John 1:1-18

Marks of a Christian

My grandpa Neal, my mom’s dad, was one of the neatest men I have ever met. He was an Amish preacher for most of his life. When I was in high school and early college I would love to go over and just sit and talk with him. He was pretty hard of hearing, by that I mean mostly deaf so there was more sitting than talking but I just wanted to be around him. He was one of those special men who just exuded Christ in everything they did. The love and patience of Jesus just oozed out of him and it was infectious. When I was a little kid, not much older than Addy, I remember going over there for afternoons while my mom ran errands or whatever else she needed to do. My cousin who lived next door to them and I would run wild around the house and make all kinds of noise and ruckus, never once in my life did I hear him raise his voice, that could be because he couldn’t hear it because of his hearing but I don’t think so. His correction was always in a way that we knew he was serious but never in anger, always quiet and to the point. He would always say “a quiet answer turns away wrath.” That is not the point of my story though, he was the rare man who could ask you a question and you knew immediately that he cared about the answer. His greatest hope and ambition in life was that all of his kids and grandkids would find a personal relationship with Jesus. When I would get up to leave from our visits, he would always tell me, “Let Jesus lead you, follow Him and let Him lead you.” I pray every day for Jesus to lead me, and I hope that I am following well.

What is the point of this story then and what does it have to do with the text from today, you’re wondering? After Grandpa died, I wanted a Bible of his to remind me of him, and I got one, it’s sitting on a shelf in my living room where I can see it every day to remind me to let Jesus lead me and for me to lead my family to follow Him. When I opened the Bible and looked through it, I found this text underlined and when I was asked to preach again, the first text that came to mind was this one. So here it is again in case you forgot. I will be preaching on the entire chapter of between this week and next, but for today we will focus on the first 8 verses. I know Lyle just read it, but you can never have too much Bible.

Romans 12 ESV

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 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.

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

How does the handout work?

My grandpa Neal, my mom’s dad, was one of the neatest men I have ever met. He was an Amish preacher for most of his life. When I was in high school and early college I would love to go over and just sit and talk with him. He was pretty hard of hearing, by that I mean mostly deaf so there was more sitting than talking but I just wanted to be around him. He was one of those special men who just exuded Christ in everything they did. The love and patience of Jesus just oozed out of him and it was infectious. When I was a little kid, not much older than Addy, I remember going over there for afternoons while my mom ran errands or whatever else she needed to do. My cousin who lived next door to them and I would run wild around the house and make all kinds of noise and ruckus, never once in my life did I hear him raise his voice, that could be because he couldn’t hear it because of his hearing but I don’t think so. His correction was always in a way that we knew he was serious but never in anger, always quiet and to the point. He would always say “a quiet answer turns away wrath.” That is not the point of my story though, he was the rare man who could ask you a question and you knew immediately that he cared about the answer. His greatest hope and ambition in life was that all of his kids and grandkids would find a personal relationship with Jesus. When I would get up to leave from our visits, he would always tell me, “Let Jesus lead you, follow Him and let Him lead you.” I pray every day for Jesus to lead me, and I hope that I am following well.

For those of you who like to take notes, or those of you who have to just to stay awake, just like your Bible, I will break today into two parts. The first two verses, and then verses 3-8. What is Paul talking about? The chapter starts out with, …therefore, present your bodies as living sacrifices… Therefore..I am no English expert, but when you see a “therefore” or “because”, it usually has to do with whatever came before it. Remember last time I preached, I told you about how the Bible wasn’t divided into chapters and verses until long after the books and letters were written. So just like every other verse, chapter, book and Testament in the Bible we have to read it in context. I would love to go all the way back to verse 1 and walk all the way through, but that is more than I can do in just two weeks, so I will give you the cliff’s notes version, Romans in a letter from Paul to the Jewish Christian church in Rome. In the letter to the Roman church, Paul lays out the Gospel in a similar way a lawyer lays out an argument to a jury. He explains how we are saved, and how the patriarchs were saved. Who were the patriarchs? Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and so on. How was Abraham saved, or justified in God’s eyes? Through sacrifice? Through obeying the law? Through circumcision? No on all counts. Abraham was justified through faith. God made Abraham a promise and says, “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Paul goes on to explain that, it is only through God’s grace by faith that we are saved. The law that was given to the Jews, or at the time, the children of Israel, was not to save them. It was to show them that no one can live up to God’s standards for righteousness. quotes ,”None is righteous, no not one.” So what Paul is saying is that we cannot be saved on our own. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves. We cannot pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and save ourselves, because we can’t follow the law of God. No amount of willpower, or church going, or serving on committees or Sunday school attendance will save us. We are only saved through grace by faith in Jesus. Not just believing that God exists as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even the demons in Hell believe that tells us. It is not enough to say, I believe in God, we must put our trust in the risen Jesus, the only Son of the living God, who lived a perfect life, died as propitiation for God’s righteousness, and rose again to cover us with His own righteousness so that God can be just in punishing sin. Now a quick note before we move on, what does propitiation mean? The apostles liked this word, because it fits as well as a word can for what Jesus did for us. Propitiation means, the satisfying of God’s holy law, the meeting of its just demands, so that God can freely forgive those who come to Christ.

So now, back to the therefore. This is what Paul was saying therefore to. Because of what Christ did for you, and because of God’s grace, give yourselves to God. Before we are saved, we are dead, and once Christ saves us, we are alive, body and spirit. Our bodies are now a temple for the Holy Spirit, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians. We aren’t asked to just be sacrifices, but living ones. The word “present” in present yourselves, has a finality to it in the original Greek. It means, present your bodies as living sacrifices to God, once and for all.

Verse two says, 2 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.

This verse is fairly straight forward. Here Paul tells us, don’t get caught up with what the world is telling you. Everything around you is trying to change your mind and conform you to something. Whether it is a commercial trying to get you to buy something, or the culture telling you that you need to stop being such a backwards bigot and taking such a hard line on something as hazy as gender and marriage and abortion all the rest of the things that the Bible tells us in Galatians and 1 Corinthians are works of the flesh and will lead to death.

But how do we renew our mind? How do we make sure to know what is the will of God? Can we renew our own minds? Can we make ourselves into what God wants us to be by ourselves? I would hope by now you have the answer ready. Of course not. God renews our mind, through the Holy Spirit, prayer and living in the Word, not just reading it to check it off our to-do list. This is something I struggle with, we have to live in the word. Soak in it, dive deep and wash in it, roll around and wallow in it. If we do this, through the grace of God and the help of the Holy Spirit, God will transform us through the renewal of our minds from sinful things to spiritual things. This is the process. We give ourselves up once to God and are justified through grace by faith, we are only saved and justified once. When I was a kid, like about Addy’s age, I remember distinctly driving in our old rusted out pick-up on the bench seat between my mom and dad and asking Jesus into my heart, I was three or four then, did I understand what I was doing? In part, I knew that I wanted Jesus to come into my heart and forgive me for when I was bad. What I didn’t understand however was that I only needed to do this once, I continued to ask Jesus into my heart periodically for a few years after that and one day I told my mom, I asked Jesus into my heart again today and she having more understanding than a five year old told me that, no I have already asked Jesus into my heart and do not need to do it again. It was done, I had been justified in God’s sight. This is where God looks at us and sees Jesus. But every day we have to be sanctified, this means that we must become more like Christ. And we are brought towards sanctification through the process of renewing our minds and giving our will to God. So long as we think we can save ourselves, even a little, so long as we think that God owes us salvation because of what we “do for Him” like we can do anything for Him, like He needs anything at all, we cannot be saved. But once we surrender our will to Him, we can live in the will of God and see what is good and acceptable and perfect.

What is the point of this story then and what does it have to do with the text from today, you’re wondering? After Grandpa died, I wanted a Bible of his to remind me of him, and I got one, it’s sitting on a shelf in my living room where I can see it every day to remind me to let Jesus lead me and for me to lead my family to follow Him. When I opened the Bible and looked through it, I found this text underlined and when I was asked to preach again, the first text that came to mind was this one. So here it is again in case you forgot. I will be preaching on the entire chapter of Romans 12 between this week and next, but for today we will focus on the first 8 verses. I know Lyle just read it, but you can never have too much Bible.

What about the slides?

In light of giving ourselves to God and having our minds renewed and transformed by Him through grace, the rest of the chapter focuses on our relationships with other believers. Paul starts with a warning, “3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” That means exactly what it says. Do not think of yourself as more important than someone else, remember you were just as dead as they were before God saved you. Your sin was just as despicable to God as theirs was, as they are just as saved as you are now. In the same vein, you are no less important than they are and you have a job to do. With sober judgement, means to take an honest look, assess yourself and find what you are supposed to be doing. Verses 4 and 5 tell us that each person has a job to do in the body of Christ, and you had better be doing your job, or the whole body suffers. God has given each person a gift to use in His body, in His church to further His word and so that the body can grow. Whatever gift that we are given is to be used for God, and not for yourself. In verses 6 through 8, Paul lists the gifts and tells us to use them. Not here are some cool gifts God gives now go home and sit around and talk about them. Or worse yet, here are some cool gifts that God gives now go do whatever you want. Each of these gifts are absolutely essential to the life of a church and the life of The Church. I could probably, no not probably, I could do a sermon by itself for each of these gifts, but that isn’t the point of this sermon so I will quickly move through each gift and then sum up my point at the end. In verse 6, Paul says, “6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith” Remember prophecy is as much forth telling of what God is saying as fore telling what is going to happen in the future. This gift and job that comes with it is extremely important in a church, prophets have a job to tell the truth even when it is hard to hear. Remember though, this is not any more or less important than any other job. Just because you are a prophet does not give you license to go around telling people off, remember that without love it is all just noise. Verse 7 says, “if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching” Where would we be in the church without those who serve, the ones who are also there to clean up after a meal, the ones who are always willing to jump in and help when you need it. The ones who show up to every service day and make the rest of us look bad. But again, to those who are serving, remember who you are ultimately serving. Do not think more highly of yourselves because you serve, and in the same vein, don’t be discouraged when you and the same other people with the gift of service are the only ones who consistently show up to service days. Remember whom you serve. And to the teachers, teach well. In case you couldn’t tell, I am a teacher. I can’t help it, teaching just leaks out of me. I am forever trying to teach someone something. I love learning and I feel like I have to help someone else learn all the cool stuff I have learned. Those of us who teach have to remember that not everything we learn is interesting to other people and we need to use our gift to build up the church, not to use it as an excuse to get up and tell people cool stuff, no matter how cool it is. Are you sensing a theme here? These are great gifts from God in order to build up the church, but if let ourselves get in the way of our gifts, it messes everything up. We have to be careful to get out of the Lord’s way and allow Him to work through us.

Verse 8 gives us four more gifts, “; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.” Exhortation means to encourage, to lift up and urge on. Use this gift to encourage people, not to nag them to do something you think that they should be doing. To the giver, or the one who contributes, my goodness, givers are great. They are the people who would literally give you the shirt off their back and not think anything of it. Without the givers, we wouldn’t have anything nice. They also need to remember who they are ultimately giving to, without love, you can give away everything you have and gain nothing. Leaders are to lead with zeal or energy and enthusiasm. Lead by example and action, not only with words. Lead the people of the church through the grace of God and not through your own strength, because this leads down roads no one wants to follow. And finally, last on this list but certainly not least, the merciful are to show mercy with cheerfulness. Don’t show mercy with pity or in a way that makes the person you are showing mercy to feel worse off than what they started out as. Remember what Jesus said on the Sermon on the Mount? Blessed are the merciful because they will receive mercy.

What is the point of each of these gifts? Is it so we can separate the really useful people from the rest? Absolutely not. Each of these gifts have to be dedicated to God in service of His Church. Remember, this isn’t our church. Not this building, not this congregation, nothing. None of it is ours. We are not our own, we were bought, body and soul at a price. What is the price? The blood of the Son of God. These spiritual gifts are tools for building up the people of God and the church, and not for your own personal use.

We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus alone. We are called to be living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. Not to be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds, by living in God’s word and allowing the Holy Spirit to move in us. So that we can determine the will of God and what is good and acceptable and perfect. We are to look honestly at ourselves. And not think of ourselves as better or lesser than others. Not that we are all the same, if we are in Christ, we are all gifted by the Spirit in some way to further the church. We must use our gift to build up the Church both locally and as a whole because the Church is not ours. We are His, and we had better live that way.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 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.

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

For those of you who like to take notes, or those of you who have to just to stay awake, just like your Bible, I will break today into two parts. The first two verses, and then verses 3-8. What is Paul talking about? The chapter starts out with, …therefore, present your bodies as living sacrifices… Therefore..I am no English expert, but when you see a “therefore” or “because”, it usually has to do with whatever came before it. Remember last time I preached, I told you about how the Bible wasn’t divided into chapters and verses until long after the books and letters were written. So just like every other verse, chapter, book and Testament in the Bible we have to read it in context. I would love to go all the way back to Romans 1 verse 1 and walk all the way through, but that is more than I can do in just two weeks, so I will give you the cliff’s notes version, Romans in a letter from Paul to the Jewish Christian church in Rome. In the letter to the Roman church, Paul lays out the Gospel in a similar way a lawyer lays out an argument to a jury. He explains how we are saved, and how the patriarchs were saved. Who were the patriarchs? Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and so on. How was Abraham saved, or justified in God’s eyes? Through sacrifice? Through obeying the law? Through circumcision? No on all counts. Abraham was justified through faith. God made Abraham a promise and Genesis 15:6 says, “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Paul goes on to explain that, it is only through God’s grace by faith that we are saved. The law that was given to the Jews, or at the time, the children of Israel, was not to save them. It was to show them that no one can live up to God’s standards for righteousness. Romans 3:10 quotes Psalm 14:3,”None is righteous, no not one.” So what Paul is saying is that we cannot be saved on our own. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves. We cannot pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and save ourselves, because we can’t follow the law of God. No amount of willpower, or church going, or serving on committees or Sunday school attendance will save us. We are only saved through grace by faith in Jesus. Not just believing that God exists as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even the demons in Hell believe that James 2:19 tells us. It is not enough to say, I believe in God, we must put our trust in the risen Jesus, the only Son of the living God, who lived a perfect life, died as propitiation for God’s righteousness, and rose again to cover us with His own righteousness so that God can be just in punishing sin. Now a quick note before we move on, what does propitiation mean? The apostles liked this word, because it fits as well as a word can for what Jesus did for us. Propitiation means, the satisfying of God’s holy law, the meeting of its just demands, so that God can freely forgive those who come to Christ.