Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
**Pastor Dennis Tuuri**

Sermon text today is Romans 12:1 and 2. Romans 12:1 and 2. Our topic will be worship and work. This is the second part of this particular sermon. After four weeks interruption, we return to it. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

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 reasonable service of 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.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. Bless us now with an understanding of it, but more than that, Lord God, transform us by it in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Please be seated.

There’s a recent series on PBS on topic was the Roosevelts—FDR, Theodore, and what was her name?

Eleanor. And forgetting the politics. Okay. Although there’s lots to learn from the series on politics by the way, but forgetting the politics. I was sort of struck by one part of it after FDR is struck by polio. He at some time after that trying to recover, trying to do what he could to get his legs back, he went to a hot springs, ended up buying the hot springs property in a hotel there. And it became then a convalescent home or a place where polio victims could come and try to get some strength back.

And there were a lot of children but also a lot of adults there. This was in on Pine Mountain, Georgia. And the property was located there. There was a place there that the series showed, a high point that you could go to and there’s actually a statue of FDR there now, where you could go and see this tremendous view of the surrounding area from what was called Dowel’s Knob. And so what he would do would be when children particularly or adults were discouraged by the condition they were in, he would take them up to Dowel’s Knob and they’d see this beautiful majestic view and panorama and it would give them hope and encouragement.

It’s interesting to think about those experiences of FDR being not just you know feeling for somebody else going through pain but going through the same loss of hope as they went through because of his polio and him then becoming a source of hope and encouragement to those fellow victims. How there was to some degree you can see preparation then for his work as president as the nation went through the great recession or depression.

Now, I don’t want to talk about the politics. Don’t want you to think about him. My point in bringing this up is that’s where we go every Lord’s day. We go up on Dowel’s Knob. We go to a high place. We ascend into heaven from a heavenly perspective and we look at our lives in the world. We come through a week in which we suffer some of us some real traumatic difficulties, others small problems, problems that everyone has.

Though they’re common in this fallen world and despair and depression and loss of hope and struggles these are commonalities of life right we have victory in Christ and every Lord’s day we go up to Dowel’s Knob and we get this heavenly perspective on what’s happening and it puts things in perspective for us and it gives us hope it gives us encouragement we sing these wonderful songs of praise we hear these wonderful comforting verses from God about who he’s creating us and to be in Jesus Christ, how he’s provided eternal mercies that we just sang about and as the text talks about as well.

And we’re up there. See, we’re on that knob. Even though our life might have been discouraging this past week, we’re there. We see from a different perspective. And hopefully for you, for your children, hopefully this is a day, this is a weekly occurrence where we enter into renewed hope from a renewed perspective.

Interestingly, Dowel’s Knob was actually used for open air church services by Dow. He was a farmer in the early 1800s and he would go up there with his slaves and they would jointly celebrate worship in this open air worship service that he would conduct on Dowel’s Knob.

I didn’t know that when I thought about using this as an illustration for worship, but there it is. And so Jesus has led us up to this hill. We’re his servants. He’s giving us hope, rest, comfort, and a renewed sense of anticipation of what he is doing in the world through our worship and that prepares us for the week and prepares us for eternity.

Essentially, today’s text gives us some imperatives that we’re supposed to do, but the foundation for those imperatives are the mercies of God. We’ll talk more about that in a couple of minutes, but that’s the basis. He says, “I therefore entreat you brothers by the mercies of God, right?” Which he’s expounded in the previous chapters in Romans. And on the basis of that, at then we do things. We’ll go into the week. We’ll leave Dowel’s Knob today, we’ll leave the mount of transfiguration and we’ll go out back into our labors. But we’ll do so with a renewed appreciation for the eternal mercies of God.

And on the foundation being laid in those mercies, we’ll then engage in the stuff that he tells us we’re to engage in. So that’s what I think is going on here. These mercies of God.

Now this sermon and the last one are really about properly seeing the sequence of worship in our liturgy, formal Lord’s Day worship, and seeing the significance of that for our work. We’ve laid out a series of sermons talking about the incredible image bearing capacity of work, giving a high stature to all kinds of work. And now we’ve warned against idolatry of work, finding our meaning, salvation, our core identity in what we do as workers and in our vocations. And one way we can avoid that is by remembering the sequence of our worship service. And it is actually the sequence of Romans 12 here in these few verses too.

He begins with the sure mercies of God, right? Bases it on the mercies of God. Then he tells them to be renewed in their mind through God’s word. Right? So we now have the word preaching, renewal of the mind. And verse three, which I haven’t gotten to, we’ll talk about at communion, talks about the significance that we are now part of a body. Okay? And so the beginning of the disciplining of our minds and retraining and transformation of our spirits is a knowledge of our corporateness, our community together. And so it moves right through the basic sequences of our worship.

We begin with the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. We move on to the preaching of the word, which transforms us, gives us that heavenly perspective and informs us. Every week progressive sanctification is being worked out. We see things from God’s word and it changes our lives. And then as the service moves to its conclusion, we’re rejoicing together and at rest in community. That flow of worship places work preparation for our vocations, all of them, including our what we would call our employment.

But it places that after the foundation has been laid through the security of knowing that our sins are forgiven not through what we labor to do but rather through the mercy of God, the grace of God. The gospel is that good news that we cannot earn right standing. We cannot attain identity in and of our work, but rather it must flow out of the recognition of the gospel of God’s mercy to us. And so the worship service reminds us of the placement, the proper placement of work.

Okay? And it prevents us from seeing work in an idolatrous way. And I think that’s one of the implications of the overall view of our liturgy as well as the sequence of Romans 12:1-3.

Now, I want you to take a minute and look at your order of worship, one of the back pages, the announcement page. Can you look at that? And do you see the prayer requests over there? I was explaining to someone this morning why they’re laid out that way. And I was embarrassed that I haven’t talked about this more, but you see over here, right, the prayer requests. And you’ll see there’s four categories. Have you ever noticed this? Probably have, but maybe you haven’t thought about it. So it’s worship, right? Then it’s mission, then it’s discipleship, then it’s community. That’s our strategy map.

If you’ve ever seen the strategy map of RCC developed whatever 15 years ago or whatever, or have looked at it or have heard me talk, heard one of the elders here talk about the flow of worship. This is what’s going on. Worship prepares us for mission, discipleship, and community. And as I talked about forgiveness of sins, and then the preaching of the word and then the Lord’s supper. That is the same flow. It’s mission. We’re forgiven. The mercies of God are extended to us that we can go on mission for him. Right? Then it’s discipleship. Figuring out how to do that mission in the world with the preaching of the word, the word being this central section of our liturgy. And then it’s rejoicing in community together.

Now you may not know it as well, but we have these things called ministry teams here, right? How many do we have? We have four. What are they? Their worship, missions, Christian education discipleship, and their missions or excuse me, not missions, but camping and celebration, which is community stuff, rejoicing in community. Those teams reflect our strategy map.

The prayer requests you see before you reflect our strategy map and that flow. And all of them are meant to reinforce to you the liturgical progression of the worship service. So among thousands of other things, you won’t become idolatrous about your work, which is at the center, the discipleship part, right? That you’ll layer that on top of the sure mercies of God, the forgiveness of sins accomplished through Christ.

So our liturgy drives us away from idolatry. What’s idolatry relative to work? Well, it’s seeing our central identity is what we do, right? Remember I mentioned Martin Lloyd-Jones who said that you know it who was previously a doctor and a doctor’s tombstone should say born a man died a doctor because the total sense the temptation of idolatry in the medical healing profession is great and the tendency is to see your life totally in terms of your vocation and this is a rejection of our being disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, that we’re true man, perfect man, mature man in Christ, and that we’re mature women, right?

And that’s who we are in Christ. And when we do doctrine work, but it can never be or it should never become idolatrous to us. And we have a tremendous tendency that it would do just that. So that’s kind of the overall thrust of these two sermons on idolatry and work. And if you look at it that way, then the portions of our strategy map having to do with discipleship is what this sermon is about. And really, it flows from this instruction of Romans 12:1 and 2.

Based on the sure mercies of God, we’re to not be conformed, but to be transformed. How? By the renewing of our minds, right? To discern the will of God. What’s the will of God? It’s his word. And then how to apply that word in our lives. So that particular aspect of our team structure of our liturgical patterns and what we do is aimed at what Romans 12:1 and 2 is doing which is to prepare us to go about our work in a distinctively Christian way.

Now one other comment at the beginning here before we get to some specific teachings from Romans 12. For the last couple of weeks had this reformation timeline in the back. Hopefully, a lot of you picked it up as you’re prepared for the celebration of October 31st, or just this is a good time of year to think about the Reformation. This church is named Reformation Covenant Church. And the parents of those three women who actually they’re I think their husbands are the board members of APA, but they’re with them as well.

And those the uh those parents of those women may remember that 30 years ago when we chose a name for this church, we chose Reformation to tie back to this and to say that we need a modern reformation, a reformation, a continuing reformation. Now, I bring it up to talk just briefly before we get to Romans 12 and the specific details to talk about the significance of the reformation for this whole series of sermons on work because the Protestant Reformation gave tremendous new significance to vocation to work employment and really created much of the history of the world for the last 500 years through equipping men and women in a proper biblical way for vocation.

Now we can think of it as two men Calvin and Luther right we always think of them as the central reformers and those two strands of the reformation produce different emphases is, but both having to do with empowerment for work. We’ve talked about Martin Luther and the fingers of God, the masks of God as he described it. Remember, we looked at God’s providential care of his created order through work, and we’re to enter into that work.

And so, the Lutheran tradition has provided a sense that we’re God’s fingers, right? That we’re serving people and loving them and taking care of a cow or a chicken or whatever it is we do, right? Preparing transport systems for food or whatever it is. And so the Lutheran tradition has stressed this idea that work is essential to carrying out God’s providential care for one another and care for the world.

Calvin the emphasis in Calvinism and his descendants Abraham Kuyper and others was the idea that work not only takes care of things but in caring for things we actually restructure the world around us and we mature it. So the Calvinistic strand of the reformation tended to talk more about worldview tended to be more about you know transforming the world as opposed to simply caring for the world. Okay.

So the idea was culture building and we’ve talked about that in earlier sermons in this series that work is culture building. It’s not just preservation. So those two strands coming from Luther and Calvin inform us tremendously with both the recognition that we are the fingers of God as we do our work in the world and that like God, we’re creating a culture. We’re taking the image of the garden, we’re taking the word of God and letting it transform how we work.

So the world will become increasingly transformed and culture will be built, matured, developed, and beautified. So those two strands come together. There’s some tension between the two. Lutheran tend not to think that there’s a distinctively Christian way to do your work. The whole idea is caring for people. They’re kind of suspicious of worldview. Calvinists can be sort of suspicious about the what might be seen as an overly devotional aspect, you know, in terms of work and not enough cognitive thinking going on about how we’re to change culture and vice versa.

So, there’s some degree of tension. But in the providence of God, the reformation that’s going on in America and across the world today is that these strands are coming together and the teaching of men like Tim Keller and many others now that are thinking through work and trying to integrate the various strands of this Protestant Reformation that we all have such owe such a debt of gratitude to.

Finally, the Protestant Reformation gave us the power for work by essentially reminding us of Romans 12:1 and 2 because the Protestant Reformation was also not just about work but the work thing streamed out of a more central truth of theology that was developed in the Protestant Reformation and that is the solas right that is that our salvation is not accomplished through our work that our identity is not our work and our work alone that there’s nothing we can do to merit right favor with God but rather the gospel is his pure grace his eternal mercies his great love and compassion for us and the Protestant Reformation freed the church from the burdens of Roman Catholicism at that time that essentially taught works righteousness.

And so it’s again for this sermon, building on our last sermon, it’s so important that our reformation today must build work using both Lutheran and Calvinistic traditions. And it must give us that as we go to our workplaces tomorrow. But it also must have at its root what Romans 12 puts before the commands to be transformed the mercy of God. The mercy of God. And the mercies of God are those things that Calvin and Luther saw as fundamental, foundational for our right standing with God.

What the Reformation did was restore the grace of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ at the heart of the church. And having that view, having that mountaintop, right, to walk on enables us then as we go down the mountain every Lord’s day to work in a way that’s not bound by trying to determine identity or favor or salvation from what we do but rather has that sure foundation that allows us to work with tremendous freedom energy and vitality so the Protestant Reformation is absolutely foundational and of course the book of Romans was essential for much of what I’ve just said in the work of Luther and then later Calvin.

Let’s talk about Romans 12 very directly now then. Okay. So, what do we have here in Romans 12? Well, I don’t know because I’ve misplaced the text. Here it is. Okay. No, it isn’t. As you’re finding your place in your Bible and I’m finding my page, when we find it, then we’ll talk directly about it. Okay. Here. Here we go.

One, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as living sacrifices.”

So, the therefore is significant. And many commentators have seen this transition that’s that’s said here. In other words, you can’t just pick up the Bible at Romans 12:1 and 2 and say, I’m going to transform myself by God’s word without knowing the therefore, without knowing all the grace, the mercies of God that have been developed by Paul earlier in the epistle. So the therefore is quite important and he repeats essentially the therefore pointing us to the mercies of God.

So first there is a foundation here. There’s a basis for the imperatives that will follow and that basis is the sure mercy of God. Then there are these imperatives right? So what summary present your bodies as living sacrifices holy and acceptable to God which is your reasonable service of worship. So the command, the imperative is a holistic one dealing with all that we are. Okay. The basis is the sure mercies of God and articulated in the preceding 11 chapters.

And the command, the imperative is summed up as seeing our bodies as living sacrifices. Right? So we got sacrificial language going on, but it’s living sacrifices, not dead ones. Now there is that right? There is that fact that in the Old Testament what was being offered as a sacrifice died and in the New Testament Paul is telling us that we’re living sacrifices. We don’t want to miss that. There’s a contrast there certainly right this side of the cross right now we’re living sacrifices.

On the other hand we also don’t want to think that those animals were essentially dead in the sacrificial of the Old Testament. We’ve talked about this. The central offering, the ascension offering is not aimed at killing the animal. The killing of the animal is part of the process of transformation into smoke by which the animal ascends to God. Remember that as you know, water was laid upon the one. the hands of the offerers laid on there. I’m a representative of Christ and in ushering that one into the kingdom of God. I speak for him and him alone not me. And the in the same way the one offering the sacrifice that was him right. So in a way he was already a living sacrifice.

Yeah we can see a big distinction a big transition. But don’t miss this other thing that’s going on. He’s bringing in sacrificial language. And the sacrificial liturgy was intended for the offerer in the Old Testament to see himself identified with the sacrifice and with the sacrifice he saw his life as one of death, resurrection and ascension. The same thing we see our lives as right. So that’s who we are and that’s what the language here is reminds us of who we are in this transformation.

There are these imperatives and then there’s a couple of other imperatives going on here. How do we go about doing this? Well, he says that this expands into don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. So, you know, you’re going to accomplish this offering your bodies as living sacrifices by not being conformed, but instead being transformed. And more about that in a couple of minutes.

Those are more imperatives. And then there’s a goal given for us so that you might be able to discern what is the will of God. So, the goal is to know what we’re supposed to do, right? What do we do tomorrow? How do we know the will of God? Well, it’s this process. If we’re not going to be conformed to be transformed, we do so by the word of God. The mechanism for this is the transformation of who we are, our minds. And more about that in a couple of minutes as well. And then the goal is that you can discern the will of God. And that’ll allow you not to be conformed to the world, but rather transformed by it.

Now let me a moment go going back now. We’re going to go back over each of these particular elements. First the element of the therefore and the mercies of God. Here’s what Calvin says: “After having handled those things necessary for the erection of the kingdom of God, the righteousness rather is to be sought from God alone. That salvation is to come to us alone from his mercy that all blessings are laid up and daily offered to us in Christ alone.

Paul now presses on according to the best order to show how the life then is to be formed in relationship to this. And Calvin again says: “Paul lays down here the principle from which all the duties of holiness flow. Even this that we are redeemed by the Lord to this end that we may consecrate to him ourselves and all of our members.”

So again, you know, one of the concerns that some men have, I would probably share this concern about kind of kingdom gospel stuff that we’re all going to be doing things, we’re all going to enter into a vocation, is that we don’t pay enough stress on making sure the foundation for our work is solid and laid out well. And what is the foundation? It’s the mercies of God. We’re here today as the recipients of all that Paul has lined out as an example in Romans 1 through 11. That we’re all sinners and that only through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, his love, his mercies to us, our lives are abundantly filled with these mercies.

And we don’t even understand these mercies, right? I watched a film this last week, All is Lost. And I can’t I don’t want to spoilers or anything, but I think the point of the movie can be seen at least from a Christian perspective that all the sufferings, all the loss that we go through, all the difficulties that we have are part of the process of God in bringing us to resurrection life. Okay? In fact, the conference I went to in San Diego a month ago that Christine and I went to was on loss.

It was the annual conference for the Christian Counseling Education Foundation. And I had wanted to watch this movie. It’s Robert Redford. No words except the voice over at the beginning. My wife was reticent to watch the movie. So it sat in my on my shelf waiting for the right time. So we go to this conference in San Diego and the very first talk by David Powlinson is titled “All is Lost.” And he shows a clip from the movie, right?

And the movie begins with “All is Lost” the voice over and it ends the voiceover with “All is lost.” And so Redford is this character who goes through tremendous difficulties at sea, struggles valiantly against it, but all is lost. And what do you do when all is lost? That’s kind of the point, I think. What do we do? I saw another movie this last week. I saw portions of it. Again, I always watch it when it’s on. It’s called Magnolia. Not recommending it because it has difficult scenes in it, but it’s a tremendous movie.

It’s in this movie and it’s all about troubles and most of them are about parent child sins of parents against children trying to work that out even as adults blah blah. So it’s about all that and about halfway through after all these problems all the struggles are set out for us. We then have a weird moment in a film a song begins to be play on the soundtrack and each of these characters It’s like a series of vignettes going on all kind of interconnected and each of them are singing along with the song to the camera.

So the director doesn’t want you to miss this. This is important. This is the central message of the film, right? And the chorus goes, “it’s not going to stop until you wise up.” Well, that’s what happens. The problems get worse and worse, and then a plague of frogs happens. Rain comes. It’s set in modern day Los Angeles and with the rain, huge toads fall from the sky. Three times in the movie, the verse from Exodus about the plague of frogs is written out in a card, for instance, Exodus, whatever it is.

Again, the filmmaker wants you to see this. What’s going on? Plague of frogs. And after that happens, things start to change in each of these characteristics. Each of the relationships begin you know, begin to get healed. Well, well, that’s, you know, an understanding that our lives are filled with the mercies of God. And those mercies of God frequently come in the form of things we hate, trials, troubles.

I heard another talk in San Diego by Winston Smith talking about when they were on vacation and they had a child that fell and hurt his head and had a big laceration. Late that night they go to this little country hospital and there’s an old guy there and this boy, I don’t remember if he’s three or four or something. And the doctor says, “Hey, you know, you ever play bug in a rug?” The boy says, “No, what’s that?” You know, “Well, we’re going to play bug in the rug today.”

So, he takes this carpet or rug and he wraps up the kid in the carpet, right? What he’s doing is restraining the kid. And then he starts to stitch his head up and the kid’s screaming, right? But he can’t do anything because he’s stuck like a bug in a rug. That’s the game God plays with us, right? You know what I’m saying? Some of you this week, this last week, you were caught in the rug. You wanted out and then at first it looked like it might be fun and then it turns out it wasn’t so much fun.

A lot of suffering going on in that rug and you think, “What is God doing this to me for? He’s killing me.” Well, in a way, yeah, he wants you as a living sacrifice through being united to the death and resurrection of Jesus and through a series of events, losses, struggles, trials, tribulations that are not going to stop until God has brought you to the place of wising up until you experience, you know, the idea that your life is with Christ and you have to trust in him.

Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t do anything. You still struggle. You still try to make use of the means that God has given you. That’s clear from the text. But I don’t want us to walk away from this text just thinking about how to transform our vocations because that’s not the point. That’s part of what’s happening. But the major thing that begins it all, the foundation to keep us from becoming idolatrous about our workplace. The thing that has to happen is an appreciation, an appropriation that we exist in the context of the mercies, the love, the grace of God even in the midst of our most difficult struggles.

That we don’t want to gloss over that. In fact, that’s the whole point of last sermon and this sermon is that you know you don’t come to church and immediately get you know information on what you do to be different. No, you come here and you confess your sins and you say it’s only by the mercies of Christ. It’s only by the grace of God. It’s only through the death of Jesus Christ for my sins which were my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault. You have to start there.

That comes first. So I don’t I want to just be careful that we don’t set up, you know, an idolatrous relationship to our job. So we can never really this side of the coming of our savior come to a full appreciation of the depth of our sinfulness, right? And because of that, we also don’t really know the tremendous height, the blessings, the heights to infinity, right? To the infinite power of the grace and mercy of God.

Those things are related and much of our struggles and trials and tribulations are intended to show us our sinfulness which we don’t ever want to look at. But if we don’t look at it, if we don’t know who we are fallen as fallen creatures, then we do not appreciate the tremendous love of God for us either. And that is what is the engine. Okay? It’s a response to the mercies of God.

Paul said, in Romans 12. It’s a response to that sets up everything else. And if all you do is walk away from the sermon trying to not be conformed but be transformed, well, that’s I guess but what it’s not really getting what the text wants. The text wants you to have the driving engine, the fuel in the tank to be a continual appropriation of the grace, mercy, love, forgiveness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that drives everything else here.

Now, what it drives then is something about our bodies, right? “I urge you by the mercies of God to present your bodies.” Well, that’s interesting. He’s going to talk about our minds in a minute. Now, he says to present our bodies. God is interested in your body. And this is where it really is linking your worship into your week, right? Because you’re going to go into your week and your bodies are going to be quite significant.

Paul talks about bodies a lot. For instance, in Romans 6, he says, “Neither yield you your members as members of your bodies as instruments to unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” So, as those who have the sure mercies of God alive from death, we’re to not present our members are what we do with our bodies, which is everything that we do in life, right?

Whatever we do this week with our bodies, don’t serve unrighteousness with those, but remembering the sure mercies of God, remembering the death of Christ for you, use your bodies to serve him. Again, in Romans 6:16, “know ye not that to whom you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants, you are to whom you obey, whether of sin unto death or of obedience to righteousness.”

So, it’s significant what you do tomorrow with your body as you go to work, as you go about your recreations, whatever you do, your body is exceedingly important because if you don’t have yourself transformed and your body renewed in its mind so it knows what to do according to the will of God and instead you’re just conformed to this world and you do things that seem small innocuous things over time you’re yielding your body to unrighteousness and to death and that’s what you’ll reap you’ll reap death sin judgment so what we do not just what we think or believe supposedly, but what we do physically do with our bodies, Paul says, is incredibly significant.

And so, we’re to present them as living sacrifices to God. Again, in 1 Corinthians 6, “meats for the body and the belly for meats, but God shall destroy both it and them. Now, the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” Significant what we do with our bodies. And then again, of course in 1 Corinthians 6 “for you are bought with a price therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are God’s”

And that’s what he’s saying here because you’ve been bought with a price because of the sure mercies of God therefore use your body to serve him and that’s what Paul is saying here in Romans 12. So as one commentator put it Paul is saying take your body take all the tasks that you have to do every day take the ordinary work of the shop, the factory, the shipyard, the mine, and offer all of that as an act of worship to God.

So, Romans 12 is presenting to us this call for renewed vocational perspective and to do and to honor God with everything that our bodies have to do.

Now, he tells us then how we’re to go about doing this. He says, “Don’t be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. This is interesting. The words are interesting and maybe you already know some of this stuff, but the word for conform here, it is the idea of you know, we used to have silly putty when I was a kid. And you take silly putty, you’d put it on one of those cartoon sheets from the Sunday paper and then you get the impression of it then on the silly putty, right? It’s like a rubber stamp kind of idea.

Well, that’s what conform means here. It really is focusing primarily on externals. So, it’s kind of a don’t be a copycat of the world in which you live. Maybe that’d be another way to say it, right? Don’t just be a Xerox copy of what you’re doing in life and the people you’re with. Don’t be conformed to all of that. Okay? Whereas the word for transformed is far deeper. It’s a far more comprehensive term about everything that you are and who you are.

Now, one thing this tells us is that, you know, apart from Christ, people become less. And in Jesus Christ, as we renew our minds, as we found ourselves on the basis of the mercies of God, we become fuller. Human flourishing is the big buzz term these days. One of them, right? Human flourishing. Well, that’s what’s being described here. You’re not going to flourish by conformity because you’re really kind of just a carbon copy image of the world in which you live.

But you’re to be transformed, formed having to do with all of who you are. And then he says specifically by the renewing of your mind. Okay? So these two terms help us to remember what’ll happen if we don’t do this. If you go to work tomorrow and you’re like everybody else and you do what everybody else does and you just sort of say, “Well, this workplace is like this and I’m going to be like this.” And if you look at their recreations and enter into those kind of things and you do what the world does, you see that’s all just being formed to the exteriors of the world in which you live.

He says that’s what you got to stop doing. Don’t do that. But instead, get serious. Think about your life. Think about who you are in Christ wholeheartedly, thoroughly in everything that you are and do and say, right? Mind, soul, body, strength, be transformed. Okay. So, these are commands and it’s interesting. So, conformity has to do with the idea of assimilation, accommodation to the world around us. Right?

And it’s interesting that the particular tenses of these words, these words to conform and to be transformed, right? These are in the present tense. So what it means is this is not a one-time deal. This means that all the time, think of it as every day you get up, renewed commitment to put off being copied into the world’s image and put on being transformed. Stop this action from happening. If we do nothing, we will slide into conformity to the world. And it’s an ongoing process, present tense, it’s an ongoing process. It’s not a one-for-all.

It’s all the time you’re to be thinking of putting off conformity to the world and putting on being transformed as image bearers of God and Christ. Okay? These words are also in the passive tense. They’re really ultimately it’s God who has to accomplish these things for you, right? And yet these are also imperatives. They’re commands to us. So, we’re to have a desire that our life not be one in which we’re being copied into the world’s image, but rather we’re to have a desire that we would be transformed.

Now, I’m talking about vocation because that’s what you do with your body most of the time, right? If you work for a living, right? That kind of vocation. That’s what this series is on primarily, although it applies to all other callings as well. Applies certainly to the mother who’s mothering all the time or homemaker or if that woman is working, it applies specifically to the workplace. And so what this is saying is when you go to work, don’t be conformed by all of that, but you be transformed.

What? Because why? Because you’re not there just to make a living for your family. Remember the first few sermons? You’re there to create Christian culture. You’re there to serve people, showing them the goodness and grace of God. You’re his fingers, as Luther would say, and you’re the culture builder as Calvin would say. Now, that won’t happen if you’re conformed to the world. That’s not what they’re into, and that’s not what you will end up doing.

So, the text really is kind of, you know, it’s pretty simple. But how do you go about doing it? That’s really not so simple, right? What does it mean? How do I do that, Dennis? I go to work tomorrow. How do I not be conformed to all of that, but be transformed? Well, one way is to think of the different elements of your work. Right? There’s a community there. There’s relationships there. There’s office politics we can say, but in other settings as well.

Are you conformed to the office politics? Or are you trying to transform office politics, the polity, the community that lives there by being a witness for Christ? Not just talking about Jesus, but living out a Christian lifestyle, being transformed, knowing what the word of God says about relationships. My daughter’s employer, Lana’s employer. He has his employees reading through Crucial Conversations and they meet on company time to discuss the book because he’s trying to do this.

He’s trying not just to be conformed to normal office politics, but to transform it from something that he lines up, as I have done in the past as well, to certain truths of the word of God. I remember Chris W. years ago trying to draw up a vision statement for his clinic. Right? So, how do we go about doing this? Well, in or rather what does it mean specifically? I can’t really tell you in your job.

This is an excellent topic of conversation in your community groups. I can mention a few things, but if you this is really the game. This is the whole deal right here. This whole sermon series really one of the major things that we hope to be able to do is to think about this. How does the word of God, how does it critique where I work and how the work is done and how I relate to my fellow workers and how does it provide a new vision, a resurrection vision in Jesus for this workplace and how it goes about.

I’ll give you several examples though. You know, the triple bottom line has been talked about in the last 10 years in American corporations. So, the idea now is we don’t want to serve the god of mammon. I mean, if all you care about at your work and at your home and stuff is money, if everything’s the bottom line, well, then you have to think about the idolatry of mammon which Jesus warned us against over and over again.

So the triple bottom line guys say well it should be money that’s a bottom line you got to be profitable that’s a reflection of what God is saying to you about your business but you also got to try to have good human relations right you want to be helping your people flourish and third you want to be sustainable have an understanding of the impact of your business on the created order now those are all really good biblical directions But are they being developed from a distinctively biblical perspective of what’s good for the environment for instance?

No. There’s a worldly way of evaluating human flourishing and what’s good for the environment. And so we can embrace what God is doing through the triple bottom line guys. But we’d also want to be involved in that and bring in ideas about what the Bible says about human flourishing and about man’s relationship to the environment, caring for it. Yes. Caretaker, no. We’re supposed to be developing and maturing the created order, etc.

There’s an example other examples. I listened to a book this last week called People of the Lie. It’s trying to build a psychology of evil. And the man who writes it is a very interesting fellow heavily recommended by U. Richard Schaeffer. So, you know, it’s going to be a little interesting. But you know, he’s a psychiatrist and he’s got a lot of psychiatric presuppositions going on. But he’s also obviously a committed Christian and what he’s trying to do through his observation of counseling cases, etc.

Through an understanding of the Bible and through a delving into the human personality. He’s trying to develop a psychology of evil to acknowledge the existence of evil in the world. What is it? How does it operate? etc. He’s trying to not be conformed to the psychiatric models he’s been taught. But to be transformed by the word of God so that he can move that profession in a more biblical direction and actually accomplish more human flourishing.

Tim Keller’s church, Redeemer, they’ve set up a whole deal about this, right? They’ve got you know an institute or I don’t know what they call it, but that’s what it’s all about is thinking about how not to be conformed to the profit motive to office politics and including frequently sexual politics in the context of the office or in the context of its recreations and entertainments. It tries to look at for instance advertising for people involved in that industry.

If you put out an ad that’s going to feed lust for instance, is that a good thing to cooperate in? How do you avoid that? How so? They’ve got a whole series of high-level discussions ongoing for the last I don’t know 10 years or something trying to help people to do this very thing to not be conformed to what’s happening in the world in our vocations, but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind by bringing the word of God to bear on the workplace.

And we couldn’t do that here, but we might be able to do it in Oregon City, and we’re praying about that. Maybe doing it in Oregon City or maybe Clackamas County, something. Okay. But we can do it in some ways. Scott and his community group has shown a series of videos off of I think YouTube that are talks. They have a conference for Keller’s faith and work or whatever it’s called uh group and they have speakers in etc and he talks other speakers talk and so Scott’s been showing those videos to his community group for a discussion in the in the Bible portion trying to help them by watching this other material produced at a big urban church to go about doing this don’t be conformed but be transformed many other things could be said should be said in your community groups, but this is the gig.

This is what you have to do in terms of vocation. If it’s as important as what we’ve talked about in this sermon series so far, then certainly this is should be a significant part of how we proceed. How do we proceed? How do we go about doing this? Well, it says don’t be conformed but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now, the mind is more holistic than we think of it, but it certainly includes thought, right?

And the renewing of your mind that by discerning you may that by testing rather you might discern what is the will of God, what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. So we study the scriptures, we have a relationship with God. He immediately talks about a relationship to community and in that context then we apply ourselves to the renewal of our mind to become Christians following the Lord Jesus Christ in the resurrection that he has initiated by his being raised from the dead 2,000 years ago.

So the how is by the will of God and as John Murray says quite simply the will of God is the law of God by which he doesn’t mean the ten commandments but by which he means the entire 66 books of the Bible. The Bible is the revealed will of God. Now the Bible isn’t going to tell you about the triple bottom line but an understanding of the Bible and the one who wrote the Bible and why he wrote those particular things that can give us a sense of transformation of our mind.

Kinds based upon the truths of the Bible is then applied in the particular specialized fields of our particular workplaces. The key to all of it as one commentator said is the transformation of the mind. Many Christians in today’s world never come to terms with this. They hope they’ll be able to live up to something like Christian standards while still thinking the way the rest of the world thinks. It can’t be done.

It can’t be done. God’s word says you can’t think the way the world thinks. You can’t just be conformed to the world around you. The end result of knowing the word of God, knowing the will of God, understanding the basis for our work is not striving for salvation, but flowing from our salvation, and then all the things the word of God has to say about wisdom and then applying it to our workplaces. That’s the key.

The key to the transformation of our vocations. The key is the mind. The key is applying it. And if we don’t start there with a knowledge of the word of God and with its understanding, beginning understanding of how it relates to our particular vocations, our particular cultural context in our workplace, whether it’s small or big, then we can’t hope to fulfill what this verse tells us and has been recognized since the Protestant Reformation is a key crucial couple of verses for who we are as Christians.

We’ve gone to the mountain this morning and God’s mountain has given us hopefully a renewed view of the tremendous beauty of the panorama we’ve seen in the grace of Christ and his sure mercies, a reality of the depth of our sinfulness and the great height of his mercy that reaches to us and sacrifices himself for us, bringing us into relationship with him. And from that mountaintop, he’s also talked to us about the need when we go to work tomorrow to renew our commitment to not be conformed to the things that our workplace presents, but rather to be transformed and bring that transformation into our workplaces.

You are new creatures in Christ. This is the new creation. And the new creation is supplanting the old creation. And the way that happens is through you and me, men and women, boys and girls, going about their work tomorrow and what they’re called to do in a distinctively Christian way. Not, you know, in a silly way with a badge that you love Jesus, but understanding your tasks, thinking about them, thinking about the relationships you build from the perspective of God’s word and the new creation.

You bring resurrection life to your workplace potentially. Maybe you haven’t done much of that. Maybe you’ve just been conformed to the office politics, the get-togethers that are not particularly upbuilding, the perspectives on profit, scamming other clients, etc. Maybe you’ve kind of silently gone along with that. Time to decloak. Time to decloak and reveal who you are. Loving agent of God’s new world as you transform yourself and your workplace for Jesus.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for worship. We thank you, Lord God, for the songs we sing. We take them for granted. We thank you for the wonderful truths from your scriptures that are balm to our souls if we would just open up and let them in. Bless us, Lord God, and bless us as we leave this place that we would have a renewed commitment to transformation of who we are and as a result our rejection of the conformity to the fallen world around us.

Bless us, Father, in our individual conversations. Bless our community group discussions, bless this sermon series as we move forward. Bless, Lord God, the showing of videos and listening to books about the transformation of our work and vocation. Thank you so much that here we are 30 years later in this church rejoicing in the ongoing reformation that’s happening in our day and age. Bless us, Lord God, that we would be part of that world, the only place in which there is life, that we might move away from death.

In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen.