Alba 4-24-2022
THE PERFECT WILL OF GOD
Romans 12:1-2
Have you ever received a “sweepstakes” offer in the mail? For years magazine companies like Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping and Publishers Clearing House have sent out mailings offering a sweepstakes where a lucky winner could win substantial prizes if they’d just send in the paperwork.
In 1997, American Family Publishers had a mailing list that included the “Bushnell Assembly of God” in Bushnell, Florida.
The computer somehow twisted the name of the church so that the sweepstakes notice was addressed to "God of Bushnell" and was sent to the church’s address.
The letter read, "Dear God. We're searching for you. You've been positively identified as our $11,000,000 mystery millionaire! What an incredible fortune there would be for God! Imagine the looks you'd get from neighbors. But don't just sit there God, come forward now and claim your prize!”
They were searching for God! They promised God a huge blessing, if only He would respond to their offer. Well they have a lot to offer, but I don't think that God, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, needs what they can give.
On the other hand, it would be good for everyone to truly seek God and His will, because He has an even better offer with a huge blessing for everyone who would look to Him and respond to His offer.
For there is the perfect will of God that if followed would bring about changes in people, and in the world, that is desperately needed today.
Would you like to know God’s Will for your life? Of course you would! So, if you are searching for God’s Will for your life and if you want His blessings you need to look no further than Romans chapter twelve verses one and two.
1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Now, what Romans 12 is telling us is that God has offered a huge blessing. And not just for one lucky winner.
Have you noticed how they are able to insert your name in their sweepstakes offer to make it look like it is a personal letter? Well God makes His offer personal as well.
Do “you” see it? The scripture says “I beseech YOU.” God is speaking to “you,”... actually to each one of us. And it is a message about our body and our mind.
To respond to God's offer of the blessing of living in His will begins as we:
Present Our Bodies (verse 1)
Our bodies are to be “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God.”
That is God's will. We are urged to present ourselves, our whole selves, as a living sacrifice to God as a response to God’s mercies.
We’ve been programmed to think that our bodies belong only to us. So we hear such slogans as: “It’s your body, you have the right to choose,” and "If it feels good, go ahead, do it.” That’s basically the attitude of the world.
But God’s Word teaches that our bodies don’t belong to us alone. Not only are we God’s creation, but I Corinthians 6:19-20 says, “19 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? 20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
It’s not just with our spirit we serve the living God, but also with our bodies as a holy sacrifice. A simple study of the word holy reveals its meaning: to be set apart; sanctified, it also means pure.
God expects that the people He sets apart for Himself will live set apart lives. Remember what it says in Romans 6:12-14.
“12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. 13 And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14 For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.”
The pleasures of sin are real. But how long does it last? A short time. Therefore it is not very valuable. The pleasures of sin last a short time, but the pain of sin can last a long, long time.
The problem is, our spiritual lives can take on a façade. What is a façade? It’s a superficial appearance or an illusion of something that it is not.
That happens because we don’t take the time or effort necessary to allow the changes God desires to take place in our lives. So then we try to give off the illusion that we’re something that we’re not.
I like the way Mike Hays, minister of Britton Christian Church in the Oklahoma City area confronts this. He says, “Being a pastor doesn't make a person any less prone to live a fraudulent lifestyle than being a doctor makes one less likely to become ill.”
And he says, “Since the Lord has heightened my awareness of my daily need for experiencing His presence I have come to be totally disgusted with my fraudulent ways. For myself, I have arrived at a conclusion -- I reject living as a fraud. I want to live as a child of God. I want the light of Christ to shine through me clearly and convincingly.”
God's will calls us to be a living sacrifice. This basically means that our whole lives should be on the altar, surrendered to God.
Author and speaker Elizabeth Elliott wife of one of the five men who were killed trying to take the gospel to unreached people in South America quipped a number of years ago that the problem with living sacrifices is that they tend to crawl off the altar.
That’s a major issue with people who call themselves Christians today, because there are a lot of people want to give Jesus their hearts, but they don’t give Jesus anything else.
They want to live their own way, they want to act their own way, they want to have their own priorities. They want to give Jesus their hearts an hour or two a week, at most. But the majority of their lives they want to keep under their own rule.
So what can keep us on the altar of sacrifice? Truly it is our love for God, our faith in His promises, our commitment to the work of Christ and remembering the sacrifice He made for us on the cross.
The apostle Paul understood that it can be a struggle. He wrote in
I Corinthians 9:27 “But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.”
For the Christian, it is our reasonable service. It is our spiritual worship to live in such a way as to bring honor and glory to the One who gave Himself for us. He allowed His body to be nailed to that cross so we could have forgiveness of our sins.
It is reasonable for us to say with Paul as he did in Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
If we want to win the sweepstakes of God's blessings and live in accordance with His perfect will, we must offer our whole selves to Him and...
Be Transformed (verse 2)
We are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.
A renewed and transformed mind focuses on godly things; on God’s standards of behavior; on God’s priorities. The renewed mind looks for God’s will. The renewed mind approves of God’s will; and it sets out to obey God’s will.
Spiritual transformation starts in the mind and heart. A mind dedicated to this world and its concerns will be tossed back and forth like a reed in the wind. But a mind that is dedicated to God’s truth will produce a life that can stand the test of time.
Transformation comes only as we do not conform to the ways of the world. Eugene Peterson translates it this way in The Message: “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without thinking.”
So we are told in I John 2:15-17, “15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. 17 And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.”
The world will tell you that anything goes, and it does not matter what your decisions are, but God makes clear that there is a right and wrong, and it does matter what decisions you make. Do not be conformed to the world.
In Christ we are raised in newness of life and we are no longer to be as we once were, conformed to the image of this world, but instead transformed into the image of our Lord having the mind of Christ.
You may have heard the story of a newly baptized disciple's concern over reaction from co-workers. Next Lord's day when asked how things went, the response was, “It was no problem, no one noticed the difference.”
I heard another story of a man who was baptized one Sunday morning, and at the close of the service after the baptism, the preacher asked him to close in prayer.
The man began to pray, saying, “Thank you God for Jesus”. Then there was a pause and silence filled the air for about 30 seconds. Then he closed, “I guess when I get to know you better I will know what to say to you”. Learning to know God and His will comes from knowing God's Word.
If you want to know God’s will for your life, you must go to His word to see what it says. It is able to transform your mind as nothing else will.
It has been said, “Some minds are like concrete; thoroughly mixed and permanently set.” Hopefully that does not describe any of us. But it may be necessary to clear some cobwebs out of our minds. We begin that process by freeing ourselves from false expectations.
Too often we expect God to reveal His will in a very special way. The truth is God has revealed His will to us. We can know what He wants us to do in most situations.
Within God’s Word is either a command or a principle that will show us His will for every situation. When making a decision the first thing we should ask ourselves is “What does God's Word say?”
We are to stop thinking the world’s way and start thinking God’s way. This is why the military sends people to boot camp. They want to take a person and empty them of their civilian way of thinking and get them to think the military way.
As Christians we need a kind of spiritual boot camp. In order to undergo God’s transformation, the believer must be made over. God’s Word can’t change us if we don't know what it says.
You can’t do the will of God if you don’t know the will of God. But minds which have been transformed by the renewing work of God’s Holy Spirit in accordance with the Word of God will be able to discern what God's will is.
Only the renewed mind is one that works according to God’s Word and does His will. Verse two says that when we are transformed by the renewing of our mind we will, prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Prove. How do we prove it? The NIV says we“will be able to test and approve what God's will is .” In other words if we do this right, we’ll be transformed, and we’ll be able not only to test that God's will is best, but also to test ourselves to see if we are living as we should.
The Living Bible has it this way, “Then you will learn from your own experience how His ways will really satisfy you.”
And, I might add, we will know the perfect will of God.
That makes a real winner!
CONCLUSION:
There is a story that is reported to be true about a wealthy man who had a collection of paintings, one of which was the "Leaning Tower of Pisa," that hung over his writing desk.
One day he noticed that the painting was hanging crooked… so he straightened it. But the next morning, he noticed it was crooked again. So he straightened it again.
That happened every morning for about 4 or 5 days. Finally, in frustration, he asked his housekeeper if she had any idea what was happening. She answered: “That was me. I have to hang it crooked to make the tower hang straight.”
That made sense to her. It wasn’t right for the Tower to lean like that, so she felt she had to make the painting crooked so the Tower would look straight.
Now, the Bible says that that’s kind of like a “Default” way of thinking for most of us. Proverbs 3:5-6 warns us:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
And lean not on your own understanding;
In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He shall direct your paths.”
Proverbs 14:12 warns “There is a way that seems right to a man (it makes sense to me) but its end is the way of death.”
There is a better way: When the body and mind are living in the perfect will of God.
