It is always a rich blessing for Zola and me to come and be among you, brothers and sisters. I know that you probably expect everybody who comes under the category of guest speaker to say the same thing.
And I really do want to apologize to you young people for the fact that you have to endure the great speakers. It must get to them. They must dread that day when they are going to have a guest speaker.
But it is a rich blessing for us. It is just so good to be among you. The reason that is the case is because each time I have come among you, the Lord has been here, and it has always proved to be a very rich time for us. So we anticipate times when the Lord gives us the privilege to come and fellowship with you.
This morning, I would like for us to focus our attention on some very familiar verses of Scripture in Paul’s letter to the Romans—Romans 12.
I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God,
to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good, and acceptable, and perfect.
And through the grace given to me, I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
For just as we have many members in one body, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.
And since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let each exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation.
He who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; and he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.
Let your love be without hypocrisy.
Father, it is difficult for me this morning to find adequate words to express thanksgiving to You for this time that we have had, meeting at the Lord’s table, when our hearts once again have been focused upon our blessed Lord. We have had this privilege of all privileges to come to His table and to share this time.
We thank You for the ministry of Your Holy Spirit that was here, aiding us and helping us to express our hearts in thanksgiving and praise to Him for who He is to us and for the marvelous work that He has accomplished on our behalf.
We want to thank You as well, Father, for all of our brothers and sisters. We do thank You, as the song said, for the many faces and for the many races. We bless You this morning that throughout the whole world, throughout this whole globe, there are our brothers and sisters from all different races, with all kinds of faces. Lord, we are so privileged to be a part of that great big family.
We thank You, Lord, that You have wonderful ways of communicating Your heart and Your mind and Your very life to us. We thank You, Lord, that by Your Holy Spirit, Your written Word can become a living Word to us.
We stand ready now to hear what You would speak to us. Both speaker and hearers, we put ourselves under that anointing of Your Holy Spirit, that He would be able to speak to us in such a way that we would understand what it is that He is seeking to speak to us.
Then, Lord, before we even hear, we once again want to commit ourselves to being doers of Your Word and not hearers only. Deliver us, Lord, from just hearing what You say with no intention of following up on it.
May You now speak to our hearts, and may we find grace to respond to You. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
It seems to me that the apex, or the highest point, of the Christian life is for us to become worshipers.
You will recall, for instance, in John 4, in the Lord Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well—the Samaritan woman—as He engaged with her regarding this matter of worship. In John 4:23, we hear Him saying:
But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth;
for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.
Part of the mission that our Lord Jesus came on when He came to this planet was to get worshipers for His Father. It is an interesting thing that our Lord Jesus says that God is seeking worshipers.
It is very clear in this conversation with the woman at the well that our Lord Jesus gained a worshiper as He spoke to her. As you read the rest of the story, you discover that she became a worshiper.
Back here in Romans 12, the appeal of the apostle Paul to the church at Rome, and to us today, is that we would become worshipers of God.
Now, it would seem to me that we also need to broaden our understanding of what worship is. So often, when we think of worship, we think of the hour that we meet together on Sunday morning, between ten and eleven here among you brothers and sisters. We offer some praise and thanksgiving and adoration and love to our Lord, and we call that worship. I trust that it always is just exactly that.
But worship includes much more than the hour that we spend together around the Lord’s table, or at other times when we offer thanks and praise to our Lord. Worship really includes our entire life.
When Paul begins to make this appeal, he is appealing to them so that they will end up being those who worship God by serving Him with their whole lives.
Paul begins by making this appeal on the basis of the mercies of God. He does not appeal to us to be worshipers because it is the right thing to do, although that is true for many other reasons. His appeal for us to become worshipers is based on the fact that God has manifested His mercy toward us.
When he begins, he uses this word, “therefore.” You have probably heard others say in the past, “When you find ‘therefore,’ ask why it is there for.” He is referring back to something very important. He is saying that on the basis of what he has said previously, he is now making an appeal.
It is very important that you and I understand what that “therefore” refers to.
When we begin to read the letter to the Romans, if you do not get beyond the first three chapters, you will end up very depressed, because the situation is hopeless. Paul begins describing humanity, who are not worshipers of God but, when you come right down to it, are worshipers of themselves.
Listen to some of his description in Romans 1:28:
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer,
God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil;
full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice.
They are gossipers, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful;
and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death,
they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.
That is only one example of what Paul is describing for us in the first three chapters of Romans. He paints a true picture. Even though it is dark and hopeless, nonetheless he has painted a true picture: humanity outside of God has only one direction, and that direction is downward. There is no hope for mankind outside of Him.
Paul ends up at the end of Romans 3 making a declaration: all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Both Jews and Gentiles—there is no distinction—all have sinned and continue to fall short of the glory of God. That is his description of humanity outside of the scope of God’s redemptive work.
Then Paul begins his wonderful task of setting before us how God has responded to this situation: He has manifested His righteousness. God has acted in righteousness in relationship to the condition in which He finds the human race.
We find him declaring, in Romans 1:17:
For in it, that is, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.
God, finding this situation as it was with man, decided that He was going to do something about it. He demonstrated His righteousness.
The way Paul begins to set this forth is by pointing out the way that Abraham was made righteous before God. We often include Abraham among those who lived under the law, but we do not stop to realize that Abraham lived before Moses and before the law was given. We tend to put everybody in the Old Testament under the law, but the fact is there was no law when Abraham lived.
Abraham was justified how? By faith.
It was an act of God’s righteousness toward Abraham that He told Abraham, “If you will believe Me, if you will put your faith in Me, then you will be declared to be righteous.” Abraham was justified by faith.
From this, the apostle begins to point out that in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, God has so worked that both Jew and Gentile can now have the same experience that Abraham had: they can be justified by faith.
In Romans 5:1, we hear him saying:
Having then been justified by faith, we have peace with God.
As God demonstrates His righteousness, He does so by doing what is right in His own heart. He is not doing it in a way that you and I would necessarily do it. But God, in His own righteousness, has set up a way where you and I can be included in His family again. The outcome of His dealings in our lives is that we can become worshipers of God.
May every one of us understand this morning that it is in God’s heart that, if you have become a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, the result of all His work in you is that you too will become a worshiper of God.
He has justified us by faith. Now, justification, brothers and sisters, does not just include pardon. Justification means God now sees you as if you had never sinned.
Pardon means He knows that you have sinned, but He has set your sin aside. Justification means God now looks upon you, out of a demonstration of His righteousness, when we put our faith in His Son, as if we had never, ever committed a sin. He accepts us as if there was never anything wrong in our lives.
This is a demonstration of His righteousness. We are told that the just shall live by faith. We are justified by faith, and once we have been justified, we are to continue to live by faith.
It may be good for just a moment for us to remind ourselves of what faith actually does. We are told, for instance, in Hebrews 11 that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.
Brother Darby, in his translation, I think really gets at the essence of what the writer is saying when he says that faith is a substantiating—a making real in your experience—that which you hope for and do not see.
God has so worked in His Son to do everything necessary for you and me to be taken out of that humanity of which we were initially a part, placed into the family of God, and given everything—without exception—that we will ever need to be the kind of people God wants us to be, both in this life and in the one to come. There is nothing lacking.
The finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ has wrought for us everything that you will ever need. It now becomes our responsibility and our joy to put our faith to work and to appropriate into our own experience that which God has already made available for us in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Living by faith means that I begin to enter into this wonderful realm of God’s grace and appropriate for myself, in experience, all that God has made available for us in His Son.
When we get over to Romans 5, we hear Paul talking about God demonstrating His love. In Romans 5:8, it says:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Here in this chapter, Paul, in a sense, takes the grace of God and holds it up before us. He wants us somehow to grow in our appreciation for this matter of how God has manifested His love toward us.
Grace is God’s practical way of exercising His love. It is in the practical things of our everyday life that we experience the grace of God, but that has its source in the fact that God has demonstrated His love toward us.
He did it while we were yet sinners, when we were still a part of that old, fallen humanity. God loved us then.
I will never forget my father. After I came to know the Lord, my parents did not know the Lord at the time, and I went to my father and tried to share the Lord Jesus with him. He told me, “Ernie, when I get to the place where I feel like I can live good enough, then I will begin to be interested in the things of God.”
Well, that is the way many of us thought. But the fact is, while we were yet sinners, while we were still a part of that fallen condition and that hopeless situation, God set His heart upon us, loved us, and manifested His grace to us.
May I remind us again this morning: God sought us out. He was not lost; we were. He found us; we did not find Him. It was an act of His grace toward us that has resulted in us coming to know Him and being able to call Him our elder Brother and our heavenly Father.
God has demonstrated His love. Listen to some of the language Paul uses here in Romans 5.
Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.
For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many.
For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.
And the law came in that the transgression might increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.
I hope you see what Paul is saying. It is almost like God keeps outdoing Himself. He not only sought us out when we were still sinners and loved us, but He did much more, and much more, and much more, until Paul finally declares, “Where sin did abound, grace did superabound.”
We need to see this morning, brothers and sisters, that by comparison, sin is a little trickling stream compared to the mighty grace of God. It is like the ocean in comparison to a little trickling stream. No matter how great our sin has been, the grace of God has abounded toward us and is greater than all of our sin. This is an act of the mercy of God toward us.
When we get to Romans 6, Paul points out that our God, in His wonderful way of expressing His righteousness, not only did something about the outward acts of sin that we had committed—all those things that were against us, the ways in which we had violated His laws—God has done something about removing all of that from us.
He has gone even a step further: He has made it possible for you and me to be free from that power that causes us to sin. How merciful of our God to do something to make it possible for us to be free from the power of sin in our lives.
It is true that, no matter how many sins we commit, God has forgiven us through the blood of His Son. But it is glorious good news to us this morning, brothers and sisters, that God has wrought something in His Son to make it possible for you and me to be free from the power of sin.
Listen to what He has done. Romans 6:6:
Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him,
that our body of sin might be done away with,
that we should no longer be slaves to sin.
Hallelujah! We no longer need to be slaves to sin.
God, in His great wisdom and in His great righteousness, did it in a way that you and I would have never done it. Our way of getting free from sin is trying to get our old Adamic nature somehow to improve itself.
So many Christians still believe that the Christian life is a self-improvement course. You take this old man who was a part of this old humanity, put him into school, and begin to train him how to be and act and talk like a Christian. They spend their whole Christian life in this futile effort. That is not God’s way.
Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, God has another way. It is a sure-fire way. He put our old Adamic nature—that sin factory that we inherited from Adam—into Christ, so that when Christ was crucified, it was crucified with Him.
Hallelujah! It is dead; it is gone. We no longer need to be slaves to that old sinful nature that we inherited from Adam. We need to begin to live in the good of it.
It is not enough for you and me just to confess our sins. We need to get to the place where we are experiencing this freedom from the power of sin that operates in our lives.
At the end of Romans 6, the apostle points out to us that God is prepared to take us and do a work that He calls sanctification.
I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.
When you and I first come to the Lord, we are in a mess, whether we know it or not. From God’s perspective, there is no good thing in us. Even those so-called good things are as filthy rags in the sight of God. They simply do not mean anything to God.
God has a real job on His hands, taking us in that condition and getting us to where we are free from the influence of sin that made us that way. At the same time, He does this wonderful work of forming us into the image of His Son.
When we find these words in the Scriptures that are translated with these long sixty-dollar words—sanctification—we somehow do not realize that there is something very practical and very real that is to be a part of that.
It simply means that God is taking us as He found us, getting us free from the influence of the old, and then bringing into our own experience, into our own lives, the very life of Christ.
As this life begins to have an influence upon us, we are sanctified. That is, more and more of the life of Christ is formed in us. Sanctification simply means that there is becoming less and less of the old and more and more of the new.
I hope you realize what we will discover when we get over into Romans 7: you became a genuine schizophrenic when you became a Christian.
When you believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, God put into you a new life and a new nature. Now, you inherited from Adam your old life and your old nature. These two lives and these two natures are bitter enemies. They can never, ever be reconciled.
Paul describes this experience in Romans 7: wanting to do good, and the more he wants to do good, he ends up doing the very thing he hates. So he has this conflict going on there.
If we allow this conflict to produce its work in our lives, it gets us to the place where we throw up our hands and say, “It is impossible to live the Christian life. I am going to give up. I am not even going to try anymore.”
Well, that is exactly what the Lord has been waiting to hear you say.
O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
This body is always making me sin, always making me do something that is not the will of God. In my heart, I want to do what is right.
How many of you here this morning—do not raise your hand; I do not want to embarrass you—but how many of you, before you went to bed one night, committed and covenanted with God, “God, tomorrow morning, starting tomorrow morning for the rest of my life, I am going to get up and spend at least fifteen minutes in prayer”?
That was in your heart. But when the alarm went off: cut it off, forget it.
It is not that in your heart you did not want to do it. You wanted to do it. But the very thing you wanted to do, you could not do. Something overrode that, and you end up saying, “O wretched man, I give up. There is just no way I can make it.”
When Paul says, “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?” he answers his own question:
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
That is God’s answer to our “who.” Christ Himself is the One who will deliver us from this old wretched man who is always making us do what we do not want to do.
Sanctification is the process that God takes us through. Please understand: He is the One who is in charge. The Holy Spirit engineers the opportunities in your everyday life for you to discover the wretchedness of your old man and to discover the wonderful beauty of the life of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You alone are the only one who makes the choice as to which one you are going to allow to reign in your life. This is an act of God’s mercy. We would have never done it this way. We really would not. It is an act of God’s mercy and His righteousness.
We come to Romans 8, and I hope you see how God just keeps pouring on His mercy.
God gives us the Spirit of life. Have you noticed that even when you get a little bit of victory in your life as a Christian, you want to turn the whole thing into another set of laws? It is not that we want to take the old covenant, because somehow we feel like that might be a little too much, but now we have our own set of laws and regulations that we are to live by.
But God says, “That is not My way. My way is, I am going to give to you as a gift the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”
The same life that was operating in Jesus of Nazareth, that enabled Him to live the Christian life, has now been given to us as a free gift. That Spirit of life that is within us is to become our life.
Romans 8 is talking about the wonderful work of the Holy Spirit, and it is a gift from God. We do not have to reduce the Christian life to a list of do’s and don’ts, of regulations.
Certainly there is discipline that is going to be imposed upon our lives, but it needs to be discipline that the Holy Spirit is the author of, and not something that you and I decide we are going to do in order to live the Christian life.
Notice there in Romans 8 why He has given us this Spirit of life. Romans 8:2 says:
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did:
sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh,
in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Brothers and sisters, if we will come to know the reality of the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, whom God has given to us as a gift, and if we will follow Him, the result will always be, without exception, that we will keep the law. We will do that which is pleasing to God.
The Christian life is so simple—so simple. Paul puts it in Galatians 5:
Walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.
How much more simple can it get?
Indwelling us as believers in Jesus Christ is the life, the Spirit of life, that enables us to know what the will of God is and also enables us to do what the will of God is for our lives.
Also in Romans 8, God adds another thing to this list of mercies.
The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God,
and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ,
if indeed we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him.
Notice down in Romans 8:29:
For whom the Lord foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son,
that He might be the firstborn among many brethren;
and whom He predestined, He also called;
and whom He called, He also justified;
and whom He justified, these He also glorified.
An additional act of God’s mercy is that He wants you and me to be glorified. He wants us to be fully formed into the image of His Son.
In terms of character, we have the very character of Christ. But also, in terms of responsibility, brothers and sisters, our God has planned an age to come. Glorious things He has planned for us.
One of the things He wants us to do is share the throne of His Son and share the responsibility of governing that which He has created.
Revelation 22:5 says:
And they shall reign with Him forever and ever.
To be glorified means that God has so worked in us and built the character of His Son in us that He can entrust into our hands the rulership of the universe along with His Son.
Please understand that God is desirous of glorifying us. One of the problems God faces in our lives is that you and I settle for far too little.
Some of us in this room this morning are satisfied to know that we are not going to hell and that we have the assurance that we are going to heaven, and that is about all we are concerned about.
That is a marvelous thing, but that is only the beginning, brothers and sisters. Those whom He justified, He has glorified. It is all available to every one of God’s dear kids—no exception.
I hope it is in your heart this morning to respond to Him and say, “Father, I want to know that experience of being glorified.”
Now, if you make such a request of Him, get ahold of the boat.
Notice there in Romans 8:17:
If indeed we suffer with Him in order that we may be glorified with Him.
The end of the chapter adds one additional thing about this matter of God’s mercy. Romans 8:37 says:
But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
There is security, brothers and sisters, in the love of God. If we can learn how to rest ourselves in the fact that He loves us, there is nobody who can disturb our security. Nothing can separate us from Him—absolutely nothing. This is an additional expression of the mercy of God.
Well, that is my introduction.
It is on this basis now that Paul makes his appeal:
I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God.
All these things that we have just gone through in the book of Romans are the things he had reference to in terms of God’s mercy. On this basis, he now appeals to us: become worshipers of God.
It seems to me that in the verses that follow in Romans 12, 13, 14, and 15, there are three ways in which Paul sets before us how we are to involve ourselves in worshiping God.
Again, I trust that we will allow the Holy Spirit this morning to broaden our understanding of what worship is. Certainly when we come together on the Lord’s Day to remember the Lord around His table, we ought to have a real expression of worship. But there ought to be behind that a life that backs up the singing, the songs, the prayers, and everything that goes into that meeting.
Worshiping God is something that includes all that we are and all that we do—at least it should.
His appeal, first of all, is that we present our bodies as sacrifices to God.
Under the old covenant, the sacrifices that had to be offered to God in reference to sin were one thing. But after that issue was settled, there were other offerings that had to be offered—the whole burnt offering and a peace offering.
I think Paul has in mind here the whole burnt offering. The issue was no longer an issue of sin. It was an issue of us taking our lives and offering them as freewill offerings to the Lord.
That is Paul’s appeal. When you look at it, brothers and sisters, there ought not to be any other response. When we see how merciful God has been toward us, there cannot be another legitimate response other than for you and me to give ourselves fully to Him.
He is saying, “My appeal to you is that you would come and present your bodies as sacrifices to God.”
You remember back in Romans 6, Paul makes an appeal about us presenting the members of our bodies as members unto righteousness. That presenting of our bodies there is a presenting of our bodies to the Holy Spirit, so that He can do some work in us.
But after the work has been done, then we need to offer them to God as a sacrifice. In Christian circles, sometimes we have felt like that in the very beginning is when God is wanting us to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to Him.
But, you know, brothers and sisters, we do not have much to offer Him that is acceptable to Him.
Have you ever heard anybody talk about some of the bad habits they had when they came to know the Lord, and they said they gave them to the Lord? “I gave my smoking to the Lord. I used to chew, but I gave it to the Lord.”
Do you know the picture I have in my mind when somebody says that? It is like going out to the garbage can, picking up all the garbage that is in there, tying it up in a box with a nice ribbon around it, and presenting it to the Lord. That is all we had to offer Him: the rags of our lives. And He is not interested.
But He is interested that, after the Holy Spirit has taken us through a process of sanctifying us—of making us what God wants us to be in the image of His Son—then we offer ourselves as sacrifices to Him: holy, living, acceptable.
This is a decision that Paul feels like he must appeal to us about. You see, what God is doing in us, brothers and sisters, is not for ourselves. Certainly we benefit greatly from all that God does, but the work God is doing in us is for Him.
He takes a tremendous risk. You talk about making investments that are unsure and shaky. He makes an investment in your life, taking His own life and pouring His grace upon grace, upon grace, upon grace, upon grace into your life, and then taking the risk that He will not get anything back in return—that you will keep it all for yourself.
Paul’s appeal is this: take that which God has done in your life and now offer it to Him as a whole burnt offering, as something that will be a sweet aroma to God Himself. That is worship.
When I take my being—my body, which is the container of my spirit—my body becomes a means whereby I express who I am as a person. God has put His life inside of me by His Spirit and put the nature of Christ within me.
As that nature is allowed to be released and to influence the various areas of my life, then I become what God is really after. Yet He still allows us to have the choice of what we are going to do with what He does in our lives.
Paul’s appeal is, “On the basis of all that God has done, I appeal to you. I urge you. I plead with you to offer your body, which is the container of your life, to God as a sacrifice.”
Remember, the sacrifices are for God; they are for Him to enjoy. His appeal is that we offer ourselves living, because in the Old Testament the sacrifice was a dead sacrifice. But now He wants our lives—how we live—to be an expression of worship to Him.
There is something I would also like to say for just a few moments about what God is really after in our lives in the very beginning.
So often, when we are born into the family of God, some well-intentioned person determines that the most important thing is that you learn how to do things in the body of Christ.
But I want to say to us that, as I have looked at these verses and chapters in Romans, it seems to me that God’s primary concern is who you become before what He wants you to do.
All of these chapters leading up to Romans 12 describe the work of God in us to make us somebody. He is more interested in who you are as a person than what you do.
We are going to get to the doing in just a moment. But I would like to underline this in red ink this morning: God is concerned about you as a person, whether you are ever able to do anything or not. His primary concern is that you would be formed in the image of His Son, that the character of Christ would be formed in you.
In some Christian circles, the emphasis is immediately to get people involved in doing something. I realize that God can take the doing and use it as a way of producing character.
But, you know, I was a Christian three months, and they asked me to teach a class of junior boys—nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-olds. They knew a hundred times more about the Bible than I did. I had never read a Bible in my life. Here I was, three months old in the Lord, and I was doing something already.
The problem I see with it is that it begins to impress upon us that the Christian life is primarily doing rather than being.
You will notice, if you read those chapters over again, that God’s emphasis is on having sons and daughters, children. He is interested in who you are as a person, not necessarily what you are doing.
He wants us to allow this formation of Christ within us to have its necessary time.
Can you imagine, for instance, those of you who have recently had newborn babies, that if you had a baby girl, a week later you had her down in the kitchen saying, “Now, this is a stove. These are pots. These are pans. I want to show you this recipe that I got from my mother, and I want you to learn this very early, because this is where you really get your sense of worth: where you are able to cook and provide for your family.”
Or you have a little baby boy, and the dad takes him immediately out and shows him all the tools in the garage, showing him how to use them all. “This is how you get your sense of worth and identity—because you are able to use a good shovel, or you are able to get in there and use those tools and fix that car.”
I know that is a silly illustration, but it illustrates something that happens among us that we need to be alerted to: God is interested in who you are as a person before you are involved in a lot of doing.
He goes on in Romans 12:2 and says:
And do not be conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
In order to worship God, we have to discover what the will of God is. To worship God is to do the will of God.
Come with me back to the Gospel of John for just a moment.
I think all of us this morning would heartily agree that our Lord Jesus is the example of a worshiper. Listen to His words.
John 4:34:
Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.
John 5:30:
I can do nothing on My own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.
John 6:38:
For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.
We find our Lord Jesus also saying, “I can only do the things I see My Father doing. I can only speak the words that I hear My Father speaking.”
In other words, worship to our Lord Jesus was very simple: it was doing the will of God.
Worship, in this context Paul is talking about, includes you and me discovering ways that we can come to know what the will of God is.
Let us allow the will of God to be as big as it is. Let us not narrow it down to some little experience in our own lives, but let it be as large as it is. Then, out of that largeness, God can begin to work out the smaller details of our lives.
Notice what he says about the will of God. We need to hear this this morning, because the reason some of us have not become worshipers is because we have misunderstood the nature of the will of God.
That you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
Some of us have an erroneous idea that if I submitted myself fully to the will of God, the first thing He would do is send me someplace where I would be utterly miserable.
But that is a total distortion of who God is, first of all, and what God’s will is. God’s will is good. It is well-pleasing, and it is perfect.
Do you know what the will of God is? Your sanctification. The will of God is that you be glorified. The will of God is that you grow up and become a son who can take responsibility in the kingdom of God.
The will of God is that you would fully enjoy all that, in His Son, has been made available through His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. That is the will of God. It is good, it is well-pleasing, and it is perfect. We need not be afraid of it.
The enemy has done a job on our hands. He has distorted our thinking. He has twisted our understanding of the God who revealed Himself in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is not what we have thought Him to be.
Therefore Paul says two things. First of all, do not let the world push you into its mold. Learn how to resist the pressure from the world that causes you to think in a certain way.
This is something, brothers and sisters, that you and I need to become alerted to: the influence that comes from this world in which we are living.
It would be wonderful if somehow, when we got saved, God would lift us completely out of the situation and put us in this sterile environment where there is nothing but Christians who are absolutely perfect. But that is not what He has done.
In His great wisdom, He has allowed us to remain here. One of the things that we have to learn to do as worshipers is to resist the influence that comes upon our lives from the world system in which we now live.
We must remember who the god of this world is. He is God’s arch-enemy. He is seeking to thwart the work of God. He is seeking to prevent you and me from coming into the fullness of what God wants us to be.
Very simply, he is trying, as he has always tried to do, to get worshipers for himself and to rob God of those who would be God’s worshipers.
That influence which comes from the world has one objective: to dull our hearts, to confuse our thinking, and to distort things in such a way that we really do not give ourselves to being worshipers of God.
That is the first thing we need to learn to do. Not in some negative way necessarily, but in a strong, positive way: learn how to resist the kinds of things that come our way.
I need not go into detail this morning. You know it. You see it on the billboards as you drive up and down the highways. You see it in the newspapers. You see it on the television screen. Everywhere it is screaming out at you: “This is what you need in order to be a complete person.”
They sell you a bill of goods, only to find out that the results are not what they promise.
Paul says that we do not need to be conformed to this world, or to this age of which we are a part, but we need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
This transformation is very simple, brothers and sisters. It means that God takes His Son as a model and sets Him up. Then He begins to work on each one of us as His kids and form us by transforming us.
Second Corinthians 3 talks about going from one stage of glory to another stage of glory to another stage. That is transformation. Only the Holy Spirit of God is capable of doing that work.
As we behold our Lord Jesus, there is a work that the Holy Spirit does. He begins to adjust our thinking, our concepts about God, about ourselves, and about what it is that God wants.
Through this whole process, we begin to discover—we prove in experience—what the will of God is. The reason for discovering the will of God is so that we will do the will of God.
Worship, brothers and sisters, is this matter of you and me standing against the influence from the world, allowing the Holy Spirit to do His inward work of forming us into the image of Christ, so that we can discover what the will of God is in experience and then find ourselves putting that into practice in our everyday life.
It is not something that is impossible. It is something that God wants you and me, as children, to experience for ourselves. It becomes an act of worship.
You will notice that Paul begins to launch into another area. He talks about being members of the body of Christ.
Initially, I asked myself, “What does this have to do with worship?” Here I am as a member of the body of Christ, and I am being encouraged to go ahead and function as a member of the body of Christ.
But when you look at Paul’s words in the latter part of this chapter, and then read on through Romans 13, 14, and 15, you see that Paul is really taking this whole issue of how we live every day and putting it in the perspective of worship.
As you and I live by faith in Christ, that is to have an impact upon everything we do. The influence where we are is to be an act of service, of worship to God.
Again, we have to have our minds adjusted in terms of the way we look at things, because we normally think that serving God and worshiping God is done in the context of a building, at a certain hour, under certain conditions.
But the Lord wants us to understand that, just as the Lord Jesus, when He was upon the earth, His worship and service of God was something that went on all the time. It was a life for Him.
Faith in the life of Christ within us produces worshipers of God.
The first thing Paul addresses here is the fact that we are members of the body of Christ. One of the places that we begin to express our worship is in going ahead and functioning according to the gifting that is within us.
We are told in 1 Corinthians 12:7 that the Holy Spirit has given to every member of the body a particular manifestation, a way of expressing the life of Christ through you. As you express the life of Christ, it ends up serving God and worshiping God.
This matter of worship includes our activity as members of the body of Christ. When I go ahead and do the responsibilities that are mine among the people of God, it is an act of worship. God receives it as worship to Himself.
Whether it is just a menial thing or whether it is something of more importance, it does not make any difference. If you are setting up the chairs, God accepts it as worship. Whatever it is that we are carrying out as members of the body, it ends up being an act of worship to God.
As you go on, Paul introduces the rest of this book by saying, “Let your love be without hypocrisy.” Let your love be real.
In our loving of people, beginning with God’s people, God views it as an act of worship.
I find it very interesting, brothers and sisters, that the last moments our Lord Jesus spent with those twelve men who were His disciples, He spent teaching them the most important lesson He ever wanted them to learn.
In John 13, what was the lesson He taught by washing their feet?
This is My commandment, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you love one another.
That was what He wanted to teach them in very practical ways. He demonstrated, as the Son of God—God the Son—coming and washing the stinking, dirty feet of those twelve men, when they should have been doing it.
He demonstrated love. Our serving our brothers and sisters, our, in a sense, girding ourselves with a towel and going about in very simple, hidden ways of washing the feet of our brothers and sisters, is an act of worship to God. It is very pleasing to Him.
So much so that our Lord Jesus looked for this one prime opportunity to drive this lesson home to the hearts of these twelve men.
Our love needs to be real toward our brothers and sisters. Please remember: you do not have to wait until ten or eleven o’clock on Sunday morning to love your brothers and sisters. They are living their lives every moment of every hour of that entire week.
We need to ask the Holy Spirit to give us living opportunities to manifest the love of Christ to our brothers and sisters.
Jesus said, “This is the way the world will know that you are My disciples: if you have love”—selfless, giving, generous love—one to another. That is to be an act of worship.
He goes on in these chapters to talk about our relationship to the world. Worship, in God’s perspective, is responding properly to human authority. That is Romans 13.
He goes on talking about the different kinds of relationships that we get into with people. He points out that there are ways in which you need to deal with these relationships. As you deal with them in Christ, out of the life of Christ that is within you, it becomes an act of worship to the Lord.
I trust that we will see that Paul’s appeal is an appeal to us to see worship as something that includes all that we do.
If we cannot see it as an act of worship, we ought to ask ourselves whether we should be doing it or not. I know that can put us in a straitjacket, but I think we will discover that our God is pleased with a lot of things that we do not think that He is.
There are things that thrill the heart of God that you and I are convinced He does not enjoy. We are convinced that He is an old screw—He does not enjoy having some of these things done. But it is just not true.
Our God is a God who is full of joy and enjoys things. He enjoys us. He wants us to enjoy life, enjoy one another, and enjoy Him. That is to be an expression of worship.
Paul says to the Philippians:
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.
Somewhere, something has gotten missed in this whole matter of our joy in the Lord. It is our concept of who He is and what pleases Him.
I hope that we would allow the Holy Spirit to speak the same appeal to our hearts this morning, that we would respond to this appeal from the apostle Paul to become worshipers and to move our worship out of the Sunday morning meeting to include everything that goes on in our lives.
So often, when you read the commentaries and the various books on the epistles that Paul wrote, they say that what he does is set forth a doctrinal foundation and then afterward makes the practical application.
I do not want to quarrel with them. I am just not sure that it is that cut-and-dried with the apostle Paul.
When he comes here to Romans 12, you can see that he is making some kind of adjustment. But he simply says, on the basis of all that God has made available to us in His Son, all that He has done on our behalf, the appeal is now that you begin to live out of it.
As we live out of it and express the life of Christ in these various ways, God receives it as an act of worship, of service to Him, that brings delight to His own heart.
I would like this morning to make Paul’s appeal personal to us. I would like for you to consider before the Lord this appeal that is being made.
Maybe you have never seen yourself as one who is to be a worshiper. But that is what God has in mind. He wants you—yes, you—with all your weaknesses, all your failures, all your idiosyncrasies, and all the things that you can enumerate.
God has chosen you. He sought you out. He wants you to become a worshiper of Him.
Do you have any idea what happens to someone who worships someone else? You know what happens? You become like that one. That is the real objective anyway.
Sometimes Christians put this thing of worship in such a way that you think God has an ego problem and has to always have somebody tell Him how great He is. That is not the case at all.
God knows that as we worship Him, as we behold Him, as we serve Him, and as we love Him, the result is that we are going to become like Him. That is the real issue.
You cannot outdo Him. You really cannot. You cannot do it in such a way that somehow He gets the best end of the deal. He always works it out where you get the best end of the deal. That is great.
I would like to encourage us this morning to seriously consider making a response to Paul’s appeal: that we become worshipers of Almighty God and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
What I am going to suggest we do is just take a few moments. Quietly consider before the Lord this appeal that has been made from the Word of God. Then we are going to give you an opportunity to indicate what your response is.
But listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit. Is He calling us to be worshipers of our God? Let us consider it in our hearts.
Now, to help us as we consider the mercies of God, whether or not it is not the appropriate response to this appeal for us to offer ourselves to our God as living sacrifices.
I would like to ask everyone to keep their eyes closed, so that everyone will feel free to do what is in their heart and will not be hindered in any way from other people seeing.
But considering the mercies of God and this appeal that has been made, if you have made a decision in your heart today that you are going to present yourself as a living sacrifice, that you are going to become a worshiper of God, I would like to suggest that you indicate that by just standing to your feet in God’s presence.
Now, let us understand, brothers and sisters, that what we have done, we have done as a freewill offering to the Lord. There has been no coercion from man or from anyone, but just an appeal on the basis of the mercy of God.
You are standing before God as a way of indicating that you are giving yourself to becoming a worshiper of the living God.
Father, You see those who have stood here today. Out of their hearts, they have considered how merciful You have been to us.
We have decided that our legitimate response to You is for us to offer ourselves as living sacrifices, as those who will become worshipers of You.
Lord, we ask You that, as we have offered ourselves to You, You will continue to teach us what this means in our everyday living: in our family life, with our husbands and wives, with our children, with our parents, with our brothers and sisters.
Teach us what it means when we are on the job and working with these other people; what it means when we are in relationship to other people in our neighborhood; and what it means in our relationship with our brothers and sisters.
Lord, we offer ourselves now. We do it with fear and trembling, but we are trusting that Your Holy Spirit, even now, will find a way in our hearts to do a work, the result of which is that we become true worshipers, whom You are seeking, who worship You in spirit and in truth.
We thank You for the work that You are going to do in us in making us worshipers. We do it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
You may be seated, please.