Romans 12:1-2

“Oh, to grace, how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be.” Isn’t it amazing how we sing the faith. Sometimes, especially with a classic hymns, we sing the faith, with a power, with a concision, and with joy. It’s one thing to read it on the page and to know it’s true. It’s another thing to sing it. It’s yet another thing to sing it in the presence of other Christians and to hear Christian voices singing in unison that we are all debts to grace. We’re daily constrained by the fact that we are saved by grace.

I want to extend my personal welcome to those of you who are here. Of course, we welcome all for to this service and are thankful that you are with us. I’m particularly thankful for the Southern Seminary Foundation here. I mentioned on Tuesday, our governing board is the board of trustees elected by the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, and they can serve 10-year terms. You know, that’s a long time for someone to give to a calling, a stewardship like this, 10-year term. That means many, many, many days over a course of years serving on this board of trustees. The sentence for the term for a foundation participant may be decades. My heart is filled, and Mary with me, that with so many of these folks who are here for the Southern Seminary Foundation, they have been instrumental in what the Lord has done here for 30, and 30 plus, years. That’s an amazing thing. I want to urge you in the room who are young – and there are many of you, most of you, it’s impossible by definition for most of you to have had any friend for 30 years, a fraction thereof – I just want to encourage you, pray for friends who will be friends to you in Christ for a lifetime. Pray to have friends that will mean so much to you. You’ll share their joys. You’ll share their sorrows. You’ll learn from each other. You’ll keep each other faithful, encourage one another to faithfulness. You’ll exalt in each other’s children. I just want to encourage that today, and this week, is one constant reminder of that on this campus, and I just want to boldly say, I wish this for all of you. Those who are here for the preview conference for Boice College. I just want to give you, and extend, my personal welcome – just absolutely thrilled that you are here. I pray the Lord will use this time, not just in this service but your time on this campus, to move your heart to know what you should do or your loved one should do as you think about the course of higher education to the glory of God for service to Christ. And we pray, of course we think we know the answer to your prayer, but we want you to find where the Lord would want you to be most faithful and ready for a lifetime of faithful service. So, I look forward to meeting you as well.

Our opportunity right now is to meet God’s word, to be confronted by God’s word, to hear God speak. And I want to direct you to the book of Romans, chapter twelve, and in particular to the most familiar verses in this text in chapter twelve, verses one and two. The Holy Spirit speaks through the Apostle Paul, “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.” I’m thankful for God’s Word.

For the experience of my Christian life, beginning when I was a teenager, this text has seized me. And when you know that a text has seized you, you come back to it again and again and again to be seized yet again and again and again. I’ve come back to this text today because of a certain current perplexity. One of the realities of God’s Word, living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, is that you never exhaust it. You’re always learning more about it. You learn, first of all, intertextual connections, and all of a sudden you realize this connects to this, connects to this, connects to this. This is very important for the Evangelical Protestant, and, we think, proper Christian understanding of how to read the Bible. We read the Bible in the context of the entirety of the canon of scripture, the books of the Old Testament and the books of the New Testament. We read it in terms of an overarching story of promise and fulfillment, an overarching narrative which gives the structure to Scripture of creation and fall and redemption and new creation. We understand as Christians that every single word of Scripture points to Christ. But it is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, so it will surprise us, and sometimes it takes a certain controversy to awaken us to something we should have seen.

The remarkable first force of Romans chapter 12:1-2 is the language Paul uses, “I appeal to you, therefore, brothers.” That’s one of the strongest exhortations a Greco-Roman speaker could use. He’s making an appeal. This is not something that begins the kind of speech in the Greco-Roman world, and the ancient world, especially influenced by Greece and Rome. When you get to “therefore,” you’ve already said quite a bit, “therefore” is the turning point in the argument. This is when things are getting intense. It’s also when things are going to get concrete and specific. I think the folks who look to this text, and by the time you get to the renewal of the mind and discerning what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect, I think this is what the Puritans try to describe as practical reason. And then in the entire English speaking philosophical tradition, the emphasis upon practical reason, this is it. This isn’t intellectualism, this is practical reason. This is the right operation of reason, which is corrupted, that is reason corrupted by sin, but we are rescued by Scripture and thus our minds are transformed. It’s the transforming of the entire body, the entire self, but it’s specifically here, just unapologetically, specifically referring to the renewal of the mind.

It begins, of course, in chapter twelve, verse one, with Paul’s appeal, “therefore” – on the basis of everything he said. Well, on the basis of how much he said? Well, the entirety of the book of Romans. In one sense, the right way to see Romans is to understand that you have this incredible manifesto of thick doctrine – thick, not thin – very thick presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And of course, we’re taken into some of the mysteries of the Christian life made visible to us. So much is explained, and there are “therefore”‘s before this “therefore” in the book of Romans. But this “therefore” at chapter twelve, when Paul says, “I appeal to you, therefore,” he’s using that rhetorical device to say, “on the basis of everything I’ve said,” how much of it, all of it, “on the basis of what I have said up till now – only now can I say what I need to say at this point.”

And so what does Paul need to say at this point? Well, I spoke of practical reason. It’s a turning point in the book for practical instruction, practical Christianity – “present our bodies as a living sacrifice.” And of course, the sacrificial system very much in mind, that there’s no such thing as a living sacrifice in the animal sacrifice world. You never meet an animal survivor of the altar. It just doesn’t happen. And so a living sacrifice is one of those oxymorons, two words which put together certainly get our attention because this redefines the entire thing. There’s no more sacrifice of death, as the book of Hebrews will tell us, because Christ died once for all for the redeemed, there is no perpetual sacrifice, there is, instead, an eternal gospel. But there’s still a sacrifice of a sort, and of a fundamentally important sort, snd it’s the sacrifice of self, ego, and the false ideas that had held us captive, to present our bodies as the totality of ourselves, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship. It’s our right response. It demonstrates our worship. It’s one thing to say we are worshiping Christ, it’s another thing to live as his, and it is that to which we are called. How’s that going to happen? Verse two, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” So there’s a very clear dichotomy. We’re going to go one way or the other. We’re going to be marked by one condition or the other. We will either be conformed to the world or we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Those are stark alternatives. And then, and only then, will we discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

When I was a teenager, I was trying to figure out what in the world was going on around me. I was by circumstances of my life, my family moved from one town to another. And it was, at the time, like moving from one world to another. The world I had known up through the seventh grade was a world of basically settled things. The world that I knew in the eighth grade was a profoundly unsettled world. As I sometimes say, I moved from Mayberry to Metropolis – there is a difference. The new world I inhabited in the eighth grade was a world of progressivist educational theory, modern sociology. As I tell people, the school was just remarkably different. You know, in the school I had up through the seventh grade, they had people known as teachers and they were in charge of the classroom and their responsibility was to teach. And we were in a classroom, had walls, had a door. That was your home where you learned. And you sat in rows of desks, calmly, in right order. Disorder was not encouraged, it was punished. I will say that children thrive on order. It was a great experience. I knew teachers, teachers were in authority. I loved teachers. I loved learning. I loved knowing what learning was about. I loved, even as a child, when I didn’t know anything about curriculum, lesson plans, educational philosophies, I loved it when I knew the teacher was mastering the subject and was doing his or her best to help us to learn and to master the subject – and I wanted more. And then there was always a new grade with a new teacher, and new books. In the eighth grade I arrived in chaos, and not only that, these teachers were weird. They didn’t seem to know so much, but they really wanted us to be happy. Big self-esteem stuff going on. “You are so smart.” You haven’t taught us anything, how do you know if we’re smart or not? “I don’t know. We don’t know anything.” Discipline? “Oh, that’s oppressive. We want middle schoolers to express themselves.” And of course, the obvious response to that is, no, you don’t. No, you don’t. Teachers were facilitators, they weren’t really teachers because that’s an authoritative position. And so they didn’t teach, they facilitated. And here’s another lesson I learned, as a 13-year-old, facilitators may do many things, one thing they do not do is facilitate. The motto of the progressive educators in that day was – sounds like hippies from the sixties because they were hippies in the sixties – “No more sage on the stage, man, now just a guide on the side.” It wasn’t much guiding either. I was totally frustrated. And not only that, I had two teachers who were atheists. Now, religious diversity that I’d known before included Presbyterians, and so this is a fundamentally different category. These people are past Episcopalians. The Episcopalians have been trying to catch up with them, but that’s another story. But you know, this is tough stuff here. I got people who don’t believe in God, and then everything else is breaking loose at the same time. Everything’s breaking loose – the sexual revolution, the gay rights movement which started in south Florida in the early 1970s. It was a huge thing. I was in the meeting with my parents at the Miami Beach Convention Center where Anita Bryant, who had been Miss America, and very well known, she had called together – she was kind of a catalyst for pushing back against a gay rights ordinance, and successfully so by the way – and at that event, at the Miami Beach Convention Center – and, you know, my family and folks in my church very concerned about this, wanting to know about this – there was a big bus out front and it had a choir in it that had traveled, and the choir sang, and the preacher of that church – which nobody had ever heard of – named Jerry Falwell, he got up and spoke, and I don’t know who this guy is, never heard his name, but he’s evidently preached before – this is pretty strong – and Anita Bryant sang, and we all affirmed the biblical truth and the necessary actions from biblical truth, and went home. It was very impressive. I can tell you almost where we were sitting and what was happening. I was pretty astounded by the whole thing. But no dots were connected. Nothing. In other words, I didn’t understand. I left there not understanding why there were people who were across some kind of chasm. I mean, their entire view of life is just fundamentally different than ours, but I don’t have any categories for that. I don’t have any way to look at that. And that’s when I was introduced as a teenager to the idea of the Christian worldview, and the necessity of Christians thinking consistently with biblical truth, and that that created and constituted a world and life view that that was very fundamental to everything else. As you think, so you will act. As you think, so you will live. So we’ve got to give attention to how Christians should think Christianly, and you know you only do that – honestly, this is just human nature – Christians only do that when we have to. And we certainly have to when, all of a sudden, we’re surrounded by people who operate from a very different worldview, a comprehensive understanding of life. It helped me enormously. I told the story many times. It was a figure by the name of Francis Schaefer who had this enormous influence because he was writing about just what I was worried about. He was writing about, and speaking about, the crisis I was confronting. You know, you have the collision between two worldviews, and the people who were teaching who were facilitating – whatever they’re doing – they’re operating, the atheist, they’re operating out of a relatively consistent worldview. They, at least in their own minds, have some degree of coherence – things hold together. In other words, they’re not just atheists when it comes to if there is a god, they’re atheist when it comes to if there is a morality.

I was able to start connecting some dots. There was a great chasm between these rival worldviews. Christianity comes with a worldview. And you need to understand that many Christians, I think most Christians, I can say decisively, that most Christians in the United States, up until something like the 1970s never talked about anything like the Christian worldview, because we didn’t have to talk about it when everybody agreed with us. Even people who weren’t Christians were operating out of basically Christian worldview. It took developments to bring an alternative worldview, that was behind the sexual revolution, behind personal autonomy, behind situational ethics, behind abortion, behind the gay rights movement, as it was known then, and it was, all of a sudden, now coherent. You can understand, here’s the Christian worldview based in scripture, and it begins with the pre-existent, self-existent God of glory, and the works of God in creation. It points to creation order as fundamental. This is not just a story for our interests, this is actually the revelation of the very meaning of the cosmos and of human life and of all things visible and invisible in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, right down to “therefore man shall leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Right down to “be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.” Right down to the imago dei. Right down to the distinction between human beings made in God’s image and all the other creatures as part of the glory of God’s creation. The distinctions in creation absolutely as essential as the declarations of creation. I came to understand that, and I lived in it, I seized on it. Over the course of evangelical history since then, just about anywhere you find seriously minded, evangelical Christians, seriously minded believers under these conditions with the challenges around us, Christians have learned to speak of the worldview of the Christian worldview, of a biblical worldview, the comprehensive view of life to which we are committed, and out of which comes all of the basic decisions, we will make judgments. The recovery of worldview understanding was a massive gift to evangelical Christianity. And thus you have institutions and you have churches and pastors and you have professors and you have authors and others, and they’ll say it is the Christian duty, it is the Christian responsibility to develop a truly biblical comprehensive world and life view, summarize this by saying the Christian biblical worldview.

Recently, just in the course of the last few years, there has been a pushback against this. There are authors who are suggesting that it was a detour or at least a false start or something inadequate that Protestant evangelical Christians have become so concerned about worldview. Now, there were pushbacks like this in the 70s. There were pushbacks like this in the 80s and the 90s, and I’ve been able to witness them unfold. And most of it, at least in the beginning, was coming from basically theological liberalism, or an effort to try to define Christianity without doctrine, without specific truth claims. It was at the expense of the authority of scripture, and it basically was at the expense of the entire Christian faith. It got to the point where liberal Christianity during those days had reduced all the Bible to be sweet and vote democratic, basically. But we couldn’t do that. There was this clash of worldviews and there were people who said we don’t have to make the distinction so stark. Because even when you talk about the Christian worldview, and when you talk about the atheistic secular worldview, or when you’re specific about alternative contrasting worldviews to Christianity – if it’s existentialism or situationism or it could even be a variant, a Hindu worldview or an eastern or an Asian worldview based upon very different understandings of history, very different understandings of life – and some were saying we’ve got to respect other worldviews and, almost kind of like a National Geographic, we need to be thankful for other worldviews. Just let me just point out, you can’t be a faithful Christian and be thankful for other worldviews. You can’t be a faithful Christian and be thankful for idols. You can’t be a faithful Christian and say it doesn’t matter. So it was pretty much a liberal/conservative thing. And I’ll be honest, for most of the last several decades, the debate of the Christian worldview has been largely a liberal/conservative thing where the liberals were saying we need to think more like the world, and the conservatives were saying we need to think less like the world. You know, we agree that water’s wet, but we don’t even agree with why there’s water or why it’s wet or what it means.

Alright, over the course of the last several decades, a lot of people developed the understanding of the Christian worldview and really helped Christians to see more clearly and to connect more dots. That’s one of the fun, fulfilling aspects of the Christian life – the older you get, the more you learn, the more you give yourself to learning, the more dots get connected, and that’s very satisfying. They’re those “aha” moments when all the things you say, well, okay, now I understand this. If I truly believe that God’s the author of life, and if I truly believe that God says, “Let there be life,” when human life begins, then I can’t possibly endorse in any way the destruction of unborn human life, and not only that, I have to recognize a human person made in God’s image as deserving the full protection of the entire society because of the sanctity of that life from the moment of fertilization all the way, not only until birth, but all the way until natural death. And Christians, under other intellectual social conditions, didn’t have to think it through all the way to a sentence. You go to a someone in Europe in the 16th century, you don’t even have to have an elaborate argument, everyone agrees with you. It’s when you’re in the presence of those who don’t agree with you, when you see the clash of rival worldviews, that’s when things get hot.

Lately there’s another wave of attack upon a concentration on a biblical worldview or a Christian worldview. It’s pretty assertive. It’s coming in the form of books that are gaining traction and books addressed to Christians saying that the Christian worldview is, some are arguing, kind of a detour from faithful Christianity, and some are saying it’s inadequate, it’s not enough on its own, and there are others who are saying it polarizes because of the fact it shows the polarities, it shows the divisions, it shows the antithesis – that’s a good Christian worldview term – and emphasizes the antithesis rather than indicating what we share in common with people who have other worldviews, instead, Christian worldview thinking tends to accentuate where we have differences, and so missiologically, morally, theologically, spiritually, the Christian worldview as a concern is a diversion and perhaps a waste of time compared to some other approach. Well, I’ve been aggravated by these books. It may show. I have been frustrated with these books, I think some of them, and I’m thinking of one in particular, I don’t think it honestly presents how the concern for Christian worldview among evangelicals emerged and how it functions. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how you can be a faithful Christian in this age and not pretty much every waking hour be committed to believing and living through a Christian worldview in the lens of biblical Christianity, understanding we do live in the midst of a giant antithesis. There’s one part of their critique, though, that I think has traction. And so even though their ambition may be to try to shift evangelical concern to something other than a biblical worldview, that is what I profoundly do not want to do. One critique, one dimension of the critique upon reflection, I think does have some traction.

You look at Romans chapter twelve, look at verse two, “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.” So you have the rival worldviews. It’s made very clear here. You see the confrontation, you see the thesis and the antithesis. And it’s interesting that Paul begins rhetorically with what we are not to do – very common in the Greco-Roman speaking rhetorical tradition. It’s common also in the Old Testament in passages. Don’t do that. Do this. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. The default is to be conformed. It takes no effort to be conformed to the thinking around us. That just comes naturally. It’s seductive. It’s culturally driven by dynamic of agreement. The easiest thing is just to go along, no doubt about that. The easiest thing is to think like everyone around you thinks, meaning the society. That’s the easiest thing. But Paul says, that’s what you can’t do. And what Paul is talking about here is the entirety of what he said in the book of Romans. And we know that because he said, “therefore,” on the basis of everything that came before. And what came before is this declaration of God’s saving work that was accomplished through the substitutionary atonement accomplished by the Son as part of the Father’s will from before the creation of the world to redeem a people through the blood of the lamb. It is ours by grace. We’re saved by grace alone in, in Christ alone. Therefore, don’t be conformed to the world.

The gospel is effectively betrayed when Christians live like worldlings. It’s a repudiation of the power of the gospel. And Paul is so intent on demonstrating the power of the gospel. It is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe to the Jew first and also to the Greek, to the Gentile. The power of the gospel is betrayed by those who are conformed to the world. So that’s important for us to know. You betray Christ when you’re conformed to the world. You betray Christianity, you betray God, you betray the gospel when you are conformed to the world. And in order not to be conformed to the world – what is Paul’s positive exhortation – be transformed by the renewal of your mind. So the opposite of being conformed to the world is not just being conformed to something else, it’s far more powerful than that. It’s transformation, the transformation of our minds. It’s the transformation of our totality. “But be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Now that renewal of the mind, I think it is just undeniably intellectual, cognitive. It’s based in truth, based in God’s revelation. It’s based on the truths of the gospel that Paul’s been articulating so symphonically in the first eleven chapters of Romans, it ends, by the way, with this phenomenal doxology in verse thirty-three of chapter eleven. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom of God. How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor, or who has first given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” That verse, verse thirty-six, is one of the most comprehensive you can find anywhere in scripture. Paul brings that portion of his argument together with a declaration that everything comes from God, everything is from him, everything holds together through him, all things teleologically, that is in the end of all things, the thing to which they are pointed is God. They came from him through him and all things eternally will glorify him, be accountable to him, to him be glory forever. Amen. Then Paul says, “I appeal to you brothers, by the mercies of God to present your body the totality of who you are as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

So I said I think there’s one issue that has traction. I think there’s one critique that does have traction, and that is the critique that the Christian worldview, if we’re not careful, look each other in the eye, if we don’t remind ourselves that it’s not a mind game, then we can turn it into one. Okay? So what do I mean by that? I mean, it is possible that there are people who operate out of a Christian worldview who aren’t Christians. And actually we know that. And in the society around us, one of the reasons why you didn’t have to talk about so many of these things, and now you have to talk about them in an urgent way, even with your own neighbors, is because even if your neighbors weren’t believing, regenerate Christians, faithful Christians in a local church, they still basically held to so many of the same judgments based upon the revelation of God in scripture. I mean, they may not have known Christ, but they did know male and female. They may not have known Christ, but they had a clear, innate knowledge that was also affirmed by cultural authorities of what marriage was. And so basic morality influenced by Christianity channeled through Western civilization, it led to a situation in which most people basically agreed with us on most things, even without the gospel, and they don’t anymore. Christians are marked by belief in these things, but not just that. I’m saying I believe we need to hear critics and take them seriously. We need to know. If we are at fault, if something’s lacking in our understanding, then let’s fix that. If there’s something lacking in our faithfulness, let’s fix that. And so I want to say, I think one of the critiques of Christian worldview thinking and Christian worldview teaching, that is that now marks our time, it’s people who say it’s not enough merely to believe these things, it’s not enough merely to know these things, it’s not enough merely to give affirmation to these things, if it’s separated from a faithful Christian life. I can’t refute that argument.

For the sake of time, I want you to turn with me to the book of Ephesians, chapter four. Let’s try to connect some dots. Beginning in chapter four, verse seventeen, we read from the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians by the Holy Spirit, through Paul to us, “Now, this I say and testify in the Lord that 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 blindness, their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learn Christ, assuming that you heard about him, and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirits of your minds and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” We could continue in that passage, but for the sake of time, this is the other place Paul talks about the renewing of the mind. So understanding that we are to interpret scripture by scripture, this is really going to help us. You take Romans 12, and you take Ephesians 4, Paul points us to the renewing of the mind in both of these passages. This is the same apostle speaking of the same Christ, preaching and defending and teaching the same gospel, but it’s a little different here in this context. The passage is a little longer. The context is slightly different. Here in Ephesians 4, Paul writing to the Ephesians in the context he’d been talking about, the body of Christ, he gets very practical, and this has to do with how Christians live. He writes to those Christians in Ephesus and says, “Now, I’m going to tell you this. I’m testifying in the Lord.” Strong words here. He says, “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. There was a day when you walked just like the world walks. Remember, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Here you have Paul say, “You can’t continue being conformed to the Gentile way of life, which once you knew ,a pagan way of life, which once you knew.” And so there’s an incredible parallelism in this. There’s a symmetry here. Paul’s giving us more. In Ephesians 4, speaking of the Gentiles, he says, “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart.” They’re darkened in their understanding. They’re living out their worldview. They are. We all do. They’re living out their most basic beliefs. You may call them unbeliefs, they’re living out their unbeliefs which function as their beliefs. They live out consistently. What are their moral principles? Well, how do they live? What is their understanding of life? How do they think? How do they live? And you notice Paul here speaks to Christians as those who once were similarly alienated and darkened in understanding. He attributes it to human sinfulness, the hardness of their heart. Look at verse 19, “They become callous.” Notice the moral point here, “They have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.” Okay? So, so now we understand that the worldview, the secular worldview, the unbelieving worldview, the pagan worldview that once marked, not only the world, but also those who, until the gospel walked in the same way, it’s due to darkness, it’s due to the hardness of heart, and it’s demonstrated in how they live. They give themselves up to every kind of sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

Then Paul says, “But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you heard about him, and we’re taught in him as the truth is in Jesus.” He speaks of putting on and putting off. It’s not, in this case, just no longer are you conformed to the world, you’re to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, in this graphic language here in Ephesians 4, Paul speaks of the same process of the same requirement for Christians as a putting off of an old self and a putting on of Christ, that the old belongs to your former manner of life and is described as corrupt through deceitful desires, and instead, here’s the renewing, “and be renewed.” That’s the contrast. “Be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” We’re to put on a new self, created after the likeness of God. And notice what’s said here, “in true righteousness and holiness, as God is righteous and as God is holy, so his people are to be also.” And so you notice here, this is about Christian truth. This is about the necessity of doctrine. This is about how we are to think, but it’s translated into how we live. So much so, that the distinction between the pagan, the former Gentile existence, and the Christian existence is in the fact that the sensuality and the immorality and the going after every immoral thing that marked the past for the believer cannot mark the present. So much so that it’s a putting off of the old self and a putting on of a new self. It’s a transformation. What does Romans 12 look like? Well, Ephesians 4 helps us to see that what it is to fulfill, what it means to prove what is the will of God, that which is good and excellent and perfect, it is so transformative. It is so distinct that it’s like taking off one self and putting on another self. We are dead to self and alive to Christ, transformed by the gospel.

But notice again, verse 23, and to be “renewed in the spirit of your minds,” as in Romans 12, “by the renewal of your minds.” Transformed by the renewal of your minds, here also, renewed in the spirit of your minds. Okay? What I want share with you is the fact that sometimes our critics have a point.

Let me tell you what they’re not right about. They’re not right when they assert that a focus on the Christian worldview is wrong, they’re not right. We can’t be faithful as Christians, we can’t even experience the renewal of our minds unless that means that based upon the truth of God’s word, the power of the gospel, we are holding consistently to God’s truth and learning how not only to think as Christians, but to live as Christians. So that gets to the next point, and that is that there are people who might basically agree with the Christian worldview who are still basically dead in their sins and trespasses. And there are some who would say, “I hold to this entire system of truth,” but in their moral lives, they betray it. Paul here doesn’t just say, “Exchange one ideological understanding for another.” He doesn’t say, “Exchange this set of ideas for that one. All’s done.” He says, “Put off the old self, put on a new gospel self.” I think that’s exactly what he says in Romans 12.

What I want to say is, I am not only as committed to the importance of the Christian worldview and to Christian worldview education and Christian worldview understanding as fundamental to what it means to be a faithful Christian in this age. I not only believe that as emphatically or more emphatically than ever, but I also believe it’s not enough just to say, you have to think differently. It’s good to be reminded if only the claims of Christ change how we live as profoundly as how we think. Put off the old self, put on the new self. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It is all to the glory of God. And we would be lost to understand any of this if God didn’t love us enough to make it clear. I pray this morning that the truth of God’s word will penetrate the hardness of our own hearts and to the glory of God and for faithfulness in Christ’s church, we will be conformed to His image, not just in how we think, but, yes, in how we think, made evident in how we live to Christ’s glory.