Different the sermon. Romans 12:1-3
Different now there’s an interesting word.
What do we think about people who are different?
Now he’s a bit different eats bugs, wears strange clothes and lives in the scrub.
Did you hear about the bloke who saved a ship load of people by allowing himself to be thrown overboard, nutter?
Well that’s different.
There was such a crowd around the pharmacy and such a need to get to it that they tore the roof off to get the meds that their friend needed. Certainly different.
His kid had caused him so much shame when he left, ripped of the estate, blew the cash in night clubs and on hard living until he had nothing left. When he went back home his Dad not only welcomed him with open arms but celebrated like the boy had done nothing wrong.
These things that happen, these people who react in ways that are unexpected sometimes shock us, they sometimes make us wonder why people respond the way they do, why they think the way they do.
You might see that the references I've made are a little bit of paraphrasing of Biblical stories, John the Baptist, he was a bit odd by modern standards. Jonah, well if I was in the same situation I think I would have gone overboard kicking and screaming. The friends who lowered their paralysed mate into the house after breaking through the roof so that Jesus could heal him, who paid for the house repairs? The Father in the story of the prodigal son, who shamed himself in the eyes of the community to forgive and welcome back his pain in the neck kid; this Dad certainly put himself out on a limb. It may have been a lot easier just to tell the boy to sling his hook to stay away. It happens.
Different; are you doing things differently, are you different to the rest of society or are you compliant, not wanting to make waves? Where does being different start?
If you are here today and are a Christian, and when I use the word Christian; I don’t mean that you were brought up in a Christian society, so you get the general idea about what Christianity is. Christian because a grandparent was pushy enough with your parents so that you got done as a baby, yip got done, christened or dedicated so that if anything horrible happened you would get to heaven in a state of grace. Or that you generally believe that Jesus was a good man, so in that case I’m definitely Christian. There’s probably a whole lot of examples of what a Christian is, there’s even some, soldiers, church members who believe that that signing a bit of paper and becoming a member or a soldier is the golden ticket to heaven just as those who centuries ago believed that paying for a church indulgence would get them straight to heaven. I’m not sure it works that way.
1) Christians are called to be different, to know God’s will for their lives to repent for a start and what that means is to take charge of their lives and with the Spirit of God living in them, with them change. But there are some who encounter God and after the initial Holy Spirit encounter that takes them a few hundred metres up the road to glory they somehow faze out and end up back on the road that is filled with potholes and burdens, the same old road that they were travelling is a battle, life is a struggle, if not Hell on earth. If you want a really good depiction of this; check out the parable of the sower and the parable of the weeds in Matthew’s gospel chapter 13. For all of us there’s a choice to be made, an internal choice to be transformed to be different to what we have been.
2) God wants people who encounter him to be different, not odd and eccentric though the Christian Church has certainly had a good number of them, people who stood out from the crowd and made a difference. There was even a movement where the people would march, bands playing loudly, singing songs of praise while crowds would taunt them throwing stones, dead rats and cats at them. The marched so that they could be seen praising God with the hope that others would join them on their strange campaign to bring others to salvation, so that others might live for God. They even produced a hard bonnet for the ladies to protect their heads. Why would the early members of the Salvation Army do this? (I pulled out an old bonnet and showed how it was a hard hat, I asked people how they would feel about putting on a hard hat for safety to attend a meeting at church)
Why would a Roman soldier like the one guarding forty other Roman soldiers who were condemned to death by exposure on a frozen pond for their belief in Jesus at Sivas in what is today Turkey, 320AD, throw off his clothes and join the remaining 39 after one of their number renounced his faith. A good question his actions were certainly different. This guard did not have to die, he could have faded into the crowd, faded into history, just another of many legions of other soldiers who did nothing special. Maybe he was a believer who had held back and realised that this was the time to publically declare his faith.
Why is it that people do alter when they encounter Jesus, when they have an experience of God?
3) Paul tells us this, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2) That was from the NIV translation of the Bible, the New Living Translation says it this way, “Don’t copy the behaviour and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
i) The very essence of being a Christ follower not only a believer but a disciple is allowing yourself to be changed, not only by God’s Holy Spirit at work in you but by doing the changing yourself, allowing it to happen, not doing the world stuff but living in such a way that you are a new person.
I was once talking with a man who was thinking about being a Salvation Army soldier, when I first met him he mentioned that he was living some weekends at his partners house, with all that a weekend stay over involved, this was a physical relationship. I asked him where he was with that relationship. He mentioned that it no longer involved a sexual relationship for he wanted to be in God’s perfect will. He was being transformed and seeking to no longer conform to the world’s standards but to God’s standards. He also knew that he was in God’s will for his life. He’s still a soldier and is doing great stuff for the Kingdom of God. With a new way of thinking you can know God’s will.
ii) I have seen people be prayed for, they have asked that God will change them, that God will change their actions. They want God to do this without their taking responsibility for their own thinking, attitudes and actions. Input is proportional to output, there is a difference that occurs when we seek after God, his will, in prayer, getting understanding of scripture and answer our own prayers by the renewing of our minds, by changing our thinking. Ask God for help by all means but help yourself to be transformed, it is your mind start renewing it!
[Illustration removed at the request of the person quoted as the quote from media source contained inaccuracies]
Conclusion: These are examples of people who have a new way of thinking. Desiring to live in God’s will, seeking his will through the reading of scripture, through studying the Bible – with others or alone, so that they will be transformed and listening, always listening for God’s still small voice.
Often we hear of people who struggle in their Christian journey only to come to the point of either walking away from God, or they decide that they desire to be like Christ, to no longer conform to family standards, friend’s standard, society’s standards, to those standards of the world but to the standards of Jesus. They change their thinking, their way of living and then live knowingly in God’s will for their life. Somehow burdens are lifted; somehow worldly pressures to conform no longer have the same degree of concern.
This starts in here (pointing at the head), often it’s easier, way easier not to be different, easier not to stand out from the crowd, not to respond to God’s will to be like everybody else in your own way. Yip nothing like being unique like everybody else.
To be different, to be transformed between the ears, brings freedom in Christ, this is spiritual freedom, a place of knowing you are right with God and the ability to live in God’s good and perfect will for your life. Is this the time when you decide to know the will of God for your life, is this the time to transformed, to start renewing your mind as you decide no longer to conform to the pattern of this world? Time to change the way you think?
You can be like so many legions of those who have gone on before, living by the worlds standards or make that change here (again pointing at the head) so that that change will see you living, knowing you are in God’s will.
Deciding to be different now that’s the challenge, who knows just where that may lead as you live in God’s will? Do you dare to be different?
