6pm Romans 12:1-3

We heard the opening verses of Romans chapter 12 just now, and in that chapter Paul is turning round to his readers and saying, “Right. Now what are you going to do about it?” In the previous chapters he’s been going through a closely-knit argument about the issues of sin and salvation and then, latterly about the place of the Jewish people in all this. It’s all been about how God has restored  the broken relationship between mankind and himself, and whay he has done about that break in the relationship which has come about through sin.
  And that’s always Paul’s method. You’ll find it in all his epistles, even in the shorter ones- Colossians for example, which is only four chapters long. There you’ll find the first two chapters devoted to the theological argument, and then in chapter three he turns around and says, in effect, “Right. Now what are you going to do about it?”.

As Christians, we have now that relationship with God through Jesus Christ. That relationship is like a cross itself. There’s the vertical part, our relationship with God himself. Then there’s the horizontal, our relationship with other people.
  Paul always puts our relationship with God first. If our relationship with God is not right, then our relationship with other people won’t be right either. We’ve got to get that first foundational relationship right. Paul here in Romans 12 begins with our relationship with God. I urge you brothers...to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship.
  We’ve come here this evening for an ‘act of worship’, and it’s right of course that we do come together in this kind of way- to meet fellow-Christians, to honour God, to lift him up, to direct our attention to him for this hour, through our reading of the Scriptures, through the psalms and canticles, the singing of hymns, through hearing God’s word to us in pulpit-ministry. So, for this one hour we have this ‘act of worship’. And you’ll perhaps want to turn round and say, “Surely, this is our ‘spiritual act’!”
  The trouble is that our western Christian heritage is so bound up with Greek ways of thinking. Paul was a Jew. Paul’s way of thinking was the Hebrew way of thinking. In that way of thinking, the body was equally important as the spirit; equally important as the soul. The Greeks attached great value to the soul. The body was a hindrance to the pure expression of the soul. That’s the view we inherit. It’s our spirit and our soul which are all-important. So we go to wrong extremes about the body. We can be body-denying; it’s something bad which hinders us!  So we should deny our bodies, their reflexes, their wants and needs. These are things to subdue. We should try and suppress them and deny them.  I’m no devotee of Sigmund Freud, who was an atheist. Surely Freud was right in saying how important the body, and especially the sexual instinct is.
 Paul knew all about this. he knew how good and right the body is; But he knew how destructive the bodily instincts are if wrongly directed and not kept under control. They need to eb used in a proper way; not allowed free rein. So wrting to the Corinthians he says this:

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?

temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you. You were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your body.

If we‘re tempted to ask Paul why we should offer God our bodies in that way, Paul has already told us. I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercies. It is because we were ’bought at a price’. Thus our bodies are ’not our own’. We should honour God with them. How many Christians today, sadly, do not do this. We think what we do with our bodies, doesn’t matter. It’s our business. If we over-eat, over-drink, go in for sexual indulgence- well, so what? That, of course, is the way of the world around us.

Paul is going to answer that one. He goes on to say how we offer our bodies. he has a negative then a positive.
First; do not confrom any longer to the pattern of this world. As I think J B Philip’s translation puts it- “do not be squeezed into the mould of this world”. That’s the easy, the natural way. We live in this world. It’s in our face all the time. Its values are there, its blatant godless hedonism is there all the time. We can so easily become a ’chameleon Christian’- camaflauging ourselves, melting into the background. We put on our Christian ‘face’ when we come here to church, or on Sunday. But on Monday it’s too uncomfortable, too demanding! Paul is saying, “No! Don’t do that!”
Then there’s that something more positive. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now, let’s get this clause right. We can’t transform ourselves! .This is January 5th. Many people five days ago made their ‘New Year’s Resolution’. I should think by now nearly every New Year’s Resolution has been broken. We can’t transform ourselves!
  Christianity is NEVER about transforming ourselves. No, It’s about renewing our minds. Our mind IS important. That’s where the decisions get made. What fills our minds will inform what we decide, what we do. If what we do with our bodies is important, then controlling them is founded on what’s in our mind. We have to renew our minds! That’s why we come here (partly). That’e why we (hopefully) read the Bible daily. That’s the danger of too much, or the wrong sort of TV: the visual so strongly impacts the mind. Paul says in Colossians

Put on the new self which is being renewd in the knowledge of ther image of its Creator.

But then there is in our Romans passage the horizontal aspect of our relationships, of our Christian living. God isn’t interested in us just as individuals. The second great commandment is to love your neighbour as yourself. There’s not time tonight to go into all that and Paul spells it out in detail in the later verses of Romans chapter 12. Let’s just pause to note that Paul here, as in other epistles deals first on our relationships with other Christians, then with the world at large. If we don’t realise that we shall get Romans 13 wrong. Verses 4 to 16 deals with our life with other Christians, then verses 17 to 21 deal with our life in the world at large.

But I would close by looking at verse 3, which is really a transitional verse. There he says, by the grace given me do not think of yourself more highly than you ought but rather think of yourself with sober judgment in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. If we looked at the original Greek it’s very repetitive linguistically. What is Paul telling us here? Certainly, we shouldn’t have an over-blown idea of ourselves or our importance. If we do we rob Jesus Christ of honour and glory. I think Paul is meaning a lot more than just that. What I find helpful here is a rendering of this verse in The Message- a modern paraphrase of the Bible, trying to do for the whole Bible what J B Philips did for the New Testament nearly half a century ago. Petersen, the translator, renders this verse like this:

Living then as every one of you does in pure grace, it’s important that you do not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only adequate way to understand yourselves is by what God is and by what God does for us, not by what we are or what we do for him.