles – all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. We are all sinners. And apart from God’s grace and mercy we are all stuck in our sin. But God, out of His great love for us reached across this divide and reckoned to us righteousness. He saw us as righteous – even though there was nothing righteous about us. He saw us as righteous. And that was a gift. And that’s what we call grace. It was something that we can’t earn, we don’t deserve, we can’t repay. It was just an extension of the incredible love of God.

And that love is poured into our hearts. That love re-defines our identity. That love, we’re told in Romans, is so committed…so intense…that absolutely nothing – not on earth, not in the heavens, not principalities, not powers, not in this age, not in the age to come. Nothing can separate us from that love of God.

Paul recognizes that we don’t all receive that grace always so well. Sometimes we struggle. “Oh, who will save me from this wretched body of death?” Sometimes it’s too much legalism. Sometimes too much religiosity. There’s a variety of things that keep us from receiving the grace. But this story is over and over about this God who pours out His love.

By the time Paul gets to the 9 th, 10 th and 11 th chapters, you have the sense that he’s on a roll. He’s just said it every different way, and he’s starting to say it again. And now it’s – “God will have His way. God will have His people. You Jews may reject God and He’ll use your rejection to bring the Gentiles. And then when he brings the Gentiles, He’ll use that to bring you Jews. And when He brings you Jews, He’ll use that to bring the whole world because it’s God’s intent that the mercies will go to the whole world…”

And you get the sense that by the end of chapter 11, Paul just can’t hold it any more. And so he just finally goes – “For Him, and through Him, and to Him be all things. To Him be the glory forever! Amen!”

BOOM!!

And then the air clears. And I imagine him leaning forward and he says, “Therefore, I urge you (I don’t command you, I don’t scold you. I urge you, brothers and sisters) in light of all of that to respond.”

And he actually, I think, says to respond in 3 steps. By saying 3 steps I don’t mean to minimize or make this too simple, but there is a sense of 3 steps:

To choose
To know
To act

Let me see if I can show you what I mean by that. In the first verse he says to them, “I appeal to you brothers and sisters to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” What does that mean?

Well, you might think of the word “present” as like “dedicate”, “to set apart.” Or, in the word of the hymn we just sang…Take my life, let it be consecrated… It’s a sense of setting apart for a purpose. We are called to set apart for a purpose our bodies.

Now, when Paul says our ‘bodies,’ he is responding to a dualism that exists in his time – a dualism that said in many cases, “Oh, bodies don’t count. The only thing that counts is your spirit.” And what Paul is saying by “bodies” is saying – No, it all counts. I am encouraging you – I am urging you to dedicate your whole lives.

Now, to translate that into our setting, what that would mean is to say – “I am calling you to dedicate not just some compartmentalized portion of your life; not just the part of your life that comes to church or reads the Bible or says your prayers. I am calling you to give the whole life; including the part that goes out and works in the garden, goes to the grocery store, plays racketball at the club, or works on the budget at work. Your whole life.”

And when I say “Your whole life” I don’t mean just the good parts of your life. I don’t mean just your strength. God says, “I want your whole life.” That means also your weaknesses, your sins, your brokenness, your addictions…those places of your life that you are genuinely ashamed of; those places that are dark and you wish no one would ever see (them). God says, “Give me all of that.”

So when it says “bodies,” He’s not saying, “I just want those parts of your bodies that are perfectly toned and have been to the club every day this week. I also want the ingrown toenails, the warts, the hair loss and the bone spurs. I want the whole of you. Dedicate ALL of that as a living sacrifice.”

What does that mean? What’s the “sacrifice” in this? Well, simply put if something is dedicated for one purpose, it’s not going to be available for another. If the university built a new building and dedicated it to the School of Business and Economics (it would be a great idea if they did that), it would not be available to say the School of Health Sciences.

When you and I dedicate our whole lives to serving God, our lives are no longer available to serve ourselves. And so when it talks about a sacrifice, we sometimes use the kind of Christian words “die to oneself.” But really, simply put, it means “giving up control”…being willing to say “I am no longer going to be in charge of my life. I’m not going to be making the decisions for my life. I’m not going to be living my life for myself, because I have decided to live my life for God.” And that is a sacrifice. That is a sense of letting go. We so desperately want to be in charge of our own lives.

Now Paul would probably say in light of what else he said in Romans, “Really? How hard is this going to be? Look at what happened when you’ve been in charge of your lives?” Remember back in Romans he said “God gave them up to the choices that they made.” When you’ve been in charge of your own life it’s led to broken lives and broken relationships and broken settings in which there isn’t hope, and a sense in which something is missing….and in the words of our special music, that something is missing. And we long to fill it up. And we try to fill it up with different things. And none of it works. This life, when we’re in charge is a life, we’re told, that leads to death.

But when we’re told about “sacrifice,” that’s what it says – sacrifice that life that is leading to death. And instead, serve God that you may live. It’s a living sacrifice.

God is not so interested in having Christians who will die for Him as He is in having Christians who will live for Him. He is not so interested primarily that we will come to Him and die. He wants us to die to ourselves in order that He may live. We may live abundantly. We may live rich and full lives. That’s God’s intent.

But it is the choice that is posed to the church at Rome. It’s the choice that is posed to us first. Will we dedicate our whole lives to serving God?

Now some of you today perhaps have never made that choice. Perhaps you’ve never had an occasion where you’ve turned to God and said, “God I want you to have my whole life. I want you to be in charge. I relinquish control.” And if you‘re in that place today and if there’s some part of you that says maybe this is what I’d like to do, I would urge you to follow up on that invitation. Do it today.

But probably there are some of you in here…probably many of you in here…who would say like me, “Oh, I did that a long time ago. I gave my life to Christ.” Well, yea, but if you are like me, you also need to– I at least need to - do it over and over and over again. Because I give God my whole life and almost immediately I’m taking parts of it back. Almost immediately I find some part over here that I actually never really gave. And over and over God comes to me and says, “Jeff. I love you so much. I urge you to give me your whole life, that you might live abundantly.”

But that’s the first place it starts. If we don’t make that choice, the rest of this doesn’t make any sense. It starts with a choice. Will you choose to serve God?

But…choosing to serve God isn’t going to be enough. Because if you choose to serve God but you have no idea where God is or what God is doing, then your ability to serve or follow God isn’t going to be particularly efficatious. And so we need to know. In the words of the Scripture, we need to discern what God’s will is. And that’s why I think Paul goes on to the next verse:

“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.”

You see, in other words, we need to have our minds transformed if we are to be able to know where God is going and what God’s will is. One of the consequences of sin is that it has shaped the whole way we think about our world.

I don’t actually like this phrase very much, but we sometimes talk about this as a “worldview” – that there are these basic, underlying, deeply engrained assumptions about the way things are that are so commonplace to us that we don’t even stop to think what they are. We can’t even acknowledge them. Sort of the old proverb, “Don’t ask a goldfish to describe water, because that’s all the goldfish has ever known. How could they describe something that is all they’ve every known?”

Actually I think that’s kind of a stupid proverb. Why would you ask a goldfish to describe anything? Fish can’t talk.

But I get the point. The point is that if it’s all you’ve ever known you may not even be aware that it’s there.

There’s a bunch of these kind of philosophical assumptions. And I don’t mean to suggest that everybody shares all of these. And I’ll be there are some deeper that I haven’t even be able to recognize. Things like:

The community exists to serve the individual.
Institutions are always problems.
All of the things being equal, more is better than less.
Things need to go about this fast.
Tolerance is the ultimate virtue.
Freedom is the ultimate virtue.
Market, left alone, will give us what we want.
Truth is a story.

There are different ways we have of thinking. I’m not suggesting that any or all of those are all wrong. But what I’m saying is that – as a whole – the way that the world has shaped our thinking is such that unless our minds are transformed, we won’t be able to discern what is the will of God.

But what does that mean? How do we transform our minds? Even the verb here in the verse “let your minds be transformed” is kind of a passive thing. Because you and I can’t transform our own minds. I mean, that’s got to be God’s work in our lives, transforming.

And yet here it is in this chapter 12, where Paul is telling the Romans kind of what they’re supposed to do. So then how does that fit? How is it that we participate in the work of having our minds transformed?

And this is where I think this leads. I think this leads us to the notion of spiritual disciplines. Spiritual disciplines are habits that we undertake, patterns that we build into our lives, that make us open to receive what God wants to do.

My friend and I were out sailing. We went out in the morning. And we put up the sails on the boat. And all we did was just bob up and down. We didn’t go anywhere because it was too early in the day. There was no wind blowing. We put the sails down, tooled back in for lunch, came back out, didn’t have the sails up yet…and even though we could tell there was a pretty good wind blowing…we were still just bobbing up and down because we didn’t have the sails up. It was only when we put the sails up in the afternoon so that we could catch the wind that the boat began to scoot across the water.

Spiritual disciplines are a little bit like putting the sails up. It would be silly for us to say that we moved the boat by putting the sails up. We didn’t move the boat by putting the sails up. The only thing that moves the boat is wind. In the morning, we put the sails up. Nothing happened.

There is nothing about spiritual disciplines that causes growth. There’s nothing about spiritual disciplines that causes the transformation of our minds. But what spiritual disciplines do is they put the sails up so that when the wind of the Holy Spirit chooses to blow as it will, we are there able to catch it. And it can move us forward.

So what are these spiritual disciplines? I mean these are kind of prosaic things; you’ve heard a lot of them. Some obvious ones are a regular, daily quiet time; a time set aside – say half an hour, 30 minutes - a half an hour of time set aside for an intentional relational interaction with God. Maybe for you it’s:

sitting in silence, listening for what God wants to say
reading scripture, listening for what God might want to say through scripture
journaling; talking to God as you write

Maybe for some of you it’s more of a community discipline. I know many of you have said, “Our lives are too full. They’re too busy to be in a small group now. I just don’t have room for that.” But maybe today God is saying, “No, now is time. Now is time for you to commit yourself to a regular pattern of meeting with other Christians who will gather around you, who will love you, who will hold you accountable.” Maybe once a week. Maybe once every two weeks.

It could be other things. Maybe it’s a discipline of hospitality, a discipline of generosity. Maybe it’s a discipline of fasting…setting aside some things that are important to you on a regular, weekly kind of basis.

None of these things in themselves will transform our minds. None of these things will get God to give us more or draw close to us, or earn any more of God’s love. What these things will do is just put up the sails so that when the Spirit of God blows, we’re ready to move with it.

And so I think, in a sense, that’s the second part. We choose. We dedicate our lives with God. And then we set up our sails so that He can transform our minds, that we might discern…that we might know…what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

So Choose. Know. And then we come to Act.

And this is where I get remarkably frustrated because that’s really what the rest of chapter 12 is, and on into chapters 13, 14 and 15. It’s Paul saying, “Here’s how you kind of take the love and reconciliation that you experience from God, and how you take it out now as God’s agent and extend it out to each other and to the world.”

And we don’t have any time. So I’m not going to talk about that. But what I thought I would do is try to end our time by just reading the balance of chapter 12. And what I want to invite (I’ll skip a few verses, but most all of it) you to do is just sit back. And if it’s comfortable for you, just close your eyes. And I’m going to pause after a verse or a phrase. And every time I pause, I’d like to ask you to do this – I’d like you to ask God in that moment, “Is this something today that you’re trying to get my attention about? Is this one for me today?” Okay?

Romans 12:3: For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you not to think of yourselves more highly than you ought to think. But to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

Let your love be genuine.

Hate what is evil. Hold fast to what is good.

Love one another with mutual affection. Out-do one another in showing honor.

Do not lag in zeal. Be ardent in spirit. Serve the Lord.

Rejoice in hope.

Be patient in suffering.

Persevere in prayer.

Contribute to the needs of the saints. Extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them.

Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep.

Live in harmony with one another.

Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Do not claim to be wiser than you are.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. But take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.

If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

God, I pray that you would make us a people that is fully committed to You. I pray that even today that you would hear again as we come and say we choose, we choose to follow you. We want to dedicate our whole lives in service to you. We want to know you. We want to know your will. We pray that you would send your spirit, that it might transform our minds. Make us people who are ready to receive the work that you want to do in us. And then guide us, enable us, direct us, empower us, send us to be agents of your love and reconciliation in this world that needs that so much. We pray this all in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Romans pivots at chapter 12 when Paul says "therefore".

Romans Series

Romans 12