Last week our focus was "Doing what God wants me to do and why I should even care."
Our Scripture was Ephesians 5:17 NLT - "Don’t act thoughtlessly, but try to understand what the Lord wants you to do."
We should care about doing what God wants us to do because it’s good for God, it’s good for others, and it’s good for us.
Once we’ve decided that it’s good to do God’s will, we need a plan to figure out what God wants us to do.
Here’s a good biblical plan:
Romans 12:2 NLT - "Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is."
In today’s Scripture we are given an answer to our question about how to figure out what God wants us to do.
The answer is like a two-sided coin. There’s a "heads" and "tails" to the answer.
Let’s look at the "tails" or negative side first.
"Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world."
In others words, "if you want to know what God wants you to do... don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world."
God doesn’t reveal His will to the worldly.
Paul is not the only apostle to enlighten us with this truth. Notice what the apostle John also said:
1 John 2:15-17 NLT
15 - "Stop loving this evil world and all that it offers you, for when you love the world, you show that you do not have the love of the Father in you."
[The term "the world" used here doesn’t mean the people in the world. God wants us to love people just like He does (John 3:16). This term is used to describe the wordly system that operates contrary to the will of God.]
16 - "For the world offers only the lust for physical pleasure, the lust for everything we see, and pride in our possessions. These are not from the Father. They are from this evil world."
17 - "And this world is fading away, along with everything it craves. But if you do the will of God, you will live forever."
So the Holy Spirit is saying to us, "Stop loving this evil world by copying its customs and behavior." And the reason again? Because love for "the world" interferes with our being able to know God’s will.
We can’t follow the customs and behavior of the world and follow the customs and behavior of God simultaneously. It’s an either/or proposition. As Jesus said, "No one can serve two masters." (Matthew 6:24a NLT)
The first step to figuring out what God wants you to do is giving up what the world wants you to do.
One caveat. (That’s a fancy Latin word for "warning")
God is not calling for us to give up friendships with those who do not yet know Him. Rather He is calling us to be careful not to follow their worldly behavior and customs.
There’s a big difference between loving people and loving "the world".
The life of Jesus is our model. It is well known that Jesus was criticized by the religious hypocrites of His day for His relationships with notorious sinners. They misunderstood the idea of separation from the world.
Mark 2:15 NLT - "That night Levi (Matthew) invited Jesus and his disciples to be guests, along with his fellow tax collectors and many other notorious sinners. (There were many people of this kind among the crowds that followed Jesus.)"
Mark 2:16 NLT - "But when some of the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with people like that, they said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with such scum?"
Tuesday night Deb and I sat down with our son Brandon who was leaving the next morning for his new job as a youth pastor in Indiana. He was sharing with us his passion for youth ministry when he broke down in tears recollecting some high school students he had interviewed when he was completing his youth ministry internship.
He purposely went to talk to some kids that didn’t know God so he could find out what their opinion of God and the church was. He wants to know what it’s going to take to reach youth for Christ so he wants to try and understand them better.
He said as he began interviewing a few of the students at this public high school in Nashville that a crowd of kids began to gather around him. What was their idea of God? "Oh, He’s a spirit out there somewhere", one student replied. Another answered, "He’s the ’force’ that’s in all of us."
"What do you think about the church?", Brandon asked. "Just a boring place to be", one of the teens replied. Others offered their thoughts that the church was "just a bunch of hypocrites who sat around gossiping about one another."
Brandon said it broke his heart that these kids were so far from God. But he didn’t want to be the kind of youth pastor who turned these kind of kids away just because they had purple spiked hair, rings in their noses, or because they weren’t accepted by the "popular" kids in school.
Yet at the same time, when we were going over an inventory of items for the house he’s moving into beside the church, we realized he didn’t own a television set. "That’s fine really," he said. "If I watch too much tv I find I become more focused on the things of the world and less on the things of God."
To me that’s loving people without loving the world.
So the first step to knowing what God wants you to do:
"Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this evil world."
And just how do we avoid copying the behavior and customs of this evil world?
Flip the coin over to the "heads" side, the positive.
"Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think."
The Greek word for transform is the basis for our English word "metamorphosis".
A caterpillar goes into a cacoon. A butterfly emerges. Similarly, the Christ follower must change from someone who copies the behavior and customs of this evil world to someone who does not.
This change, God says, is to take place in our thinking.
The mind is the preeminent spiritual battlefield.
Just like some people want to be transformed from "out of shape" to "in shape", so they enroll in a physical fitness program. Nothing wrong with that.
What we need is a "mental fitness program" to have our minds "transformed".
Here are some biblical principles for letting God transform your mind about doing God’s will:
1. Follow the inner desire and power that come from God. Philippians 2:13 NLT - "For God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey him and the power to do what pleases him."
What Christ follower doesn’t know the joy of being prodded from within by the Holy Spirit to do God’s will?
Jesus Himself was asked by His disciples if He was hungry when they came back from the Samaritan village of Sychar. Jesus had been revealing His Messianic role to the Samaritan woman and his response to the disciples’ question about eating food was this:
John 4:34 NLT - "Then Jesus explained: My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from doing his work."
He needed physical nourishment - but more than anything He needed to do the will of His Father!
That inner hunger of Jesus is also the inner hunger of every Christ follower. Follow your spiritual hunger.
2. Have an open mind to the Scriptures. Acts 17:11 NLT - "And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to check up on Paul and Silas, to see if they were really teaching the truth."
In addition to God’s desire in your heart and His power to help you tranform your mind - the greatest mind-changing tool available is the Word of God!
But it cannot change you if you are close-minded to it.
And it sure can’t help you transform your mind if you don’t read it regularly and hear it taught and preached regularly.
The Word is the yardstick with which we measure our way of thinking.
3. Try to think like Jesus. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says that as Christ followers "we have the mind of Christ".
That’s why we can understand spiritual things.
If you had the mind of Einstein you would probably understand a lot more about physics. If you had the mind of Bach you would understand more about music. If you had the mind of a four year old you would probably be less stressed out.
Since believers have the mind of Christ we need to use it! "What would Jesus think about this situation?" That’s the question we must ask ourselves. His mind is within us! Thinking with Christ’s mind will transform our mental processes.
If we want to walk like Jesus walked we’ve got to think like Jesus thought!
Bottom line: after you have refused to copy "the customs and behavior of this world" and "let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think, then you will now what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is".
