Transformed and Pleasing

A number of years ago now, I came across a book by an author with the unlikely name of Fritz Riddenau, I think that's how you pronounce his name, and the title of the book was How to be a Christian without being religious. It was a paperback, it was written in the 1960s I believe. Even when I came across it, it seemed pretty old and a weird kind of book. It was a book which was based on Romans and I started to read it and it was okay, it wasn't riveting. But the idea that's captured in the title is a fascinating idea, don't you think? Just sit with that for a little while: how to be Christian without being religious. Think about that. For Christianity is the most irreligious of religions. Polycarp of Smyrna, lived first, second century AD, something like that, was dragged before the Roman proconsul. He was one of the church leaders and the Roman proconsul said, "You are the teacher of all Asia and the destroyer of our gods." That's so punk rock, isn't it? You are the destroyer of our gods. No one's ever said to me Webster, you are the teacher of Lavender Bay and the destroyer of our gods, but it's true. Christianity is the most irreligious of religions. Sometimes we sing that song In Christ Alone my hope is found and it's a terrific song because it captures that so well. It is in Christ alone. It's one of the great doctrines of the reformation, one of the great discoveries of the reformation. You cannot stand on your own merits, you cannot add in any way to what Christ has done and that's pretty much been Paul's argument all the way through chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. It's in Christ alone that our hope is found. God promises on oath that when you put your simple trust in Jesus as your saviour and your king, you become one of the family and you are now his child.

So what next? Chapter 12:1 Paul says, "Therefore." This is one of the places where the whole argument is going to pivot. So he said, "This is what's happened up till now, therefore this is where the rubber hits the road for you and I". "Therefore I urge you brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship". I think one of the translations, your true and proper act of worship.

In other words, God is saying to you, "Come on, give it to me. Give it to me. Hand all of your life over to me." Not just 20% or 30% or 40%, but all of it. Don't hold back. But this God is not like some kind of urban gangster, you know, give me your phone or you'll be sorry, give me your phone or there'll be trouble to pay, you better worship me or else. He's not like a bush ranger, hand over all your valuables, or even a pickpocket who wants to try and take it by stealth, trick you into it. No, the God who calls for your worship has shed his blood. Jesus has been nailed up, he loves you. That's what Romans 5 says to us. It says here, in view of God's mercy, offer yourself to me as a living sacrifice. It's not to earn God's favour, he's already shown you his favour, it's to say thank you. And that's where Christianity differs from every other religion in the world because every other religion says in some way or other, God please be good to me, please love me, I'll try and do better, I'll try and turn over a new leaf, I'll try and lift my game. But authentic Christianity is all about thank you. It's a response to God's grace. It's driven by gratitude. God has given his everything, he's not spared his only son. So we are motivated by gratitude. You might know the true story of a reasonably famous Australian billionaire who some years ago collapsed during a polo match. He had a cardiac arrest. His heart stopped beating and it stopped beating for a couple of minutes actually and then there was a passing ambulance and that ambulance just happened to have a defibrillator on board. It wasn't the practice in the day of having them on all ambulances and just in the providence of the way things worked out, they had a defibrillator on board and he was resuscitated. And one of my friends was the paramedic who resuscitated this man. Well, he was so thankful to have another shot at life that he picked up the phone and called the Premier Nick Greiner and said, "How about we go halves in putting these in every ambulance?" And it cost him two and a half million bucks to do it, but he was so thankful. He was so thankful to the ambulance service, he was so thankful for medical care.

Now, if you're a believer, you've been saved for eternity. How much more the thankfulness once you've tasted God's kindness, then pleasing him must be the obvious response. So Paul says, "Therefore I urge you brothers and sisters in view of God's mercy." And then he says this, "To offer your bodies." What's required is an offering of your body. It's kind of a strange way of putting it, don't you think? Surely we would say offer your heart or something like that, your soul. But it says offering your body. It's a reminder again of how very physical everything is in the Bible. You don't get the idea it's just spirits wafting around, but it's a very physical thing. And when you think about it for a moment, what do you do without your body? Nothing. Can't think without your body, your brain is part of your body. You can't think without engaging your brain, some try to do it but you can't really do it. You can't speak without your tongue, you can't move without your legs, you can't lift things without your arms. Your body is your whole self and it's like God is saying here, you know what really delights me, it's when you hand over everything. Not just 20%, not 30%, not 40%, but everything, the whole of life. How can I say thank you to God for his mercy in the death of Jesus? Now this is a long way from saying I'll go to church from time to time or I'll send up a quick prayer when I need help. It's a bit bigger than that. It's the whole of life. It's every day of the week. The spiritual worship that's being spoken about here is not just Sunday worship. We often talk about a worship service on Sunday and in a way it's kind of misleading. Worship is something we do on a Sunday, but this is saying more. It's something we do outside of a Sunday. Now all of us are holding back, aren't we? All of us have areas of our life where we want Jesus to stay out of. Can you imagine someone, a friend lending you their holiday house and you go away on holidays with your family and you're there at the holiday house and the person who owns it turns up to visit and you say to the person, "Sorry you can't go into that room or you can't go into that room." Of course you would not say that because it's their house.

Paul is going to spell out over the next few chapters a whole lot of points of application. He goes into great amounts of detail and it would be really worthwhile to read it and think about it, meditate on it, turn it over in your mind the things that he says from here on. But his broad point is, make all of your life a thank you to God. How might you do that? I really don't know, I don't know what it's like for you. Maybe you're someone who's got a sharp tongue, make all of your life a thank you to God. Maybe you're the sort of person when things don't go your way, you just throw all the toys out of the cot, you just don't really have much self-control. Make all your life a thank you to God. That's your spiritual act of worship and it's going to work out for different people in different ways. According to chapter 12:1, worship is not singing songs over and over again or saying special prayers or feeling particularly enlightened or special rituals. In view of God's mercy, hand it all over to God. And the phrase here is a funny one, the phrase here is living sacrifices. That's a phrase from another era altogether, that's a phrase from effectively Jesus' time and beforehand. In Jesus' time, religion was very much about sacrifices. You wanted to please God, so you take your best looking livestock, if you were fairly poor it might be a bird or something like that, if you're more wealthy it might be something like a heifer. Not a poor animal that's going to die anyway, but a decent animal and you take it to the temple and it's sacrificed to God and it gets put on a big barbecue and it gets burnt up and as the smoke goes up, you would understand that the aroma is pleasing to God. But in the end, they were dead sacrifices. Here he says, "Be a living sacrifice." So it's like God is saying, "Take your sacrifice off the altar, I'm not interested in that anymore, it's not important anymore, Jesus has died for all of that." So here it's a living sacrifice pleasing to God day in, day out. This is your spiritual worship. Your life is the arena in which the God of the universe is either going to be delighted or not. To spend your life trying to work out how to say thank you, that's what he's speaking about.

And now he says in verse two, so be so it's pleasing to God, that's my first point. My second point comes here, verse two: "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." No longer conform to the pattern of this world. Don't conform, be a nonconformist, break the pattern, break the mould. Things like moulds, when you pour something into a mould, whatever you pour in, it conforms to the shape of the mould. That's how cast iron works and for jewellers and things like that. Or I was thinking about those clever ice cube trays, those clever ice cube trays that made out of a kind of plasticky thing. You pour the water in and the water when it freezes, it conforms to the shape of the mould and so instead of having just square ice cubes, you've got a penguin floating around in your drink or something like that. That's the idea here, don't be conformed to the pattern around you. Or you remember the nonconformists of the 60s, if you put if that's the crossword clue nonconformist of the 60s, you put that into your crossword puzzle solver and it'll come out as hippies, they were the nonconformists. But Paul is not speaking about that here. He's not speaking about wearing weird clothes and long hair and pretending to smoke something here. He's saying don't conform to the pattern of the world, be radical, be different, don't just fit in with what the world tells you to do. Every time you piggyback off the back of this world, you're disconforming. Don't withdraw from the world. Jesus says you need to be in the world but not of the world. Don't withdraw from it. The boat's got to be in the water, but you don't want water in the boat, if that makes sense.

Don't conform to the pattern of the world. Well, what's the pattern of the world? Well, I'm going to suggest to you it's anything that pushes the true and living God to the margins of life because he should be in the centre. Anything that pushes him out, any dream you have that cuts him out, any ambition you crave that pushes him aside. And again, I'm not sure what it is for you, but it's worth thinking about the way the world is conforming you and don't let it conform you. Sometimes it's the sort of stuff we watch on TV. The lifestyle programs, you know, Escape to the Country or how to have a better house like Better Homes and Gardens. I would love to see a show called Perfectly Adequate Homes and Gardens. I can't imagine a TV program like that, but it gets in, doesn't it? Some of you are probably not consumers of social media like I am, but I watch this social media platform called YouTube. And what YouTube does is it's got an algorithm and it decides what I'm watching and then tells me what other things I want to watch which is like that. And so if you looked at my the sort of things that come up on my YouTube feed, you'd work out a couple of things. I'm interested in Super Rugby and the Brumby's won last night against Wellington, which is a good thing. And you might well, there's nothing particularly wrong with that, that's okay. You might discover that I'm interested in world geopolitics. And if I look at that and think to myself, you know what, deep down I'm a little bit anxious about the way the world's heading. And so what God would be saying to me is don't be anxious about this, I've got this in control, under control. So as I worry about these things, I'm really taking God out of the centre and he's really wanting to be in the centre. And you might discover that I'm interested in in equities and investing. And there's nothing wrong with that as well, but you could draw the line and say, "I'm insecure about my financial future." And God is saying, "You don't have to worry about that, I'll look after you." And so sometimes the things that we the entertainment we consume says a lot about the the forces that are trying to conform us. Don't be a conformist, don't conform to the pattern. Rather, rather he says, be transformed.

The mercy of God is not satisfied in just rescuing you, it wants to change you, do you know that? It's not satisfied with just pulling you out of the pit, it wants to renew you. And the word here for transform is the word from which we get the word metamorphosis. So geology, I learned this in science, metamorphic rock, it's an igneous or a sedimentary rock that under pressure over time changes, it becomes a different sort of rock. Or you might think caterpillar to butterfly, there's a change, a dramatic change. Franz Kafka wrote a little novella called Metamorphosis about a bloke who's a salesman who wakes up one morning and discovers he's turned into a cockroach. And you think this is not going to end well, 60 pages later it's not going to end very well. But you get the idea, it's the idea of transformation. And Paul says here how you're transformed, he says it's by the renewing of your mind. It's a bit of a struggle sometimes to renew your mind, but God will do it. He's committed to it. You work at renewing your thinking and God will change you. After becoming a believer, over time, I am just blown away at how differently God and I think. I thought we used to think very similarly in the first stages, but I realised over time that he's got different opinion on things that I naturally have. But as you work on this, as you work on your thinking, then God will renew your mind and it might take a bit of effort.

So here's my trophy. This is let me read it to you, New South Wales Basketball Association Division Three Men Premiers 1987. So you probably, it's an archaeological artifact clearly. This took a lot of work. I worked for this, I worked quite hard, I trained for it, I worked with another group of guys to achieve that. It was a big achievement at the time. Do you know where I found it? It was in my drawer, just in my drawer. Things that can seem important at the time have a habit of becoming very insignificant in just a few years, let alone from the perspective of eternity. It will seem a very, very small thing. Do you want a trophy? You can put a smile on the face of the God of the universe. You can be pleasing to God, holy and pleasing to God.

Now I don't know what it will mean for you to be not conformed but to be transformed. It might be something private, might be something very public. But you can actually please God. The God who ripped the heavens open and said "This is my son in whom I am well pleased". That very God can look down on you and have the same reaction, "Here is my adopted son or daughter in whom I am well pleased". And most times it's not going to be hundreds or thousands of people cheering you on from the gallery when you do what's right. It's just you and God. And the sooner you realise that, the sooner you realise that the approval of God is enough, then the quicker we'll get on with doing it. Let's pray. Gracious God, we thank you for the words of the apostle. We thank you for his clarity. We pray that we might be crystal clear on what you're saying here to us. May we please you in all we do. It's a journey and we need your help and your patience. We do it though not to gain your approval, we've already got that through the Lord Jesus, but we do want to please you. We pray this in Jesus name, amen.

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