February 18 2024
Romans 12:1-2
One thing that I can easily admit is that I watch a lot of football. So it goes without saying that I also watch a ton of insurance commercials. I really laughed at the one where a mother and her grown daughter are talking and the daughter tells her mother that she has saved hundreds of dollars through switching her insurance. The mother says that she will make a note of what her daughter is telling her on her cell phone. So she gets out a Post-It note and she writes the information down on it and sticks this note to the back of her cell phone, where she has put about ten other such notes. Even though its poking fun at us less than tech savvy people, the point is that its kind of funny when people still hang on to the old way of doing things, the Post-It notes, even though they have something new like a cell phone which can keep notes if you knew what you were doing.
I think Paul could relate to the truth that this commercial points out because he too was surrounded by those who were sticking to the old ways when something new and far better was at hand. The question people asked Paul was this: now that we have been given grace by God, this forgiveness of our past and the favor of welcoming us home so that we have a hope and a future, what are we supposed to do now, just keep on sinning because, hey, God’s got us covered? Or maybe we are supposed to go back to keeping the law, you know the Ten Commandments and all that? Paul responds to questions like these just like we responded to someone who puts Post-It notes on a cell phone, like its just weird. This is how Paul begins the sixth chapter of the letter to the church at Rome, with this nonsensical question that people would ask him when they discover grace and see God’s offer like some kind of get out of jail card. To such thinking Paul responds by saying that by no means should somebody do such a thing because how can those who have died to sin, the old Post-It note way of living, continue to do so when they have been given something new, something as different from our old way of life as a Post-It note is from a cell phone, a very new way of living. Paul then proceeds to answer this question, ‘How are we supposed to now live since through God’s grace we have been given a very new way of living? The answer to this question is what Paul gives to us six chapters later, here at the beginning of the twelfth chapter, which at least tells you that the answer, it’s complicated, so we have to go slow and think about what Paul is telling us. This is why we are looking at these few verses as we come to the last segment of our series of messages, called, Think.Good.Work. The gist of these messages is that before we set off to do the good works God commands of us we first have to do a little thinking to get our minds in the right place.
We see Paul stressing this necessity of thinking when he states that we are transformed by thinking a new way about God’s grace, his forgiveness of our sins and the favor and welcome into the life of God. For us to really wrap our heads around this new way of thinking, Paul tells the grand and glorious work that God is up to. Paul reminds us that all of us start out as people enslaved to sin. Even the people of Israel, God’s own people who had been given his law, were ensnared by sin. Into this rather hopeless situation came a cross. There our old self, the one enslaved by sin, was crucified right there upon the cross when Jesus died for us. Now, if we can know that we have died a death like Jesus died then we can rest assured that we will be united with him in a resurrection like his. This is the story that is reenacted again and again any time the church brings a person up through the waters of baptism. The church witnesses one who was united in the death of Christ and is now raised up to live with Christ in resurrection life. Once they had lived under the slavery of sin but now through uniting with Christ in his death and rising up into new life they are free. The question for all those who are baptized is, just what are we to do with our freedom? Paul gives us, in the sixth chapter, this picture of two kings, King Sin and King Jesus.The question for us then becomes, in our freedom, just which king will we stand before and offer ourselves to be their servant. Who will you now serve, this is what all who have been baptized must consider as people who have a new found freedom.
This hope Paul lays out here, that we are able to be free from the power and control of sin is a foundational belief of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. Wesley preached that because we have died with Christ and are no longer slaves to sin then at last we are indeed able to live righteous and holy lives. This is our hope of being able to break free from addictions and our former ways of evil living to at last live in the power of the resurrection, united always to the Spirit of holiness. So, if living free in a resurrection reality is a possibility for us then we are left wondering, just how can this become the reality we live in? I mean, we don’t just want to be caught in this endless cycle of falling back into sin, repenting and coming back to Jesus, receiving his grace only to fall into sin again and repent again, doing nothing more then spiritually chasing our tails. Here is Paul’s answer: God’s mercy is what leads us to have an altar’d state of mind. An altar’d state of mind is one where we stand before King Jesus and we offer him not just our service but we give him our whole self as an offering upon an altar in our loyalty to God. This giving ourselves to God in total abandonment, this is just what makes logical sense when we consider and think and calculate just what God’s mercy is worth to us. In speaking of God’s mercy, Paul is speaking of an attribute of God that is different from God’s grace, which is God’s favor toward us, those whom he has forgiven by the blood of Jesus. The connection between God’s mercy and his grace is that his grace flows forth from the deep well that is the mercy of God.
The mercy of God is at the very core not just of what God does but mercy is who God is in his essential nature. This is why when Paul speaks of mercy in the New Testament, he has in mind the name of God that is found in the Old Testament, his steadfast love and faithfulness. God’s unchanging character is that he is always a God of steadfast love and faithfulness. Both words are used together throughout the Old Testament in order to enhance the meaning of the other so that we know that our God is faithful because of his love for us and that we also know that our God loves us and he demonstrates his love through his ever faithful presence. This is just who God is, and it does not matter if we respond to his loyal, faithful, love with a loyal, faithful, love of our own, or whether we do not respond at all, God’s love for us remains. This is what the whole story of Israel proves to us that God in his love is always faithful to keep his promises even when those he is faithful to are blatantly unfaithful in their love toward God.
So, yes, God is faithful to us, and he loves and wants the very best for us. This is why God has always had a special place for us, a destination Paul tells us that was there for us from the very foundation of the world. This place of wonder is called glory. This is the truth Paul tells us in the ninth chapter of Romans that God makes known the riches of his glory for us who are his vessels of mercy, those whom he has prepared ahead of time for life in glory. This same idea is found in the eighth Psalm where the writer states, “Yet, you O God have made humans a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned them with glory and honor.” This is where God desires to take us, think about that for a minute and consider just how wild such a claim really is! Yet this is where God’s mercy begins, with his always having a special place for us, and God is going to stop at nothing until at last we are set where we have always been created to live, there in a place called glory.
So, the mercy of God is his continual work of moving us from where we are at, people enslaved to sin and he brings us from there all the way until we at last are a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor. Again, lets stop and think about what God desires to bring about in my life and in your life? It is hard not to be in awe of this God who loves us. Paul, in speaking of God’s mercy, uses three different phases to speak of the work of God’s mercy: his call, his justification and his glorification, as we find at the end of the eighth chapter of Romans. In the following chapters of Romans, Paul elaborates on these three phases of God’s mercy by using the story of God’s people, the Israelites as a demonstration of the faithfulness of God. God’s call for example, is heard when he heard the cries of his people and he sent Moses to call his people out of slavery, through the waters to new life. You see, we have a God who talks to dead people as far-fetched as that sounds. Yet, listen to Jesus who, in the fifth chapter of John, says, “…the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.” Jesus, is not speaking of the death we will experience at the end of our life, but rather he speaks of the sentence of death we are under because of our slavery to sin. While we are as good as dead, enslaved in our sin, the voice of God calls us to come out of the tombs of death into life.
God not only calls us out of death, but he calls to us in anticipation of a response. What messes up our response to hearing the voice of God is our fear of judgment, our sheer unworthiness to come into the presence of a holy God. To speak to our concerns of condemnation, Paul writes of the experience of the people of God, who in their sin had broken their covenant with God and as God had promised, were sent into exile far from their home. This is an image of death. Yet, this was not the end for them because God told his people, in the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, that even in exile, in a very death like situation, even there if they heard the voice of God and trusted that voice, they could once again experience the mercy and compassion of God. But we have to ask, how could they find the courage to trust God? The answer is that in thinking about their situation the people of God would at last realize that even though they had broken their covenant with God, and even though he had every right to walk away from them, still, God went beyond what was required by the covenant, because God in his mercy remained faithful to his people out of his great love for them. This is the perfect love of God. John, in his first letter, the forth chapter, writes this about the perfect love of God, “By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in the world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” This perfect love of God is the love of the cross, the love which held Jesus there so that by that same love we might be held by him who died and was raised for us. Paul tells us in the eighth chapter of Romans that the Spirit takes hold of us in our weakness, and through are allowing God in his love to take hold of us, the rightness of our God becomes our own.This is how God justifies the claim of our being righteous, because we trust him to take hold of us and lift us out of sin.
So, God calls us out of death and into life and through his perfect love which loved us even when there was no good reason for God to do so, we yield ourselves to God and allow his love to take hold of us so that as Paul writes in Second Corinthians, the fifth chapter, “the love of Christ controls us, because we have made up our minds that one has died for all therefore all have died; and he died for all so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but live instead, for the One who for their sake died and was raised.” Can you see how the mercy of God can lead us to have an altar’d mind? We no longer live for ourselves, we can offer up all of who we are and what we have to God because it just does not make any sense to live to gain anything for ourselves especially in light of glory. You see, the God who has called us out of death, and by his love caused us to place our faith in his strength, this is the God who will not stop until we at last are where God has always intended us to live which is summed up in the word, glory. You see, our hope of glory changes everything. Again from Second Corinthians, Paul says, “…this light and momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory which is beyond comparison.” This is why the love of God refuses to let us go because he desires more than anything to bring us to this place that has been prepared for us before the foundation of the world. It just makes logical sense that we should give all that we are, our heart, our treasures, even our very lives if necessary, as an act of worship to God, its just a no-brainer. If we just allow God’s mercy to overwhelm our minds, then when we stand before King Jesus, the decision to offer him all that we are as a pleasing and acceptable offering is an easy decision, so easy, to quote another insurance ad, that a caveman can do it. If we don’t want the world to force us into its mold of those who think the world is all about how much you can get then we must stop, and consider this mercy of God, so loyal, faithful and true. It is God’s mercy that causes us to not only have an altar’d state of mind but to have an altar’d way of life as well. So let us be done with trying to fit ourselves into the mold of this world. Let us live instead as people who know that because of the wondrous mercy of God we are indeed bound for glory! Praise be to God. Amen!
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