Becoming – Romans 12:1-21

So my dear family, this is my appeal to you by the mercies of God: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and appropriate worship. What’s more, don’t let yourselves be squeezed into the shape dictated by the present age. Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable and complete. 

Through the grace which was given to me, I have this to say to each one of you: don’t think of yourselves more highly than you ought to think. Rather, think soberly, in line with faith, the true standard which God has marked out for each of you. As in one body we have many limbs and organs, you see, but none of the parts of the body have the same function, so we, many as we are, are one body in the Messiah, and individually we belong to one another.  Romans 12:1-5

I believe Paul is proposing we loosen the fasteners with which our current thinking is so tightly bolted down. Why? He knows our tendency to treat our beliefs as if they (not Christ alone) are our foundation. We tend to think our security is dependent on the accuracy and the thoroughness of our understanding. Tampering with a believer’s rigid structure of ideas is tantamount to causing an earthquake – one of the scariest things (many claim) a human can experience. Yet this is the very thing Paul is calling normal spirituality. In our passage, he is asking us to loosen the fasteners on one large idea where we have been squeezed – our worship.

If Paul were here to ask, “How is your worship today?”, most would question his verb tense since yesterday was Sunday – the day of worship. Didn’t you mean, “How was worship? Our disconnect with Paul here originates with our errant (yet sacred and tightly bolted down) notion that one day is more sacred than another. I believe Paul would weigh in even further and say, “You are also thinking wrongly if you have connected your thinking about worship to a ceremony, ritual, program or feeling. He says….

I am appealing to you by the mercies of God offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and appropriate worship. NAS  or the MSG ….

Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.

Paul’s point is that as members of a New Covenant, how we live our lives is now our worship. Consequently, our choices constitute our worship. Paul presumes the ruler of this present evil age has been squeezing our thinking into patterns which suit his ends, keeping us bolted down tightly to half truths which insure our worship never finds actual expression in our lives. Satan’s worst nightmare is that the Church become the light of the world. Paul presumes a worshipping life is one where our status quo mindsets are in transformational-flux. He puts it like this…..

Instead (of being squeezed into wordily conformity), be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable and complete. 

I believe Paul is saying we should loosen our attachment to the idea of worship as only going some place and ginning up what we deem as appropriate feelings, assenting to particular thoughts, or even participating in prescribed rituals. There is nothing wrong with liturgysong, emotion or beliefs as long as we do not think of these things exclusively as our spiritual service of worship. The greater part of worship has always involved our simple choices in working out the will of God (that which is good, acceptable and complete) in our daily (often messy) walk around lives.

Father, teach us to love you with the all of our minds and souls and strength. Deliver us from the notion that we have security in anything other than Christ alone. Help us to transfer our beliefs about You, to you – our Rock and our Fortress. Amen

 

 

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