Have you ever laundered money?
I am not talking about the money laundering done by some drug dealer who might be trying to cover the trail of their ill-gotten gain. I am talking about actual laundering money – taking one’s hard earned cash and sending it through the agitation and rinse cycles of a washing machine.
Have you ever done that?
I have. When I was a freshman in college, I accidentally washed a twenty-dollar bill. I found it the day after I washed my laundry when I slipped on my blue jeans. It reached in my pocket and found a waded up mess that turned out to be a twenty-dollar bill. It became an even bigger mess as I tried to unwrap it and ended up tearing it into five or six pieces.
Now understand that twenty dollars then was a lot more money then than it is now – and it was particularly a lot of money to a poor college freshman.
I did the best I could to repair the damaged bill with a roll of Scotch tape. Some of the pieces were missing, turned to dust I suppose as the blue jeans went through the hot air tumble dryer.
Once I had put all the pieces back together as best I could, I went to the campus bank and handed it to the teller. She looked closely at the bill and then looked back at me with a smile on her face. “You’d be surprised how often something like this happens!” Then she placed the beaten up twenty-dollar bill in her cash draw, and handed me a nice, fresh, and crisp twenty-dollar bill.
Do you know what happened to the old, beaten, and abused twenty-dollar bill?
You probably already know that when banks receives currency that has been worn out, abused, misused, agitated, and/or mutilated, they remove it from circulation and send it back to the US Treasury to be incinerated. That’s what happened to the money I laundered. It was taken out of circulation and incinerated. However, that is not the end of the story. You see, I was able to take part in a great exchange. When the bank teller removed my bill from circulation, they replaced it with a fresh, crisp new bill.
That was a great exchange – but when I read the Book of Romans I read about an even greater exchange. God takes our old life out of circulation and replaces it with the life of Christ. The gospel is not about being changed – but exchanged. It’s not about being fixed up, but replaced.
I know this is hard for us to accept this, but the Bible makes it abundantly clear that what we have to offer God is actually pretty worthless! Our lives are like that twenty-dollar bill that has been through the agitate, soak, rinse and repeat cycle of the washing machine. We enter this world in sin and the effect is that before God our lives are battered, bruised, mutilated, and beaten. Listen to Paul’s words in Romans 3:1-18.
Whether we want to hear it or not, we possess nothing that God needs. If we think otherwise, we are fooling ourselves.
So what do we try to do? We engage in some cosmetic fixes to try to convince ourselves and those around us that we are special.
We gather all the little pieces of scraps that make up our lives - we try to arrange them in a manner that seems best - and we grab a roll of tape in order to try to paste it altogether. When we have finished our little repair project we are disappointed to discover that many of the fragments are missing or in the wrong place.
I was looking through some old high school and college yearbooks earlier this week. My attention was drawn for a moment to my own senior class picture. I have to say that I looked good in that picture. What you can’t tell is that I had a great big zit right in the middle of my forehead.
Here’s what happened. When the photographer developed the picture he was able to do some cosmetic retouching to remove the appearance of the skin blemish. The zit was still there – right in the middle of my forehead. But you can’t see any indication of it in the picture.
That’s what we try to do with our lives. We employ some type of emotional, social, psychological, or spiritual cosmetics to our lives in an attempt to convince ourselves, or those around us, or maybe even God that somehow we have something of value to offer. We look at what ails us and believe that a change of venue, or a new set of clothing, or some better class of contacts will somehow fix what is broken. We are only fooling ourselves.
Here’s some news that you might not want to here. Are you ready? You and I will never be able to appreciate the true power of the gospel until we come to an awareness of our own bankruptcy.
We somehow believe that God wants to fix what is wrong with us. NO! God doesn’t want to fix what is broken. He wants to take it out of circulation and send it to the incinerator.
God doesn’t fix what’s broken - He replaces it. Like the bank teller of my college days, God takes the crumbled and torn fragments of our lives and says, “You’d be surprised how often something like this happens!” Then he takes our old life out of circulation and replaces it with the new life of Christ.
The message of the gospel is a message about a great exchange.
Our old life is put death with Christ on the cross and we share in the life and power of the risen Christ. Jesus Christ becomes our life.
Listen to what Paul says in Romans 6:3-8.
We were baptized into His death so that we might share in His new life.
That’s what we mean when we speak of the Exchanged Life. Salvation is not God fixing things, but replacing them. And it’s not about me fixing things with Scotch tape or cosmetic changes to try and make my life look or feel better, but it is about surrendering completely to Jesus so that he might live his life through us.
That’s what is meant by the term “Exchanged Life!”
(Discuss Book – Jesus VINE, we branches)
This truth revolutionized my life–it changed everything.
I exchanged my ministry for Jesus ministry.
I exchanged my efforts for the effort of Jesus through me.
I exchanged my energy for His energy.
I began to realize that I was weak–but Jesus wasn’t.
I began to discover that I couldn’t be a pastor–but Jesus could through me.
I began to discover that Jesus wanted to express Himself–His life–through me.
What does God want from us?
That’s a question Paul aims to answer in Romans 12:1-2. Listen to what he says and follow the progression of his logic.
He begins with one word: “Therefore…” It is an pithy saying, but it is true. Whenever you see the word “therefore” you need to ask what the “therefore” is there for. So what is the therefore there for? It is there to call attention to everything that Paul has been teaching thus far concerning the Christian gospel.
Just in case we are not sure what that means, Paul recaps the main topic he has been exploring in Romans 1-11. He says, “Therefore, I urge you, IN THE VIEW OF GOD’S MERCY…”
Paul is about to tell us exactly what God wants from us – but before he does that, he wants to remind us about EVERYTHING he has been teaching about God’s mercy in the first eleven chapters of Romans. So let’s take a quick review:
He has taught us that we are DEAD to sin’s power and control and ALIVE in Christ.
He teaches us that we are DEAD to the law and ANIMATED by the Holy Spirit.
He shares at great deal many of the blessings associate with NEW LIFE in the Spirit.
Then he says in Romans 12 that in the view of ALL these things (in the view of God’s mercy) – present yourselves as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God …
He does NOT say: “Make yourself HOLY and PLEASING to God!” Paul has already told us that IN CHRIST we are HOLY. Paul has already told us that through Christ we are acceptable to God. So this is NOT an admonition to DO anything. Rather it is a call to place all that God has given us back into His hands. It is a call to trust God. It is a call to depend on the Holy Spirit. It is a call to find our power, purpose, and provisions for living in Christ. It is a call to REST in the sufficiency of God’s grace.
