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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. Romans 12:1-2
As I have thought and prayed about these verses, it
seems to me that there are two more very large issues we should deal with
before moving on to verse 3. I would like to give a week to each of them.
“The Will of God”
One, which I hope to deal with next week, is the
meaning of the term “the will of God.”
Verse 2 says that we are to discern what is “the
will of God.” It’s a very common phrase and I think that
sometimes, when we use it, we may not know what we are talking about. That
is not spiritually healthy. If you get into the habit of using religious
language without knowing what you mean by it, you will increasingly become
an empty shell. And many alien affections move into empty religious minds
which have language but little or wrong content.
The term “the will of God”
has at least two and possibly three biblical meanings. First, there is the
sovereign will of God, that always comes to pass without fail. Second, there
is the revealed will of God in the Bible—do not steal, do not lie, do not
kill, do not covet—and this will of God often does not come to
pass. And third, there is the path of wisdom and spontaneous
godliness—wisdom where we consciously apply the word of God with our renewed
minds to complex moral circumstances, and spontaneous godliness where we
live most of our lives without conscious reflection on the hundreds of
things we say and do all day. Next week we need to sort this out and ask
what Paul is referring to in Romans 12:2.
Transformation by the
Renewal of Your Mind
But today I want to focus on the phrase in Romans
12:2, “by the renewal of your mind.” “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.” We are perfectly useless as Christ-exalting
Christians if all we do is conform to the world around us. And the key to
not wasting our lives with this kind of success and prosperity, Paul says,
it being transformed. “Do not be conformed to this
world, but be transformed.”
That word is used one time in all the gospels, namely,
about Jesus on the mountain of
transfiguration (the mountain of “transformation”—same word,
metemorphōthē): “And
he was
transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his
clothes became white as light” (Matthew 17:2 - Mark 9:2).
The Transformation Is Not
Just External
I point this out for one reason: to make the point
that the nonconformity to the world does not primarily mean the
external avoidance of worldly behaviors. That’s included. But you can avoid
all kinds of worldly behaviors and not be transformed. “His
face shown like the sun, and his clothes became white as light”!
Something like that happens to us spiritually and morally. Mentally, first
on the inside, and then, later at the resurrection on the outside. So Jesus
says of us, at the resurrection: “Then the
righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father”
(Matthew 13:43).
Transformation is not switching from the to-do list
of the flesh to the to-do list of the law. When Paul replaces the list—the
works—of the flesh, he does not replace it with the works of the law, but
the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:19-22). The Christian alternative
to immoral behaviors is not a new list of moral behaviors. It is the
triumphant power and transformation of the Holy Spirit through faith in
Jesus Christ—our Savior, our Lord, our Treasure. “[God]
has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter
but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life”
(2 Corinthians 3:6). So transformation is a profound, blood-bought,
Spirit-wrought change from the inside out.
The Freedom of Being
Enslaved to Christ
This is why the Christian life—though it is utterly
submitted (Romans
8:7; 10:3), even
enslaved
(Romans 6:18, 22), to the revealed will of God—is described in the New
Testament as radically free. “Now
the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
freedom”
(2 Corinthians 3:17). “For freedom Christ has
set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of
slavery” (Galatians 5:1). You are free in Christ, because when
you do from the inside what you love to do, you are free, if what
you love to do is what you ought
to do. And that’s what transformation means: when you are transformed
in Christ you
love to do what you
ought to do. That’s freedom.
An Essential Means of
Transformation: The Renewal of Your Mind
And in Romans 12:2 Paul now focuses on one essential
means of transformation—“the renewal of your mind.”
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by
the renewal of your mind.” Oh, how crucial this is!
- If you long to break loose from conformity to the
world,
- if you long to be transformed and new from the
inside out,
- if you long to be free from mere duty-driven
Christianity and do what you love to do because what you love to do is
what you ought to do,
- if you long to offer up your body as a living
sacrifice so that your whole life becomes a spiritual act of worship and
displays the worth of Christ above the worth of the world,
then give yourself with all your might to pursuing
this—the
renewal of your mind. Because the Bible says, this is the key to
transformation. “Do not be conformed to this world,
but be transformed by the renewal
of your mind.”
What’s wrong with the human mind? Why does our mind
need renewing? And what does this renewal look like? And how can we pursue
and enjoy this renewal?
The Problem with Our
Minds
There are many who think that the only problem with
the human mind is that it doesn’t have access to all the knowledge it needs.
So education becomes the great instrument of redemption—personal and social.
If people just got more education they would not use their minds to invent
elaborate scams, and sophisticated terrorist plots, and complex schemes for
embezzling, and fast-talking, mentally nimble radio rudeness. If people just
got more education!
The Bible has a far more profound analysis of the
problem. In Ephesians 4:23 Paul uses a striking phrase to parallel Romans
12:2. He says, “Be renewed in the spirit of your
minds.” Now what in the world is that? “The
spirit of your mind.” It means at least this: the human mind is
not a sophisticated computer managing data, which it then faithfully
presents to the heart for appropriate emotional responses. The mind has a “spirit.”
In other words, our mind has what we call a “mindset.” It doesn’t
just have a view, it has a viewpoint. It doesn’t just have the power to
perceive and detect; it also has a posture, a demeanor, a bearing, an
attitude, a bent. “Be renewed in the
spirit of your mind.”
The problem with our minds is not merely that we are
finite, and don’t have all the information. The problem is that our minds
are fallen. They have a spirit, a bent, a mindset that is hostile to the
absolute supremacy of God. Our minds are bent on not seeing God as
infinitely more worthy of praise than we are, or the things we make
or achieve.
This is what we saw last week in Romans 1:28, “Since
they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind.”
This is who we are by nature. We do not want to see God as worthy of knowing
well and treasuring above all things. You know this is true about yourself
because of how little effort you expend to know him, and because of how much
effort it takes to make your mind spend any time getting to know God better.
The Bible says we have “exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images resembling mortal man” (Rom. 1:23). And
the image in the mirror is the mortal image we worship most.
The Relationship Between
Verses 1 and 2
That’s what’s wrong with our minds. This illumines the
relationship between verses 1 and 2 of Romans 12. Verse 1 says that we
should present our bodies—that is, our whole active life—as a living
sacrifice which is our spiritual service of
worship. So the aim of all life is worship. That is, we are to use our
bodies—our whole lives—to display the worth of God and all that he is for us
in Christ. Now it makes perfect sense when verse 2 says that, in order for
that to happen, our minds must be renewed. Why? Because our minds are not by
nature God-worshipping minds. They are by nature self-worshipping minds.
That is the spirit of our minds.
Two Other Biblical
Diagnoses of the Problem
Now before I turn to the remedy and how we find the
renewal of mind God demands, consider two other biblical diagnoses of the
problem. Consider the way Peter describes our mind-problem in 1 Peter
1:13-14, “Prepare. . . your
minds for
action. . . . Do not be conformed to the passions of your former
ignorance.”
There is an ignorance of God—a willful suppression of the truth of God
(Romans 1:18)—that makes us slaves to many passions and desires that would
lose their power if we knew God as we ought (cf. 1 Thess. 4:5). “The
passions of your former
ignorance.” Paul calls these passions, “desires
of deceit” (Eph. 4:22). They are life-ruining, worship-destroying
desires, and they get their life and their power from the deceit of our
minds. There is a kind of knowledge of God—a renewal of mind—that transforms
us because it liberates us from the deceit and the power of alien passions.
The other biblical diagnosis is in Ephesians 4:17-18,
“You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the
futility of their
minds. 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.”
Paul takes us deeper than Peter here. He penetrates beneath the “futile
mind” and the “darkened understanding”
and the willful “ignorance” and says
that it is all rooted in “the hardness of their
heart.” Here is the deepest disease, infecting everything else.
Our mental suppression of liberating truth is rooted in our hardness of
heart. Our hard hearts will not submit to the supremacy of Christ, and
therefore our blind minds cannot see the supremacy of Christ (cf. John
7:17).
The Holy Spirit Renews
the Mind
Which brings us finally to the remedy and how we obey
Romans 12:2, “Be transformed in the renewal of your
mind.” First, before we can do anything, a double action of the
Holy Spirit is required. And then we join him in these two actions. The
reason I say the Holy Spirit is required is because this word “renewal”
in Romans 12:2 is only used one other place in all the Greek Bible, namely,
Titus 3:5 where Paul says this: “[God] saved us,
not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own
mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal
of the Holy Spirit.” There’s the word “renewal”
which we’ve seen is so necessary. And it is renewal “of
the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit renews the mind. It is first and
decisively his work. We are radically dependent on him. Our efforts follow
his initiatives and enablings.
The Double Work of the
Holy Spirit
Now what is the double work that he must do to renew
our minds so that all of life becomes worship? 2 Corinthians 3:18 sets the
stage for the answer: “And we all, with unveiled
face, beholding
the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from
one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the
Spirit.” What does the Spirit do to “transform”
us into the image of the God-exalting Son of God? He enables us to “behold
the glory of the Lord.” This is how the mind is renewed—by
steadfastly gazing at the glories of Christ for what they really are.
But to enable us to do that, the Spirit must do a
double work. He must work in two directions: from the outside in and from
the inside out. He must work from the outside in by exposing the mind to
Christ-exalting truth. That is, he must lead us to hear the gospel, to read
the Bible, to study Christ-exalting writings of great, spiritual men, and to
meditate on the perfections of Christ. This is exactly what our great enemy
does not want us to do according to 2 Corinthians 4:4, “The
god of this world [Satan] has blinded the
minds of the
unbelievers, to keep them from
seeing the light
of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” Because to see that
for what it really is, Paul says, will renew the mind and transform the life
and produce unending worship.
And the Spirit must work from the inside out, breaking
the hard heart that blinds and corrupts the mind. The Spirit must work from
the outside in, through Christ-exalting truth, and from the inside out,
through truth-embracing humility. If he only worked from the outside in, by
presenting Christ-exalting truth to our minds but not breaking the hard
heart and making humble, then the truth would be despised and rejected. And
if he only humbled the hard heart, but put no Christ-exalting truth before
the mind, there would be no Christ to embrace and no worship would happen.
What Then Shall We Do?
What then do we do in obedience to Romans 12:2, “Be
transformed in the renewal of your mind”? We join the Holy Spirit
in his precious and all-important work. We
pursue
Christ-exalting truth and we
pray for
truth-embracing humility.
Listen to rich expositions of the “gospel
of the glory of Christ.” Read your Bible from cover to cover
always in search of the revelation of the glory of Christ. Read and ponder
the Bible-saturated, Christ-exalting writings of great, spiritual men and
women. And form the habit of meditating on the perfections of Christ. And in
it all pray, pray, pray that the Holy Spirit will renew your mind, that you
may desire and approve the will of God, so that all of life will become
worship to the glory of Christ.
May the
mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.
May the
Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.
May the
peace of God my Father
Rule my life in everything,
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing.
May the
love of Jesus fill me
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self abasing,
This is victory.
May I run
the race before me,
Strong and brave to face the foe,
Looking only unto Jesus
As I onward go.
May His
beauty rest upon me,
As I seek the lost to win,
And may they forget the channel,
Seeing only Him.
*****
Click
below to hear the tune
May the Mind of Christ, My Savior
by Kate Wilkenson
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