Good morning. Since today is the first Sunday in June I thought it would be a good Sunday to begin a summer sermon series. A summer series simply entitled ‘Do Not Conform. Be Transformed.’ This series is based on the passages found in Romans 12:1 and 2. But before diving into the series I would like give you some background on the book of Romans so you have the context of the passage.
The book of Romans is actually, in many ways, considered a masterpiece of Paul. It was a masterpiece of Greek writing and of Greek rhetoric, but it is also considered a masterpiece of Christian doctrine. A large portion of what we believe as Christians can be found within the 16 chapters of the book of Romans especially the first 11 chapters. In fact, if we were to sit down and go slowly through the first 11 chapters of Romans, you would see the gospel of Jesus Christ pretty much laid out within a few key passages including Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, Romans 6:23 “The wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life”, Romans 5:8 “God demonstrates his love for us that while we were sinners, Christ died for us” and Romans 10:9 “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” you have a pretty good outline of the Gospel. In fact many people refer to these four passages as the “Roman Road” as they provide a basic and easily understood path to sharing the gospel.
But when come to Romans chapter 12 is we begin to see a transition occurring. We begin to see a transition from what we are supposed to believe as Christians to how those beliefs are supposed to be acted out within the world. In Romans 12.1 Paul writes “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship.” Paul is basically saying that although the Jewish sacrificial system is gone, including the temple with all its sacrifices of bulls and lambs and doves and those types of things, you are not off the hook. Paul is letting his readers know that now you need to become that sacrifice. In other words, you need to put yourself on the altar. And instead of a dead sacrifice that used to be offered after the killing of an animal, God wants you alive. He wants your whole life to be one ongoing sacrifice.
And unlike the Jewish sacrificial system you are not becoming a living sacrifice to regain the approval by God, but rather as the first few words tell us you are doing it in view of what God has already done for you. “…in view of God’s mercy…” In other words, in view of the Gospel message spelled out in the first 11 chapters, the only appropriate response is to make your life a living sacrifice.
Then what Paul does is unpack what that a “living sacrifice” looks like in practical ways. In verse 2 he goes on to say “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” As I mentioned back in April, if we are not shaping the world, the world is likely trying to shape us; trying to conform us to its patterns. But instead as Christians, we are supposed to resist that and we are supposed to be conformed to God. We are supposed to be conformed to Christ. As this passage reminds us we are supposed to be transformed in our minds so that we can go out and actually begin to be agents of change in the world. But it is difficult to understand what it is we are not supposed to do or be conformed to unless we understand those patterns. We have to be in tune to what is going on in culture and specifically we need to understand what are the underlying messages that culture is sending to us and sending to the whole world but also as Christians. We need to be aware of that. We need to be discerners of culture.
As a side note when Paul speaks of not following the patterns of the world he is probably talking about the Roman world at that particular time; the Greco-Roman world. But if we had time, we could look back and see that Paul’s Greco-Roman world was not that much different than our world today. What type of patterns can we see in culture today?
First of all, we see a pattern of dishonesty. A pervasive pattern of dishonesty and deceit throughout culture. People going around trying to cheat systems, trying to rip other people off, and trying to steal from each other and that sort of thing. We can also see patterns of vulgarity. What I would call just vulgarity and just general rudeness out there. We would see patterns of anger and of course we would see patterns of violence. Those patterns are really at the surface level. Anyone who just pays any bit of attention to news stories wherever they get it, they are going to see those patterns in the world.
But really there are dozens and dozens of patterns that kind of fall below the surface that really we don’t pick up. There are more subtle messages that happen all through the day. Things like a general pattern of fear. I think most people or many people just live in a state of constant anxiety and constant stress and constant fear because they just don’t feel like they have control of their lives anymore because of health situations, work situations, because of the chaos in the world or whatever.
Another pattern we would see is an over-emphasis on the new as opposed to the old. This manifests itself in things like books and movies and technology. The new is better and we forget that some of the best classical books come from the past. Some of the best artwork comes from the past. Some of the best writing and some of the best movies come from the past. But we are caught up in this whole idea to overvalue the new, which also kind of spills over into the whole idea that we overvalue the whims of youth as opposed to the wisdom of the elderly. That is a pattern. Youth is exalted as a very good thing. Nobody wants to think about the idea of aging. We have this pattern that is fed by the media that is all about being young. Once you reach a certain age you might as well forget it. We see those types of patterns.
We also see the pattern where the individual is made out to be a god. Because of technology now, everybody can basically make themselves to be their own god. They can create their own platform and create this environment where all their followers hang on their latest words through any form of social media. We also see patterns of people that are prizing possessions and stuff and junk over people and relationships.
But ultimately, one of the most pervasive patterns is the pattern of denying death. Denying our mortality. Denying the fact that we are all going to die. You don’t hear people talking about it. Sure if somebody dies you hear about it, but there is generally not a discussion much about death because we don’t want to be thinking about that. Even when the death of a famous celebrity occurs the event only receives a brief mention on the various news feeds and then the world moves on. So there are many negative patterns in the world and if left unchecked, they can become very smothering to us and to the people that we love.
Anyway, this is simply an introduction to the series. What I hope to do in the coming weeks is begin to pop the lid off of some of those subtle messages that we receive from culture. I am hoping to use a variety of images, media, video, articles, news clippings, or whatever just to expose you to help you be good discerners of culture because you cannot go out there and be not conformed to something unless you know what you are not supposed to be conformed to. Hopefully, I will be able to give you some very concrete examples of how the world tries to shape us into its mold. Ultimately, my goal by the end of the series is that you would all be nonconformists, a nonconformist in your own particular world. We all have our own little piece of real estate in life: home and work and church and otherwise. We have places where we have kind of dominion over and that we can influence. I am giving you permission to be a nonconformist in your world.
But in order to make things clear, we have to come up with a working definition of what a nonconformist is. A nonconformist, based on the dictionary, is a person who refuses to conform to the prevailing customs, attitudes, or ideas. Now I don’t know what you think about when I say the word nonconformist; what type of image comes to your mind. For me, what comes to mind is the hippie generation. How many people know what a hippie is? How many people were hippies at one point? Yeah I suspected. There are a number of them still here. Some of you haven’t left the Woodstock Era but that is okay. We love you anyway. Just in case you were born post-70s I guess and you don’t know what a hippie is I put a couple images up here on the screen that you can identify with to be able to understand what they are. The hippie culture was distinguished because they often wore weird clothes. Some people still wear clothes like that, but that was pretty weird. They were identified by their weird dress and they were also identified by always flaunting the peace symbol. They were also known by a number of slogans. See if you can complete the sentence: “Make love not….” I didn’t think that many people would know it. How about “Far…man?” “You can’t trust anyone over...” Good. There are a bunch of old hippies in this crowd. Basically, not only were hippies epitomized by their unique attire, strange looks, and the peace sign, they were epitomized by being protestors. They protested the war in Vietnam. They protested at the political conventions. You would find them protesting out in Oregon because some timber guy is cutting down a tree that was the home of a spotted owl or something like that. You would find them doing all these particular protests. But bottom line what you would find them protesting is what they would refer to as the establishment. We don’t know what the establishment is but a lot of times it had to do with the prevailing structures of the time. The government, the school system, the church, and even family. Basically, they were rebelling against the establishment. Although they left us a legacy of some phenomenal rock musicians like Jimmy Hendrix and The Doors and The Grateful Dead and Iron Butterfly and Credence and all those bands, do you know what they also left us? They left us a pattern of excess. Particularly excess, abuse of drugs and alcohol, of sexual promiscuity. They have left that and they have also left us a general rebellious nature towards everything that the church and many Americans held as sacred for 200 years. That is the legacy of the hippie generation. The sad thing is and a slightly humorous thing is that the very people who were the hippies back in the 70s who were out there sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, freedom, and all this kind of stuff, are now the same parents and grandparents who are trying to reign in that freedom from their kids and their grandkids. You are having a hard time with that aren’t you? Especially since your kids are continually reminding you of the things you did in your past saying things like, “But mom I saw your pictures in your yearbook. I also saw that picture of you and dad at Woodstock. How can you complain about how I dress when you dressed like that?”
So what I am asking you to do is not to be a nonconformist in the sense of the way the hippies were of having strange dress, strange hairdo, strange slogans and that sort of thing. What I am asking you to do is be a nonconformist the way the first nonconformist was. In fact, what I am asking you to do is to be like Jesus. Because Jesus Christ was the first real nonconformist. When he became birthed in that manger, nothing happened. Merely by his presence in the world started a revolution. It started a movement rolling. It started to come against all of the existing attitudes, ideas, and philosophies of the day. He was nonconforming while he was still even in the manger. Unlike the hippies who would go out and try to separate themselves from culture. They tried to go into communes or run as fast as they could from their parents, the schools, the government, from the draft, or whatever it was. Jesus decided that he was not going to run from the culture. Rather he was going to immerse himself in the culture and change it subversively from the inside out. One of my favorite passages out of John 1:14 says “The word became flesh and it made its dwelling amongst us.” I like how the author Eugene Peterson says it. He says “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” That is what Jesus did. He moved into the neighborhood. At that time, the neighborhood was Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. If Jesus were around today, if he was walking around today, I suspect that we would see him walking through the neighborhood. I suspect that we would see him grocery shopping at the local grocery story. We would see him at Starbucks having a cup of coffee. We would probably see him at Bayne Park hanging out with the skateboarders. We would see him going downtown. We would see him sitting down at Market Square at lunch hour having lunch with a businessman or a businesswoman and just talking about life. We would see Jesus immersed in culture. Not only would we see him immersed in culture, we would see that he was a student of culture. He would see that he was tapped into the pulse of the culture because what he would do is he would make sure that he read everything from the basic daily newspaper to the blogs to the social media posts to all the things because he wanted to stay in touch with the people with the culture of the times.
The bottom line is that Jesus had this cultural knowledge. He was tapped into the culture. But he also had knowledge of scripture, a deep understanding of the Word. And he also had spiritual authority. He had that spiritual authority because of his intimate and lasting and ongoing relationship with the Father. That is how he got that spiritual authority. What was created with this cultural knowledge, understanding of the Word, and spiritual authority was what I would refer to as a ministry sweet spot.
Some of you watch sports and when you talk about baseball or golf you know that person hit the sweet spot. It is a combination of components coming together that is creating the ideal force for the situation. A powerful force. That is what we are talking about here. A ministry sweet spot. And Jesus did not hold on to this model of ministry. Jesus passed it on to his disciples. This is the model that he passed on to his followers.
Jesus would sit with his disciples often making cultural observations. He would use metaphors and questions to highlight the messages that culture was sending whether it is coming from the Romans or just the person on the street or a woman sitting next to a well. And would also spend a lot of time pointing out the biblical truths, teaching the Word through the first five books of the Bible collectively referred to as Torah. And He was not simply providing them with content but helping them to understand it in a very deep way, and how it can be applied to culture.
And most importantly he was sharing the spiritual authority that he received because of spending time with the Father and the Holy Spirit. So when Jesus left the earth and his Spirit came down, you had a group of disciples that had the Spirit of God and these three components in place. So when they went out into the world, unlike the hippies that started a movement that fizzled out, they started a movement that began 2,000 years ago and continues today by virtue of the fact that you are sitting in this room. They impacted their world just by having these three components in place, an understanding of culture, a deep knowledge of the Word, and the spiritual authority of Jesus.
In closing, because this is really just meant to be an introduction of the series, I hope you are figuring out that you are called to be nonconformists but you are called to be a nonconformist like Jesus Christ. But in order to be a nonconformist like Jesus Christ, the first thing you have to do is be conformed to the likeness of Christ. Paul says in an earlier passage back in Romans 8:29 “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his son.” If we had time, we would go back to Genesis 1:27. It talks about that we were made in the image of God and God doesn’t make junk. We were all made so special but sin entered into the environment and what it did is it kind of shattered that image. So in the sending of his son what God is doing is offering a second opportunity to restore that broken image, not in an exterior sense, not looking physically like Jesus. We don’t know what Jesus looked like, but really in an interior sense. Really inside in the area of the heart or the inner person. The place that only you and God know about. There are places in our heart that nobody but you and God know about. That is the place I am talking about. That is the place that God does the work. In order to be conformed to Christ, we have to put ourselves on the operating table so to speak where we allow God to come in. We open our heart up, and we allow him to bring the flashlight in, the microscope, or whatever he needs to examine our heart, our soul, our mind in an ongoing way to, as David says in Psalm 139, “See if there is any offensive way in me.” You have to allow that to happen because if you don’t allow that to happen and you try to go out in the world and be a nonconformist, at a minimum, you are going to be frustrated and you are going to tick a bunch of people off. At a maximum, you are going to end up infecting the world with your stuff. What you are going to end up doing is contributing to the patterns of the world because you are going to go out there and you are not fully equipped. You may even have all the knowledge of the word. You may have a good knowledge of the culture, but if you have not developed that inner life, forget it. You are setting yourself up for failure. You are probably going to make the world worse by you having been in it. But, looking at this diagram again, if you go into the world with a good solid understanding of God’s word, with a reasonable understanding of the culture of the time so to speak, and you go in there with a spiritual authority that comes through the transformed life, then what happens is you become not only a nonconformist, you become a transformist because you begin to transform the world around you. That is what it is all about.
People, we are in a world of chaos. It is a chaotic world right now. Really what we are in the midst of is a cultural storm. We are all familiar with the storms that are happening down in Oklahoma and the Midwest and we are familiar with the people that have died because of it and the property loss. But as bad as those things are, nothing compares to the damaging effects of the culture storm that we are in here. Not only in our lives but our marriages and our homes and on everything. There is a cultural storm there where people really have lost any sense of moorings. They don’t know up from down. They don’t know left from right. They don’t know right from wrong. So what do they do? They go out and seek their highs in whatever way that high comes. Sometimes it is by drugs. Sometimes it is sex. Sometimes it is just by going out and filling yourself up with one experience after another because what you are trying to do is seek meaning and purpose that can only come one way. One way – through a relationship with Jesus Christ. Again, people, we hold the keys to the answer to the problem of culture chaos. The world is just not going to get better. I hate to say it. I don’t think the world is just going to all of a sudden just start getting better. It is only going to be better when Christians are willing, like Jesus, to leave the comfort of their pews and go out and allow themselves to be immersed in the surrounding culture, be in the world but not of the world, not be tainted by the world, but at the same time not be afraid of the world. Going into that culture again equipped also with a knowledge of that culture, a deep knowledge of the Word, and an intimate, ongoing relationship with Jesus Christ that is going to transform your soul and allow that transformation to flow out and flow into others. This is serious stuff, people, and I am hoping that you will pay attention to this because this is the world we are in. We are called for one thing as reminded in Romans 12:2 again “Do not be conformed to the pattern of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Let us pray.
