The Promise of Transformation!

Romans 12:1-2 (NAS95)

In this sermon series, we are learning how to live like a champion by learning how to live according to the victory of the promises of God. Our guiding image for this series is being a member of an NFL team who wins the Superbowl. We live like champions so that others will come to know the One who gave us His Victory—Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and coming again!

The play of the week is “The Promise of Transformation!” The memory verse for this promise is Romans 12:1-2, when Paul calls the church to respond to the gospel presentation of the first 11 chapters:

Therefore I urge you, 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 transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Today’s promise is directly connected to the Easter promise of John 11:25-26, “The Promise of Resurrection and Life!” and an essential follow up to last week’s promise from 2 Corinthians 5:17, “The Promise of a New Beginning!” As we walk through the Easter Season we are invited to not only believe our own message, but to live in the power of our hope! We are invited to live as the new creation of God, as the Holy Spirit transforms us through the renewal of our minds.

Last week we learned that as the “new creation” in Christ, we are to be compelled by God’s love—this is God’s “good and acceptable and perfect” will for our lives! Being made mature in God’s love—conformed to the image of Jesus—is the goal of the God-ordained transformation process, that you are compelled by love “so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Paul emphasized in 1 Corinthians 2:12-16 that this can only happen through the Holy Spirit:

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.

To be transformed by the renewal of your mind is to have “the mind of Christ” and to appraise spiritually all things—to not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but to pray heaven to earth and work towards this prayer being answered in and through you. Thy will be done! This is a person’s ability to discern God’s will, “that which is good and acceptable and perfect,” as promised in Romans 12:2.

Discernment is the fruit of a person’s spiritual formation; which is the Holy Spirit’s work to transform you by the renewal of your mind as you learn how to be like Jesus by spending time with Him and His people through the spiritual disciplines of Christian discipleship and the spiritual practices of Christian community.  

With that said, we need to be very clear about a specific word in today’s promise: “Prove.” Prove is not an invitation to live your life in insecurity and fear; like one child on the playground saying to another, “prove it!” or like me saying to myself, “I have to prove to others (or to myself) that I belong to God, that I really am a Christian.” Prove, by this thought process, is opposed to grace and of the flesh!

That is not how Paul used the word “prove.” It’s not the pressure cooker of performance! Paul said in Romans 14:17, “For the kingdom of God is not [based on your religious performance], but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” If you are a new creation, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you and where Jesus reigns, there is righteousness, peace, and joy!

Spiritual disciplines in your personal life and spiritual practices in our community life are not performance; they are the unforced rhythms of grace in the easy yoke of Jesus. They are us walking in the character of Jesus Christ—gentle and humble in heart (Matthew 11:29). The practices of faith, personally and in community, are the means by which we learn to work from grace and allow Him to carry our burdens.

“Prove” in Romans 12:2 means that God’s work of transformation in you will demonstrate who you are by your new life of love through your union with Jesus Christ, or as Paul said it, your giving of yourself to God as “a living and holy sacrifice” in response to His gospel invitation to Himself. Because of His mercy…

A new creation is obvious for all to see, like a light in a dark room, like spring flowers after winter, like a butterfly bursting forth as something completely new! New Creation makes the mystery of the resurrection visible for all to see that the Kingdom of God has come upon us.

Jesus is making all things new—can you see that in me?

The Greek word μεταμορφόω, translated “transformed” in Romans 12:2, is where we get the English word metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is “the process by which a caterpillar enters into the darkness of the cocoon in order to emerge, eventually, changed almost beyond recognition.”[1] This is the transformation—you become a new creature—from caterpillar to butterfly via the tomb!

“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”

“In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.”

We have no life of our own! We must be infused, like life flowing through the vine into the branches.

Just think of Jesus’ teaching from John 15, that He is the vine and we are the branches and any branch that abides in Him will bear much fruit, but apart from Him you can do nothing. Listen to Jesus’ words from John 15:8, “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples.” You bear fruit because you abide in the Vine. That’s the Spirit flowing through the vine into you and forming you.  

The fruit demonstrates your abiding in Jesus—your infused life! He proves His life through you! You are called to submit to Him and allow Him to do what He does best—He makes all things new!

Neither Jesus in John 15, nor Paul in Romans 12, are inviting you to live an insecure life of trying to earn God’s favor. Not all! Nothing like that! Rather, you are invited to rest in Him and trust that He will demonstrate His love in and through you.

God is in the process of transforming you from the inside out so don’t manage bad fruit; rather, get to the root and invite the Holy Spirit to renew your mind in the places you are not experiencing Christ’s righteousness, peace, or joy.

“Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit.”

God’s will for each of us is to become a mature disciple of Jesus Christ—the transformation of our souls as yokefellows of Jesus Christ, through the work of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of the Father. This is our spiritual service of worship; our acceptable response to God’s mercy!

We participate in this process through our personal faith practices, called spiritual disciplines, and our community faith practices. It is in these unforced rhythms of grace that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we represent Christ to the world as His Imager Bearers!

Donald Whitney states that the ultimate goal of these rhythms of grace is to transform us:

God has given us the Spiritual Disciplines as a means of receiving His grace and growing in Godliness. By them we place ourselves before God for Him to work in us. The Spiritual Disciplines are also like channels of God’s transforming grace. As we place ourselves in them to seek communion with Christ, His grace flows to us and we are changed.^[2]

His grace flows to us and we are changed.

“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52).

The Kingdom has come and the Kingdom is coming! Hallelujah! Come Lord Jesus and receive your bride unto yourself, holy and blameless, sanctified by your great love and prepared for your glory (Ephesians 5:25-27).

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms, 12.

[2] Donald Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, 7.