Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
This episode returns to Romans and comes to a turning point in Paul’s monumental letter. At the beginning of Romans 12, he turns from the deeply theological discussion of the nature of the gospel that has dominated the first eleven chapters to its practical outworking in Christian life and community.
Although Romans 12:1-2 are very well-known verses—about ‘living sacrifices’ and the ‘renewal of the mind’—we hope you find something fresh, stimulating and encouraging in this discussion of them.
For more on Romans 12:1-2 listen to one of Phillip’s sermons The Mind of God.
The next episode is Individuals in Community. The previous episode is What is a Church?
WHEN GOD CHANGES MY MIND
Romans 12 and a new way of thinking about everything
Tony Payne: Well, where do you want to start, Phillip?
Phillip Jensen: With culture and cultural relativism.
I find it interesting that we don’t do history anymore in our educational system, and so people hardly know about things like the cannibalism that was practised in many nations across the world, including some European countries up until the 11th or 12th century, and in Papua New Guinea much more recently. Or the footbinding practice in China or suti in India or the offering of child sacrifices in South America. These were horrific aspects of culture in those days, and it was the missionaries who made the difference in influencing the locals to stop these awful practices. The warfare in the Torres Strait Islands came to an end as a result of missionaries.
But the picture that you often get these days is of colonialism; of missionaries in the 19th century of imposing this awful British culture on these wonderful noble cultures. And so this business of how we mustn’t interfere with local cultures—well it depends on what the local culture was like.
TP: Christianity always has, in a sense, interfered with every culture. The nature of it from the beginning is that it’s brought with it a whole different way of living, a new and different way of thinking about the world and how we live in the world. Romans 12 is our subject today, which coincidentally talks about the world as well, and about how the gospel of grace will change our lives and lead us to put to death the misdeeds of the body and so on, and starts to talk about that more deliberately or intentionally.
PJ: Yes, because it’s not just changing other people’s cultures, it’s changing your own. Isn’t that what you’ve got to do? If you’re not willing to preach change to yourself, then I’m not sure you should be preaching change to others. Paul’s been arguing about the universality of sin, and now he’s saying, well, that’s been dealt with in our lives through the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, bringing us forgiveness. Isn’t that what you’ve got to do? If you’re not willing to preach change to yourself, then I’m not sure you should be preaching change to others. But if he’s now going to talk about moral change, how does that fit in with the gospel of grace?
TP: He’s been answering that objection all the way through, though. Does it mean if you’re not under the law, then you just sin all the more? Or if it’s all by grace, then maybe we should just sin more so there can be even more grace, and God looks even better by saving even more evil people? Paul’s been dispensing with these objections to the gospel. The gospel frees us to be slaves, not to sin, but to righteousness. So here in Romans 12:1-2, and in the following chapters 13-15, Paul is putting flesh on the bones of what he’s what he’s hinted at in the earlier chapters, to show us what it looks like.
PJ: Yes, and the motivation and essence of the change is in those first two verses. Would you read them for us?
TP: Certainly. Romans 12:1-2:
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.
So it starts off with an appeal to ‘brothers’. Who is Paul talking to there? Is he appealing to Christians?
PJ: Well, Paul is writing to a church in Rome that he knows, as you can see in chapter 16 where he lists out all the names of people well known to him. Paul as an apostle is writing to this church in Rome and appealing to these people he knows. Another modern translation uses the word ‘urge’; he is urging, not commanding. And he is urging by the mercies of God. What he means by ‘mercies’ you need to discover from the context.
TP: He’s referring back to something that he’s just been saying. The concept of ‘mercy’ has been running through the whole book, but the actual word ‘mercy’ first occurs in chapter 9, and then repeatedly in the passage immediately before our verses in chapter 12—in Romans 11:28-33:
As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
PJ: Yes, the whole plans of God are actually culminating and finding their fulfillment in the mercy that he has to all people.
TP: To all, both Jew and Gentile, to all humanity.
PJ: So seeing that there is this mercy on all, how do we now treat each other? I reckon there are three things–one that’s described in the negative and two described in the positive.
TP: I presume the first of those positive ones is in verse one—present your bodies as a living sacrifice, and then he describes what that living sacrifice is like, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
PJ: All the Old Testament sacrifices had to be holy and acceptable to God. That’s the essence of making them pure, unblemished. God was not happy with you presenting a crippled lamb. You had to give the very best to God. And the language of sacrifice is used in the work of Jesus. Jesus is God’s sacrifice. He presented Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement. So all the sacrificial system that you get in the Old Testament helps you understand what Jesus is doing in dying on the cross. But now that language of sacrifice is being applied to us, that we are to present our bodies as living sacrifices.
TP: It’s interesting that it says ‘bodies’ in those verses. So it’s not just about changing the way you think or change your heart or change your attitudes. It relates to your bodily life, it relates to all of you. It relates to what you do. It relates to your whole existence.
PJ: Yes. Back in Romans 6:12-13, it says:
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.
So yes, the Bible is wonderfully physical, and it is so much more than just mystically experiencing the supernatural. I’ve got to live physically, using my body for righteousness, rather than using it for unrighteousness.
TP: Which also takes up the themes of chapters 7 and 8, which were all about the fact that our bodies just have this habitual tendency to keep doing the wrong thing, even if in our minds, we assent and go along with the law of God and want to do the right thing and think the right thing. Our bodies seem to almost have a mind of their own. By contrast with that, our bodies are now to be presented to God as a living sacrifice.
PJ: It’s a shocking idea, isn’t it? What does that mean to be a living sacrifice? You’re not a living sacrifice if you’re martyred, but rather it’s that you are to live out this sacrificial life. You’re to present yourself in every aspect of the life that you have now in this bodily experience as being for God rather than yourself. And so it’s not going into the temple and climbing onto the altar. It’s going to God and committing your everything to him.
TP: It’s going into everyday life. It’s going into your home and into your work and into your church and into every aspect of your existence, and offering it to God, living as if to God in all of those different spheres.
PJ: And that’s called your ‘spiritual worship’, which I don’t think is a good translation.
TP: The Greek word is ‘logiken’, which is from the same family of words that have come up several times in Romans about counting or assessing or reckoning yourself dead to sin. It’s a word to do with rationality and thought. Sometimes some translations have said ‘your rational service’ or ‘rational worship’, which to us seems kind of incredibly cold and calculating. ‘Rational’ is not a positive word for us. But I think we should find some way of translating that emphasizes he’s talking about something that happens in the mind. We’ve discussed more than once, Phillip, in our journey through Romans that in coming to know God through Jesus Christ, God has given us a whole new mind. We set our minds on a completely different thing–on the Spirit–and our mind is now renewed and changed. I think he’s alluding to a similar idea here in the way we now serve God. Our worship of God—putting our whole lives before God, bowing down to God, offering ourselves to God—is now based on a completely new mindset, a new assessment of how things are, a new way of thinking.
PJ: I agree with you. There is a Greek word for ‘spiritual’, which is not the word that is being used here. The word being used here means ‘logical’ or ‘thoughtful’. But I’d like to focus more on the word ‘worship’ here, because the concept of sacrifice and worship go together, as with temple. The world has different kinds of worship in temples all around the world, but the true religion is to visit the widows and orphans in their poverty and keep yourself unstained from the world. That is what James says.
But the word here is a worship word—‘latreuo’—but the way we worship in view of the mercies of God is an offering of our whole selves, our bodies, to God. It’s everything we do with our bodies, and not just that one time in the week when we go to church.
TP: Yes, our worship now is the offering of our bodies to God in every aspect of our existence. It’s not a religious event we go to.
PJ: Which is very different to other religions or to the way in which some people assume church is run, because the world’s way of thinking keeps dominating Christians. We keep saying on Sundays, ‘Welcome to our worship this morning’, as if this is the time in the week when we worship. But that’s like saying, ‘Welcome to our love this morning’ or ‘Welcome to our repentance’. But like love or repentance or any other way of describing our response to God, Christian worship is not a one-off event we do on Sunday. It’s the offering of our whole lives to God.
So we say, “What does it mean that you’ve got to give your all of your life? Does it mean I’ve got to become a missionary?” To which I say, “Well, why do you ask that question? Are you trying to hold something back?” God may want you to be a missionary, but God may not want you to be a missionary. But whatever it might be, whatever I’m doing has to be all given to God.
TP: It’s not as if this verse is calling on a particular superclass of Christians to be particularly super devoted to God. It’s a call to the normal Christian life, which is complete devotion to God in every aspect of our lives.
PJ: That’s right. Jesus says, “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” It is the same call here in Romans 12, and there are two urgings that really reflect that call. One is found in verse two: Do not be conformed to this world, although what the word actually means is do not be conformed to this ‘age’.
TP: What’s the difference between ‘age’ and ‘world’ in that context?
PJ: ‘Age’ is much more referring to the culture of the period that we are living in. For example, if you think of the 1930s you think of the Depression, 1940s you think of war, 1950s you think of white picket fences. But one thing that is common across them all is that this age we’re living in now is in rebellion against God. They’re all just different expressions of the same present age, even as cultures change from place to place and from decade to decade.
TP: And we’ll keep generating various dysfunctional and destructive and anti-God kind of behaviours and patterns and structures in different places and different times.
PJ: We got rid of cannibalism, but that hasn’t changed the basic nature of this present age; it has just removed one particular expression of it to be replaced by others. Here in Australia, we’re in a terrible age of hedonism and individualism and materialism. You can even have the age of idolatry of the family. So it’s got to do with our rebelliousness against God, and however that is expressed at the moment, we Christians mustn’t be conformed to it. We mustn’t allow it to control or direct our thinking, our mind, our life, our way of living.
TP: I notice Phillip that you haven’t used the phrase that has been mentioned in every sermon or talk on Romans 12:1-2 in the last 40 years, which is the JB Phillips paraphrase.
Do not allow the world to squeeze you into its mold and into its own mold.
That’s a very loose paraphrase, but it captures the sense that there’s a conforming pressure that is exerted upon us by this age. The verse assumes that there the possibility and reality of this happening, and that is what they must resist and what Paul is appealing and urging them to do—to offer their bodies to God as a living sacrifice, and not to allow or continue in conformity to the attitudes and behaviours and cultures and identities and values of this age, despite the pressures to do so.
PJ: ‘Conforming’ is deeply ceded into the nature of human society. We are herd animals. We like to follow. You never have to teach your teenagers that they should follow their peer groups.
TP: No, rather you have to teach them to resist peer pressure.
PJ: Yes, and that is what this verse is telling us to resist, because if you are not positively resisting, you’re floating with the current. As the old saying goes, even dead dogs can float with the current. You’ve got to be alive to swim against it. And this is the challenge: do not just accept the way the age is going. You’ve got to say, “Hang on, I’m supposed to be different.” Now, in what way am I supposed to be different? Which leads us to the third point.
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.
This age keeps telling us what’s right and wrong. And at the moment, the Western world keeps changing what is right and wrong because we haven’t got this deep seated tribal cultural morality that comes in so many of the ancient cultures of the world. We’re now in a global culture of Western civilization where every decade there’s a new morality, there’s a new ethics, there’s a new way of doing things, but it’s always been posed to us in moral terms. And so what’s right, what’s wrong? Our teenagers are at loss to work out what they should or shouldn’t be doing, and so it’s very hard for them to fight against what’s happening in the world when they’ve got nothing positive to be said as the alternative. What we need is a transformation, a metamorphosis of ourselves.
TP: Yes, and the word ‘by’ in ‘by the renewal of your mind’ is instrumental. The way we are transformed is by our mind being transformed. It is the means by which the transformation happens.
PJ: Isn’t it interesting that it mentions the mind again, instead of the heart, which is not what we were expecting? So here it’s saying that we’ve got to think differently, but thinking differently is not automatic. You need to do so by testing and discerning. What kind of testing do you think is being spoken of here?
TP: I think it’s the way that our understanding of what is good and right in the world changes as we come to know God, as we we come back to God and stop rebelling against him. We get a whole new framework of thinking as to what is good and pure and right and desirable, what is worth striving for and what is not. As we bring that framework to life in the world, it’s not straightforward. The world’s a complex place where we’re constantly coming up against different situations in life and trying to say, “Well, in this situation, what does the new mind that I have require me to do, or push me to do, or suggest that I do? What is the desirable or good thing in this situation, or what is the right and wrong thing to do?” And so the transformation happens not just as we think a new thought, but as we take that new thought into life and start to live it. And in our bodily existence, as we offer our bodies to God and come to actually discover and put into practice and experience what God’s will is in different situations. So that verse is referring to the lived out experience of transformation in everyday life.
PJ: It reminds me of Ephesians 5: try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Don’t become partners with the world. For once you were partners of darkness, and now you have become children of light. So walk as children of light and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in works of darkness, but instead expose them. I remember my old friend John Chapman saying that people would like to please him after he’d spoken at conferences and the like, and they would bring him a cup of coffee. And that was very kind. But they’d put milk in it, and he didn’t like milk in his coffee but he’d drink it to be nice, but then he discovered they’d put sugar in it, which he also didn’t like. So although they were trying to please him, they were displeasing him.
TP: They had not yet discerned what would please John Chapman.
PJ: That’s right. So in a similar way, I’ve now come to love the Lord Jesus Christ. I’ve come to understand and be the beneficiaries of the mercies of God. I don’t want to go the way of the world, but I don’t know yet the ways of God, and so it’s from the Scriptures where God makes his way known to us. But it’s more than just reading them. It’s reading them and putting them into practice.
TP: Because as you put them into practice, you’re forced all the time into little situations like the John Chapman one, where you’re forced to consider: what does kindness mean now? It means understanding, it means working out, it means actually talking to the person and understanding the person and learning what it means to be loving towards that person in that situation. Discerning the will of God and putting it into practice, and seeing it and recognizing it not only happens as our mind is transformed and renewed through the Scriptures and through the Spirit, but as we actually live it out in daily experience.
PJ: And this is where church is good, isn’t it? Because by gathering with my fellow believers, I hear the word of God, I discuss the word of God with them, and they help me to test and to put into practice and to discern what the will of God is, what is good, what is acceptable. Church has a profoundly important role for Christian development and Christian growth and discerning the will of God.
TP: In a community of believers, I’m constantly reminded and challenged and exhorted and encouraged and corrected, and they help me to understand more clearly what the renewal of the mind means for a transformed life. But also as I actually interact with and love other people in the complexity of their lives and work out what it means to do good to them and what they need now, and how my changed way of thinking means I treat them differently, I’m actually learning what it means to put the will of God into effect.
PJ: And how does Paul now tell us what to do without just giving us a new law? Because this is a response to the mercies of God. This is not the way to get saved. This is not the way to heaven. This is not the way to have some spiritual experience of God. This is the response to the mercies of God, which I can do because I’m fully assured of salvation by the mercies of God. I’m not doing it to get to heaven. I’m not doing it to avoid hell. I’m doing it because, through God’s action in sending his Son, I’m already a citizen of heaven, and I’m not going to go to hell, because I’m more than a conqueror through him who died for me. So this is how you live as a Christian. But I think this is also the introduction to the rest of chapter 12 and on to chapters 13-15 where you get much more practical details of what to do. But if you haven’t seen this as responding to the mercies of God, you’ll see all the practical details as simply rules to live by, which would be a big mistake.
TP: It’s fascinating—this relationship between law and this transformed mind—because as we go on in chapter 13, Paul talks about love being the ‘end of the law’. He talks about there being something beyond law and almost surrounding and encapsulating law that’s bigger than law. And I think that’s also what this chapter hints at, that through the new transformed mind that comes through the gospel and God’s revelation of himself, he shows us a way to live that loves other people in light of who God is and who they are. And it unpacks how that captures what the law was always driving at, but which law-keeping on its own never equipped us to achieve.
