Dennis Tuuri

Please stand as we come before God by hearing his call to worship by praying and by singing praises to him. Please stand. If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable, and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and I will cause thee to write upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

Let’s pray.

Almighty God, we thank you for calling us into covenantal worship this morning. We thank you, Father, for instructing us to turn away our foot and our mind and our thoughts and our hands and our work and everything else from doing our own pleasure this day and to turn all that we have in full worship to you now. We thank you, Father, for directing our paths to this place this morning to meet with the covenanted host and offering you praise and worship.

Father, as we come before your holy presence, we acknowledge that we are not perfect, that we are sinful, that we have fallen short of the righteous requirements of your law word. And we come before you, Lord God, acknowledging and confessing that in and of ourselves we are dead men, for the wages of sin are indeed death. But we thank you, Father, that your absolution comes to us in the scriptures, confirming to us that those who have been given faith in Jesus Christ by your election are brought back to life and resurrected in him.

We thank you then, Father, we come before you this morning in resurrected power to offer you worship, to sing praises to your name, to be built up in the faith for the work of the service of the kingdom of Jesus Christ during the rest of our lives. Father, may we be attentive to your scriptures this day. May we open our ears wide to hear what you have to tell us this morning. May we open our mouths wide to sing praises to you.

And this day and always, may we open our hands wide to do the work of your kingdom. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord and to sing praises unto thy name, oh most high, to show forth thy loving kindness in the morning and thy faithfulness every night. He turned their heart to hate his people. He sent Moses his servant. They showed his signs among them. He sent darkness and made it dark.

He turned their waters into blood. Their land brought forth frogs in abundance. He spake and there came diverse sorts of flies. He gave them hail for rain. He smote their vines also and their fig trees. He spake and the locust came and did eat up all the herbs in the land. He smote also all the firstborn in their land. He brought them forth also with silver and gold. Egypt was glad when they departed. He spread a cloud for a covering.

The people asked and he brought quails. He opened the rock and the waters gushed out. For he remembered his holy promise and his service. And he brought forth his people with joy and gave them the lands of the heathen, that they might observe his statutes. Praise ye the Lord.

Scripture is found in Romans 12, verses 1 and 2. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

The younger children may be dismissed to go down to their Sabbath schools. Their parents are desiring and willing that—

Sermons on the liturgy of the church, the worship service, the work of the people as it were, what we do here on Sunday mornings and the implications of what we do here on Sunday mornings for all of our lives.

We began this series by talking about the call to worship itself, that God calls us here. We are here by his initiative. We are here in response to his call and we are warned that if we don’t heed that call on a regular basis, then indeed we have no rest in eternity either. We’ve been called forward to rest in God this day in the finished work of Jesus Christ and to give him worship.

We talked about the implications of that the following week in terms of the day of preparation. We must be prepared to respond to that call correctly on Sunday, getting ready as it were for the day in which we meet the King in special covenantal worship.

We then talked about the fact that when we come before the King’s presence here at the beginning of worship in response to the call to worship, the first thing that we acknowledge is our own sinfulness and our own failure to meet God’s ethical demands and requirements found in his law. And so we make confession of sin and then there’s an absolving word also that is given to us by God and we are convinced from the scriptures that we are absolved of sins as we trust and believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes we do that formally. We’ll continue next week with a formal confession of sin and a formal absolution. Sometimes we do that informally in the single prayer following the call to worship. But in any event, the pattern that we saw in scripture was that when people come into the presence of God and acknowledge that presence, they fall down as dead men. God then raises them back up in new life as it were by giving them absolution and assuring them their sins are forgiven in Jesus Christ.

Our response to that is praise for him. Praise to our creator, our redeemer, and our sovereign who has commanded praise for him and who gives us hearts that are willing to praise him in our new creation in Jesus Christ. And so we have a song of praise and we spoke about the place of hymns in church worship.

Then we talked about the response of reading in the psalms that we have every week as a reminder to us that our lives are to be lived antiphonally in response to the word of God. The psalms are written in antiphonal nature and so when we read the psalms we have the first portion read and the people respond at the second portion. God’s word is echoed back to him as it were by the people and our lives are an echoing back to God confirmation that his will is good and just and holy and perfect and that we are in antiphonal response to him and we respond to everything in the created order that comes to pass in our life because we know that all that comes from his hand and so all is to be understood as his initiative calling us to worship him and obey him in all that we do.

We then talked about the prayer for illumination when we open the scriptures and hopefully I know this has changed the devotional pattern in our families. Hopefully now when you have your devotional time before you read the scriptures you remember to pray a short prayer to God asking that the Spirit illumine the scriptures to our heart. The Spirit is the one who teaches us the word of God and the prayer for illumination reminds us and of course it’s based upon the reality that unless the Holy Spirit illumines the word to our understanding we cannot understand it.

Even the regenerate are called upon to issue that prayer as David in Psalm 119 reminds us of and as various other scriptures did as well that we talked about during that sermon. And so hopefully that’s changed your pattern at home.

Then we talked about the sermon last week and the challenging of God’s challenge word to man’s word that is always a part of the sermon, the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We looked at Jesus’s sermons in the record of the scriptures and he followed the pattern of a reading from the law and expounding that reading from the law by a reading of the prophets. And then he took it one step further to say that all those things spoke of him.

And so we mentioned how in the early church there were at times four scripture readings before the sermon was given: a reading from the law, the Old Testament; from the balance of the book, the prophets of the Old Testament; from the gospel; and from the epistles. And all those correlate together as one word from God. And that’s what the sermon is all about: a challenge word, a united word out of God’s scripture that calls us to conform ourselves to the image of his word.

And today we’re going to talk about the offering and we’ve used a passage that we have printed in our bulletins every week, Romans 12:1. We’ve also read from Romans 12:2. We’ll expound those two verses in a couple of minutes.

Obviously, what we said earlier about the various patterns of the scriptures relative to worship and offerings should come to our minds here. Remember we said that in Leviticus it gives us a theological order to the sacrifices. It begins with the sin offering, which is a confession of sin as the offerer comes before God. The holocaust or burnt offering and the cereal offering—those two go together. The holocaust offering is Jesus Christ and the dedication of ourselves of course in him. The cereal offering is the production of our labors. They’re constrained to bring a cereal offering to God. We bring tithes and offerings to God as we come forward also offering all that we have in the offertory in response to the sermon.

And then the third offering set of the day is communion which is based upon the peace offering found in Leviticus. In this order we’re discussing and that’s the final offering of the day and we have a meal with God, a meal with Jesus as it were during holy communion and we do all those things every Sunday because that’s the pattern that’s laid down in the Old Testament and continued on into the New Testament.

And so we have a set here really of three statements by God and responses by us of offerings. A statement of the righteousness of God and our response of confession of sin. A statement of the requirements of the word and our response of consecration of all that we have and our production in terms of responding to that word and consecrating ourselves to God. And then a statement of the absolution offered in Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins that the scriptures talk about in the sacraments, the sign and seal of all that. And then we have a meal with God. We eat supper with Jesus as it were in terms of the peace offering because he is the one who’s given us peace now through his covenant mediatorial work on the cross.

And so those patterns flow throughout what we do here on Sunday.

Now today we’re going to talk specifically about Romans 12:1 and 2. The fact that an offertory was part of both Old and New Testament worship is quite obvious from just a brief reading of the scriptures. Of course, just a cursory glance from the offerings taken in the Old Testament and deposited in boxes in various historical settings that are told us there in the Old Testament—that the offerings were deposited in boxes in the temple during particular periods of time—to the collection for the saints made on the first day of the week according to Paul’s instruction in the New Testament church.

The pattern of offerings as a part of special Lord’s Day covenantal worship is clear in the scriptures. Our concern this morning is with the meaning of the offering and also explaining why we do what we do here at Reformation Covenant Church. Those of you who are visiting for the first time this morning, what we do with our offering at the end of the sermon is we have the offertory and people actually come forward and deposit their tithes and offerings in the box that’s placed in the front. But they come forward themselves. The plate is not passed to you. You come forward to God as it were and offer all that you have.

And we’re going to be talking about that this morning, why we do it in such an unconventional style. This means then that we’ll be discussing the meaning of the offering and the specific way in which we accomplish that offering here at Reformation Covenant Church. And the means that we will do that with is exposition of Romans 12:1 and 2, which we read as our sermon scripture this morning.

Hopefully you have your outlines there in front of you. The outline is basically three points. The first point is that the offertory involves all of our lives and we have an Old Testament witness there. First of all in sacrificial consecration and we have an Old Testament witness and then a New Testament witness to the truth of that. The sacrificial system as a whole of the old covenant pointed to the entire consecration of the regenerate believer. That’s what was being pictured in that entire sacrificial system.

We list some scriptures there from the book of Leviticus on your outline beginning at chapter 1 verse 4 and then 3:2, etc. And those verses all have to do with the imposition of hands, the laying on of hands of the offerer upon the animal that’s offered to be sacrificed. When commenting on the burnt offering specifically in that portion of the imposition of hands, in his commentary in the book of Leviticus, he says that it was the imposition of hands that made the offering acceptable in God’s sight and in a very real sense that’s correct.

If one did not impose his hands upon the offering, then it was not an effectual offering. We have discussed the imposition of hands before when we’ve talked about ordination of elders and deacons and the imposition of hands in ordination. Remember we talked about how after the Levites are ordained in the book of Numbers and hands are laid upon them by the people, then it says the Levites are to place their hands upon the offerings of the people that are offered for the whole congregation of God’s people.

And the point of the imposition of hands both in the Levites which the Levites do and Aaron does, and then what the individual offerer does with his animal in the old covenant system, the point of that imposition of hands is identification. You’re saying it’s not exactly just getting rid of your sins onto something else. You’re identifying with that animal as he goes to the slaughter as it were of the sacrificial system.

And so that identification is one of the central meanings of the laying on of hands. And this means that this understanding of Leviticus and the imposition of hands—that the sacrificial system pointed to the consecration of the believer as a whole, not the consecration of the animal ultimately, but the person who’s offering it, who identifies with the laying on of hands—is confirmed. This is also taught in the references we’ve given there in your outlines in the book of Psalms and in the prophets.

Psalm 19:14 says, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer,” using sacrificial language in terms of his sacrifice of the words of his mouth. Psalm 50 says, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls and drink the blood of goats. God says, Offer unto God thanksgiving and pay thy vows unto the most high.” It’s thanksgiving that the sacrificial system pointed to. It’s the consecration of the entire believer.

And so Psalm 50 tells us that again. In Hosea 6, we have that talked about. God says, “For I desired mercy and not sacrifice and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” There was something more than just what was visibly symbolic: mercy, the consecration of the entire believer.

Remember we talked about Micah 6 and the three requirements of those people that would come to worship God and be part of the holy hill as it were and part of the covenantal host. Remember those three requirements of men? Well, we found that in Micah 6. And that section began with God saying, “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? How am I going to make appeasement for what’s happened here in our sin? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn or my son for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

The response is no. He hath showed thee, oh man, what is good. And what doth the Lord require of thee? But to do justly, to obey God’s law; to love mercy, to understand that God has graciously elected us to salvation and demonstrate that mercy and understanding of grace to others; and to walk humbly with God, to understand that we’re creatures and he’s the creator. To do justice, to love acts of mercy and kindness, understanding that we have received the ultimate act of kindness in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and our salvation, and then to walk humbly with God as a result of all that.

All these passages from the Old Testament tell us that the Old Testament sacrificial system itself was intended to teach the people—and David understood it and Micah understood it and the people of their times understood it—that the sacrificial system was intended to teach the people that all of their lives was to be consecrated. Okay?

And this is old covenant we’re talking about. Then there’s a New Testament witness also to that consecration of the believer that’s pictured there. Our Savior cited the prophetic interpretation of the case laws. Jesus cited Hosea interpreting the case laws of sacrifice in Matthew 9:13. And what does Jesus say?

He says, “But go ye and learn what that meaneth. I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” And then Jesus tells him what it meant. “For I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” Sinners to repentance. It was supposed to indicate the total consecration of the sinner repentantly to God and brought back to life in him and consecrating his life.

So our Savior interprets the case law of the sacrifices and then the prophetic interpretation of that case law by telling us that it pointed to the consecration of all the person to God and to his service. That’s the backdrop for what we find here in Romans 12 which uses very specific sacrificial language in discussing the believer’s consecration of his person to God.

For instance, the term translated “present” is a sacrificial term that the people were instructed to present their offerings. Same term is used here. It’s a very specific term in terms of the sacrificial system. “Sacrifice,” the word sacrifice here comes from a root word meaning to go up in smoke and so it has reference to the temple offerings as well. We shall deal later with latria, the Greek word translated here as “which is your reasonable form of service,” but it is specifically used—it’s good to point out now—of ones that ministered or served in the temple in the offering of sacrifices.

And so Romans 12:1 and 2 is filled with sacrificial language. And it simply is following this teaching throughout the scriptures that the sacrificial language always meant, was intended to picture, and certainly means now in greater sense because Jesus has accomplished the ability for us to do this once and for all, but all that pointed to the total consecration of the believer.

We have case law, prophets, gospel and epistle here all citing the same essential truth and this truth being brought to clearer and clearer understanding as the revelation of Christ in the scriptures occurs. And you’ll notice here if you’re keeping attention and if we’re here last week that I just did what I talked about in terms of biblical preaching that Jesus showed us. You take the word of God and see that it’s one piece. I give you case law, prophets, gospel, and epistles all teaching the same thing: that the consecration of the believer is pictured in the sacrificial system.

Now the point of all this is that the offertory—the giving of money or the fruit of our production in this case, very similar to the cereal offering of the old covenant—means much more than the consecration of our wealth. It is the consecration of our whole bodies and for that reason we come to the front.

All that by way of explaining why we have you bring forward your offerings. By way of application of this, then you’ll understand now why we do that and perhaps should be more obedient to doing that and do it with a willing heart and understand the symbology of it. That it means the consecration of all that you have, not simply your money or your production.

Another point of application: this should help you to understand why some of us come forward every week. It’s not that we get paid every week and we have to tithe every week. It’s that we understand that when the word of God is preached, our proper response is consecration. And one way of assembling that and signing that is to come forward in the offertory. And so to consecrate ourselves to obeying the truth of what’s been given to us.

We’re people that need that. We’re people that need to put an X someplace and sign off as it were on an agreement. So you hear the word of God preached and you say that there are portions of that are true. There are undoubtedly some portions that are going to be in error every week. But the portions that are true, you understand that you respond in obedience and you sign off on that as it were when you come forward and bring forward a tithe or an offering to God, or really offering yourself.

Now, the scriptures do say that you’re not supposed to come forward empty-handed. And so you can either divide your tithe up or you can bring offerings apart from your tithes and it doesn’t have to be a big deal. The point is you’re supposed to be coming forward not empty-handed with something in your hand to indicate to God your honor, that you’re giving to him your respect and the dedication of all that you have to him. Okay.

Now in the text that we’re discussing here, Romans 12:1, Paul says I beseech you therefore brethren to do this thing, to consecrate yourselves pictured in the offertory. Now many have written on the “therefore” in the text here and it certainly has some reference to all that has gone before. The point is that the word is taught by Paul and then consecration is called for in response to the doctrine that he’s laid out. Paul teaches doctrine and then he calls for consecration.

The word is a two-edged sword, the scriptures tell us, and it pierces us and then we come forward as living sacrifices cut in two as it were by its judgment, wounded as it were, and then raised to life by the gospel proclamations of assurance and comfort. We said that last week. God’s word’s a challenge word to us, right? It wounds us. It shows us our sin and the wages of sin is death. And we come forward as living sacrifices.

But the sermon is also a proclamation of salvation in Jesus Christ. And so we come forward assured that God will accept us in the Savior, not apart from him.

Now if this symbol of the word cutting us in two this way strikes us as a bit strange, perhaps because we always think of the word of God as being used on other people. Now that the sword is used on other people and that others are brought as offerings to God is clear from Romans 15 verse 16 where we read that I should, Paul says, that I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles ministering the gospel of God that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable being sanctioned by the Holy Ghost.

And so Paul did use the word of God to slay men as it were and to bring Gentiles as an offering up to God. And so there’s that application of what we do. And when we come forward on Sundays, it’s probably a good thing to remember that the word that we’ve heard preached and has cut us is also to go out and convert people and slay them as it were with the preaching of the word of God and bring them to salvation in Christ. Very important we understand that. Very important that we try to say that as clearly as possible because there are many people these days who will take whatever you say out of context and say that reconstructionists want to kill people as a way of saving them. No. Okay.

So the offertory is a reminder of preaching the gospel as well. But the word preached is a sword to us first and foremost as we hear it. It pierces and remolds us by God’s grace.

I am very saddened when occasionally this happens—when people either ask questions or give me comments after the sermon that are obviously geared toward helping somebody else apply the sermon. That’s sad to me because our first response to the sermon should be to say, “What does this mean to me? How, what sin in my life does it correct?” Now, we may think of application to others, of course, and that’s appropriate, I suppose, but our first response should be to ourselves, that the word of God reaches to us.

On the other hand, how pleasant it is, and this happened with several of you last week, when people come to me or talk to me after the sermon and say, “Gosh, I really appreciated that, and I’m trying to reform our ways about this. Can you give me some help in trying to apply it?” That really is music to my ears. That’s a sweet thing to see people, and that’s what we are comprised of mostly in this church—people who understand the word of God is to remold and reform them and reconstruct their lives. And as a result of that, then there’s application to others. That’s a good thing.

We have here the same fourfold pattern we talked about before. Remember we talked early on about the presence of God, people falling down dead. We mentioned it earlier in our review. God absolves us and then we’re called to service. And so that’s what we hear. The word is preached. It brings conviction of sin. Hopefully we recognize we haven’t met all the requirements of God’s law word. We fall down as dead men in our minds as it were. We come forward resurrected by God, absolved, tongues from the altar of course being Jesus, or the coal rather from the altar being Jesus. It’s applied to us by God in the scriptures and the proclamation of his gospel. And we come forward then to serve God and consecrate ourselves for service.

Now the text reads specifically that we are therefore to present our bodies. The word used is body. As one commentator has expressed, this is a very un-Greek statement. It’s not a statement that a Greek would make. Unfortunately, it is also far too often a statement that is alien to much of American Christianity in its meaning.

To the Greek and to far too many Christians today, the body is almost irrelevant. The spirit is what matters. We hear time and time again. Now the body stands for all of the man. And this is a very practical exhortation and it means that spirituality is found in what we do with our bodies. It doesn’t say that body and spirit are separate. We’re one person. And Paul uses the term body to speak of that. It speaks to all of our lives, not the spiritual end quote apart from the body.

This is very clear. And yet many heresies of the church fail at this very point. I mentioned that we’re going through world history notes with several of the homeschoolers that I’m teaching. And the early heresies, they fail at this very point. They kept not getting this. Of course, the problem was moral and not knowledge. They kept wanting to say that the body is bad, the physical is bad, the spirit is good. And so much of modern Christianity seems to say that same thing.

Paul makes this point even clearer earlier in the chapter in Romans 6 when he speaks of us yielding the very members of our body themselves, not just the body, the members of our body unto righteousness or death. This means that wherever our bodies go, we are to worship. We’re to worship God by consecrating all of our actions that our bodies perform to him. This means everywhere at all times: the workplace, the place of recreation, the car, the yard, the bedroom, the kitchen, the factory, the corporation, the home office, the homeschool, of course, the polling place.

All these are arenas of holiness, consecration, and service to God. When understood in light of Romans 12:1 and 2, wherever our bodies go, we are told that our bodies are that sacrifice is to be holy and acceptable to God. The sacrifice of the old covenant system must be without blemish. And so if we fail to come to repentance for the sin that God is speaking to us about and attempt to come forward and offer ourselves to God, it is not a holy sacrifice and it’s not acceptable. And the word is a condemnation to people that would do that, who would not reform their lives according to the scriptures.

But to those that do, the word is a word of comfort because it says that if it is holy, it is acceptable to God. Our offerings are acceptable to God of all that we do in Jesus Christ. And what great comfort that should be to us who understand our sins all too well when we scrape aside the veneer of our minds. We understand our sins and we need that comforting word that God accepts us in Jesus Christ and he accepts you as you come forward in biblical response to the preached word in repentance and consecration of who you are.

God accepts the sacrifices of a broken and contrite heart. And you need to know that.

So the believer is consecrated, and the believer also—the offertory implies cultural conflict. The second part of our outline: cultural conflict. That’ll be more clear as we get to the end of our talk this morning. But it talks about transforming us. And you have to understand that here too—this is not necessarily a New Testament concept alone. The Old Testament also spoke of the cultural conflict that would be necessary for the people of God.

Exodus 23:2 says, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil, neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment.” So God says you see a lot of people doing something. You don’t do that thing just because a lot of people are doing it. You’re different. You don’t follow a multitude to do evil.

Deuteronomy 18:9 says, “When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.” You’re separate. You’re a separate people. And of course, so much of the Old Testament laws was all about that cultural conflict because we’re a separated people. Talked about, you know, not being conformed to where you’re going into, but be transformed. Instead, you’re a new creature as a person of God. And so that makes application to you.

Psalm 19 tells us that this consecration happens and this reformation and this cultural conflict is affected as the law of the Lord is understood. We read in Psalm 19, “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is pure, making wise the simple.” See, you’ve got two kinds of people out there: the simple and the wise; the soul that’s not converted and the soul that is converted. And the law of the Lord, the testimony of the Lord is the means he uses to accomplish that.

“The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure enlightening the eyes.” You’ve got, as we’ve said before, blindness and sight by the grace of God through the administration of the word of God through the Holy Spirit. The Old Testament then spoke about that—not just the consecration implied in the offertory, but also the cultural conflict is described in verse two as “be not conformed to this world that you be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

This goes on of course in the New Testament besides the verse we just read. I’ve listed a couple of other citations there. Jesus says in the gospels, again case law, prophets, gospels. Jesus says in John 17:14, “I have given them thy word and the world hath hated them because they are not of the world even as I am not of the world.”

He says that believers, same as the old covenant, are in cultural conflict with another world as it were, another group of people, another system. And we’re not of it. We’re in cultural conflict with it.

Ephesians 2 says, “In times past you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” Okay, cultural conflict. We’ve come out of something into another world as it were, into another society, into another culture.

And then Ephesians 4:17 says, “This I say therefore and testify in the Lord that you henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind. Don’t be conformed that way. Be transformed.”

2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new.” And again, we have the idea of total consecration. How much is become new of your lives? All things. And the technical meaning of that is simply all things in your life are now new.

That’s why it reads in 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Be not unequally yoked,” and it goes through a series of terms there that indicate that we’re not the same in terms of our knowledge. We’re not the same in terms of our consecration. We’re not the same in terms of our rule or our dominion. All those things are different. We’re under the Lord Jesus Christ. They’re under Beelzebub, prince of darkness as it were, and sons of worthlessness. And so there’s this cultural conflict talked about.

There are two options that Paul lays out here for us. The first is conforming in Romans 12:2. “Be not conformed to this world.” The word conforming here means to be molded, to mold the external appearance to something else not intrinsic to the thing being molded. Okay? You assume an exterior that is not part of, not really an extension of your interior. You assume an external set of trappings.

So I was thinking about this. I thought about silly putty. If you’ve ever bought any silly putty, I think it’s silly putty we used to use. You’d push it on cartoon pages from the colored cartoon Sunday paper. You’d pick it off and there’d be the cartoon on the side of the silly putty thing. Well, that’s what Paul is saying. Don’t do that. Don’t be stamped with the image of the world that really does not come out from you. It’s an external trapping. That’s the word conform here and what it means.

The root word conform is schema. It’s the root word of the word that’s translated conform here. And that means the outward pattern of a thing. It’s the root word of schematics of course in terms of electronics. And we are then not to become like silly putty and mimic the world around us.

I’ve occasionally thought of life in America in 1984 as like living in a cartoon or a comic book. And now I guess we actually have that in the movies, right, with Batman and whatnot. I think this is why the image of the world is acted out by all kinds of people who have accepted a lot of external trappings that don’t have any substance to them. We live in a fake society, a cartoon instead of real life in the Savior and so things look absurd around us and it’s because there are all these fake realities, conformance of outward images to a pattern that is of the world and not of God. And in God is reality.

Now this may seem a bit silly to tell us not to become cartoon characters or like silly putty, and it may seem like it should be obvious we don’t do that, but it is a very real problem and it’s very difficult to correct and to avoid, and that’s why Paul exhorts us here. He beseeches us in the strongest terms not to do this.

The term “world” used here, that are not to conform ourselves to, means a system or ethos that is in opposition to Christ. There are two paths, two worlds as it were, two races of men walking around out there. Trench defining the term here translated world says the following: that it consists of this. All that floating mass of thoughts, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims, aspirations at any time current in the world which it may be impossible to seize or accurately define, but which constitutes a most real and effective power being the moral or immoral atmosphere which at every moment of our lives we inhale inevitably to exhale.

All this is included in the aeon or age which is, as Bengel has expressed it, “the subtle informing spirit of the cosmos or world of men who are living alienated and apart from God.” There is a path. There is a system. There is an ethos in which we live and that has an effect on us if we’re not careful to avoid it. That’s the world we live in. The world system, primarily anti-Christian secularism at this particular point in time in history in our land.

This is our nursery. We are all born and usually grow up quite good humanists in America. The sovereignty of God and election that we spoke of the last few weeks is a good case in point here. How difficult for any human being to think of God blinding the eyes of another human being. And yet he clearly does this as the text we’ve read for the last two weeks from Isaiah points out. The major problem in the modern-day aversion in Christianity to predestination, fivepoint Calvinism, and the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God is humanism—having a value system based on the good of mankind or the creature instead of the glory of the creator.

And so our ethical behavior looks to man and not to God for its direction on dress, hairstyle, diet, entertainment, vocation, sexuality, skills in the workplace, and all the little details that make up our life.

Whether or not you believe the dietary laws of the Old Testament are still binding upon New Testament Christians, it is true that the holy, just, and good law of God once, at one time at least, told people what to eat and what not to eat. That law also talked about how we’re to dress. It said some fabrics made of two kinds of material, you can’t wear those. And it said you’re supposed to wear this tassel at one point to the Old Testament community. It talked about people’s dress. It talked about the hairstyles, or beard styles were also addressed by God’s case law in the old covenant. They were told certain things about sexuality as well in that case law.

While some of these restrictions may have had something to do with physical health, I believe it is a strong misreading of these laws to posit health as the primary reason for them. They assert in the first place God’s ethical standards in the details of everyday life—in what we eat, what we dress, what we do, how we live our lives. These issues frequently seem unimportant to us compared to the big issues of Operation Rescue or some of these other things. But these are vital details of our life that God wants us to address.

In this failure in telling us not to conform to the world, instead be transformed by renewing of our minds, even toilet habits were addressed in the old covenant. They were told that in the camp in which their holy army rested, they were not to go to the bathroom in the camp. They were supposed to go to the bathroom outside the camp and take a shovel with them. Every man was issued a shovel to cover up what they had done so that God wouldn’t be offended. It addressed toilet habits.

By the way, we used that verse with our children posted in our bathroom for a while to remind them to flush the toilet. The point is that God’s law addresses the little details of life, all of our lives. It’s these details specifically that must undergo the transforming power of the word of God.

And so the second part of this phrase we’re talking about in verse two reads that you’re not supposed to be conformed to the world, but “be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The transformation here described is very different than that silly putty conformity of the first half of the phrase. The word transformation is the same word used of our Savior on the Mount of Transfiguration. While he normally walked about on the earth apart from the glory of his deity laid aside so to speak, there on the mount who he was in his essence, in his divine nature, shone forth and he was transfigured on the mount.

Now the word is actually the same root word for metamorphosis. And I suppose that in one way to think about this is to think about the caterpillar metamorphosizing into a butterfly. After all, the caterpillar simply becomes in the cocoon what he was programmed internally to be. The point of difference though between transformation and conformity is that the transformation we’re to be transformed in our ethical behavior, that transformation is truth. That transformation accurately reflects what God has accomplished in making us new creatures in Jesus Christ. It is truth. But conformity is a lie.

Folks, the scriptures say we’re a whole another class of people. Here is what it says. We’re a whole another group. We’re a whole different creation. And so we are different from the world around us. They do not have it in their power to be what we are and are becoming. Nor do we apart from God’s electing grace. There’s nothing in and of ourselves that commend us to God. Simply God’s grace does this.

What this means is you don’t go with the flow of the society around you. You don’t wed yourself to the spirit of the age. As one person pointed out, if you wed yourself to the spirit of the age, you soon find yourself a widower. The spirit of the age changes and the word of God lasts forever. And that’s what we’re being conformed into.

Properly understood then, the offertory, with its implied command to be transformed instead of conformed, is to be the radiance of glory of sons of God instead of silly putty images of the comic book world of life, or the facade of life without God. This is a radical event, what we’re talking about here. It calls for a radical change of life. And this change of life is accomplished by means of the scriptures. The word of God is what transforms us.

We read for instance in Ephesians 5:25 that “he might sanctify and cleanse it, talking about the bride now, with the washing of water by the word.” This sanctification, this cleansing, this transformation happens with the washing of the word.

John 15:3, our Savior said, “Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” John 17:17, “Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth.” And so the consecration and the transformation that occurs as a result of the offertory is of the grace of God through the work of God, the word of God rather. The Spirit and the word are again linked if we understand the offertory correctly. He renews us spiritually by the gift of the Holy Spirit through the scriptures.

Now a word about one of the tenses used here and then on to the next point. The word here in verse two where it says don’t be conformed, it actually literally means “stop.” Stop being conformed. And that’s important to know because that’s the state in which we find ourselves normally. We are perpetually conforming ourselves to the world around us in our great spiritual blindness and deafness, particularly here in America in 1984.

The word to us this morning, the confrontation word by God, is to stop conforming and instead to be transformed by applying ourselves to reading, understanding, and applying his word in all that we do.

As you walk forward here in a few minutes, you are to be acknowledging God’s great grace in providing your salvation and his great claims then on the rest of your life. You’re to commit yourself anew to the transforming power of the risen Christ who has caused us to be resurrected in him. There is a movement away from sin in all this. But there is also a movement towards holiness.

Chrysostom wrote of this section of scripture saying the following. “How can the body become a sacrifice? Let the eye look upon no evil and it is a sacrifice. Let the tongue utter nothing base and it is an offering. Let the hand work no sin and it is a holocaust. But more than this, suffices not, but besides this we must actively exert ourselves for good. The hand giving alms, the mouth blessing them that curse, the ear ever at leisure for listening to God.”

And so we’re speaking here of not just a cessation of a bad value system, but a complete reversal of our value system. Christianity is not tacked on to the rest of your life. It is your life and from it true life and who you really are comes out of and is transformed into that. Okay, that’s point one.

Point two: the offertory is the crux of reasonable worship. The word here which is “your reasonable service of worship” has its root meaning in logical, reasonable, rational, and it simply means here—it’s not a complex thought—it simply means on the basis of all that Paul has presented so far in the book of Romans. Paul says our reasonable response then is consecration of our whole life. He has given us a doctrinal primer. He has spelled out man’s depravity, his sinfulness, the wrath of God against that sinfulness, the glory of salvation by grace, and the basis of so great a salvation, and that freely given to us by God, made possible by the work of the One who loved us while we were yet his enemies and gave his life for us, enemies, on the basis of God’s great love and mercy and compassion shown to us.

Then our reasonable, logical, rational response is total consecration of life to him.

Now the same thing is true every Sunday morning. As I’ve—if I do my job correctly, both the liturgical order that we have already examined as well as the sermon both of them have taught us of God’s holiness and righteousness, of our own failure to conform to that holiness, to cut the mustard, to meet the grade of the judgment of God against unrighteousness or wickedness, but also the great grace of God which we now see clearly in our Savior in the proclamation of his grace and kingdom in the gospel.

Remember we said that the sermon confronts our word with God’s word, challenges us, but is also a proclamation of the great salvation brought to pass in the gospel of our Savior. And at this point of the service, then we have been given a double witness to God’s righteousness, our sinfulness, and the proclamation of absolution through the gospel of our deadness and resurrection. And so logically at this point in the service, we move to consecration in the offering. And then in the last song we sing at the end of the offering, which is another statement of our consecration to God and to obey the truths of his word.