[NO SLIDE AT START]
• They’ve all got to have one, haven’t they, these days. Every company has to come up with their particular corporate mission statement.
o ‘This is what we’re about. This is our deal.’
• And it can’t be any old thing.
o If you’re Asda, you can’t just say ‘We want to sell your more cornflakes’. It’s got to have a bit of weight to it. And ideally sound like they’re doing the world a favour – rather than just trying to make a big profit.
o What’s Asda’s actual mission statement
o Here it is:
#1
o ‘Delivering real value for ordinary working people’
o Isn’t that nice of them? They don’t care about making money. They just really care about little old me and my grocery bills!
• Thing is, they can go in different directions, these mission statements, can’t they?
• They can be almost absurdly grandiose. I mean, what about this one?
#2
o “To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
o Anyone?
o [Microsoft]
#3
o Well, dream big, why not?!
• Other times, they can just be a random or vague.
o Here’s one I don’t think you’d ever guess if you didn’t know it already!
#4
o “To be a company that inspires and fulfils your curiosity.”
o What is that? Hampshire Libraries?
o It’s actually an electronics company - Sony.
#5
o But come on… really?
• I like the ones that leave little clues in them. Like a game. One word kind of gives it away if you’re attentive.
o Who’s this?
#6
o ‘to refresh the world and make a difference.’ (Coca Cola)
#7
o Refresh as in… refreshments – get it?
o Or this one:
#8
o “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.“
o (Starbucks)
#9
o OK so not exactly subtle.
• Now I imagine it’s quite tricky coming up with these things.
#10 [BLANK]
• You’ve got to sum up your values, your ethos, your goals, your market, your product – all these factors – in a way that makes sense to your investors, your board, your management, your customers, and everyone else. All in one sentence.
• I imagine it’s a minefield.
• But let me ask you this. I wonder if you’ve ever thought about what your mission statement would be.
• As in: for your personal, individual life.
#11
• What would you say? How would you articulate your mission in life? Maybe in just a sentence or two?
• It might be you’ve had a go at doing that at some stage. I have. And in fact I found it quite a helpful experience getting something together.
• I had to think about my key relationships – husband, dad, friend, child of God, and so on – and my personal passions and circumstances and gifts and opportunities and responsibilities and ambitions and the like. And get it all down into something manageable that gave me clarity about what I was really about.
• Quite tricky to do. And yet – as I say – actually fairly helpful and clarifying.
• In fact I’d go as far as to suggest it might be a good use of your time this afternoon to get something on paper – or phone or whatever - along these lines. Why not?!
• But whether or not you actually write something down, the real question is: how would you even begin when it comes to working out your mission in life in this sort of way?
• Well look, turn up Romans 12 in your Bibles.
#12
• The letter to the Romans is a rich book. In fact, it’s a glorious book. We’re going to be spending 3 Sundays in just this one chapter of it, which I think will do us great good.
• Today it’s just the first two verses of Romans 12. But they act as a kind of hinge for the whole thing.
• They look backwards, to the first 11 chapters.
#13
o You can see that in the opening word: Therefore.
o What he says here is a response to everything, all the theology and so on, that he’s laid out so far.
o ‘That, therefore this.’
• But these two verses also look forwards to the rest of the letter.
#14
o That becomes clear in the middle of verse 2: where Paul writes: ‘be transformed’
o He’s about to get into all the very practical changes, transformations, that are going to have to happen for every Christian, if they take seriously what’s been said so far.
o For now, he’s just introducing those areas of transformation in a kind of high-level way. This is the big picture of what changes are needed.
• In effect they give us the fodder we need to get us thinking about our mission in life
• So let me pray, and then we’ll read those verses.
#15 [blank]
PRAYER
• So, Romans 12. In fact I’ve asked Chris to begin a little bit earlier, so we can see a bit of the lead-in.
• Paul’s just been talking about where the Jewish people fit into God’s plans, given that most of them seem to have rejected Jesus as their Messiah. What do we make of that reality? In the final verses of Romans 11 he gives us his summary…
READING
• So let’s get into Paul’s steers for what we’re really about in our lives as Christian believers.
#16
• First thing he says, in effect, is: don’t forget the right foundation. It’s God’s mercy that motivates our Christian lives.
• We’ve already noticed the first word: ‘Therefore’. That makes it clear from the outset that what he’s going to say now is a response to what’s come before.
• But just to be uber-clear, notice how he backs it up:
• Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy (…to offer your bodies)
• That’s his summary of the entirety of Romans 1-11: ‘God’s mercy’. And if you know Romans a bit, you’ll agree: it’s a pretty good summary isn’t it?
#17
• I mean just think back over the book
o When God set in motion a gospel that would be ‘the power of God to bring salvation to everyone who believes’ (1v16)–
#18
o that’s mercy, isn’t it?
o When the people around the world that God had made
#19
o ‘exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served created things instead of their creator’ (1:25)…
o And when God’s own special covenant people joined in and become those who ‘dishonour God by breaking the law’ (2:23)
o And when it’s not just some people, it’s everybody; ‘there is no-one who seeks God’ (3:11)…
o When – even then – there’s a God-given righteousness
#20
o ‘given through faith in Jesus Christ to everyone who believes’ because God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood’ (3:23-25) – that is glorious mercy, isn’t it? Rebels against God get given a fresh start!
o When we’re told that Jesus ‘was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification’ (4:25),
#21
o again – such mercy!
o And when the result of that is a genuine restored friendship with our creator, ‘since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’ –
#22
o again it’s all the more mercy (5:1)
o And it doesn’t stop there.
o Paul teaches us about the fresh start we all have – ‘just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life’
#23
o (6:4)
o He talks of a new sense of being set free from the law:
#24
o ‘by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit’ (7:6)
o And a new verdict over our lives: ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (8:1)
#25
o And a new future: ‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.’ (8:18)
o And a new assurance of our standing with God: ‘I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’
o This is all mercy from God!
o And even in chapter 9 – sorry I’ve run out of room on the screen – in chapter 9, where we learn of God sovereignly choosing his people, and that leading in chapter 10 to Israel actually rejecting Jesus and so being cut off from God, it turns out – as you heard in the reading – even that was a mercy: it opened the door to Gentiles being included, and that in turn leads to Israel waking up and wanting what they’ve got over there, and so both get to receive more mercy from God.
• It’s just… sensational!
• What we’ve had so far in this letter is a feast for our hearts to revel in. A feast of all these beautiful displays of God demonstrating his loving mercy towards rebellious people – which have become our experience.
• All that… is what Paul is talking about when he says: ‘Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies.
There is no more powerful motivation to living the Christian life than dwelling on what we’ve been given in Christ. That is the seedbed that produces the most vibrant, healthy Christian growth there is. And the reason I took those minutes to review those highlights of Romans so far is just to remind us of them.
#26
You see for some here this morning, this will all still be quite new to you. You are still piecing together the Christian message. Well maybe that was a useful summary. Do come and grab me later if you want to ask more.
But for others, the bigger danger is that it gets old. It doesn’t set your heart on fire as it once did. And – well, that’s a problem for a bunch of reasons. But one of those reasons is that you no longer have that seedbed to provide healthy roots for daily Christian living. And without even realising it, you end up looking for motivation in other places.
And let’s face it: other motivations are available!
Like fear. Doing the Christian thing, because you’re worried that if you don’t, God might give up on you. That’s religion across the planet, isn’t it?
Or duty. The fabric of society or even Western civilisation depends on people like me doing the right thing in a situation like this. So I guess I’d better just suck it up and take one for the team.
Or habit. I’ve always done life this way. Why change now? It’s just going to be easier to stick with what I know.
Or social conformity. This course seems tempting, but what would my Christian friends and family think if I did it. My reputation would be left in tatters.
You see what I mean? Other motivations are available. But none will be as powerful for the long-term, or produce such vibrant, joyful, heartfelt lives as simply living in response to what God has done for us by his mercy; who he’s made us to be in Christ.
Think of the kid whose dad has been drilling him all summer in football skills, and then the first week of September he gets picked for the team, and all he can think of is racing home to tell his Dad. Not because it will change his relationship with his Dad, but simply because he knows how much pleasure It will give his Dad to hear It, and having had so much input over months, so much time and effort and expertise and encouragement from from Dad, there’s nothing that would give this boy greater joy than to see that smile on Dad’s face.
Or perhaps more negatively, think about the middle-aged married man who’s away on a business trip and as things turn out, he has the opportunity to sleep with a colleague. And in the moment it’s a very attractive proposition. But then he thinks: how could I do that to my wife. After all she’s done for me. She’s given everything for me. I wouldn’t be who I am without her. How could I hurt her like that? And he goes back to his own room.
You see the point: when we contemplate how much has been given to us by someone, it becomes a joy to bring pleasure to that someone, and unthinkable to bring hurt.
And what Paul says is: think about God that way. It is – more than anything – the mercy of God we’ve experienced that will provide powerful motivation in living out our Christian lives.
• So that’s the right foundation for our personal mission; what we’re really about in our lives.
• But next, Paul says: Get the right breadth.
#27
• That is, have a good honest think about how much of your life you’re really prepared to give over to God.
• Look back at verse 1 again.
• …offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.
• Now what is Paul doing here? He’s teleporting us – or at least our minds – into the scene at the temple in Jerusalem. It’s a pretty busy and smelly place. Before our mind’s eye are priests and altars and worshippers, coming with their offerings and sacrifices and so on. But Paul is giving a bit of a twist to this mental journey. He’s taking us there to make a point.
• You see, the thing about all those sacrifices laid down in the Old Testament was that some of them were sacrifices for sin.
• You brought a perfect, healthy animal to the priest, and he sacrificed it and that sacrifice would be acceptable to God to remove the guilt of your sin.
• Those were the sacrifices that pointed forward to the way Jesus himself would die as the perfect lamb of God to deal with our sin.
• Paul talked about that earlier in Romans: how God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement – so that we could be justified before him
• Those were the sin offerings, the guilt offerings, even the grand-daddy of them all – the Day of Atonement when there was a sin offering for the whole nation.
• But then there were other sacrifices, like the burnt offering. This was when - as a completely voluntary act of worship - you might bring an animal to the altar. And on would go the bbq and it would be burnt up completely, charred to a cinder, just as a way of you saying to God: I want to dedicate the best of what I have to you. And God would inhale the smoke […], as it were, and smile down upon you. And just knowing that would make your day.
• And it’s that kind of offering Paul is referring to here. But the twist is that the animal on the offering is actually you and me.
• We are to put our entire lives – everything we are – on to that altar.
o It’s not the body of one of your animals that goes on the altar. It’s your body. In other words it’s not something you have; it’s everything you are.
• That is what worship looks like for those whose lives have been remade by Jesus. It’s a living sacrifice – that is, a death that has to keep being died that just keeps going every day. And it’s an everything sacrifice. Your… bodies.
• And there, of course, is the problem. An act of worship like this involves swallowing the cost. And it involves losing control. And it involves doing it all for someone else’s pleasure. And none of those things seem particularly attractive in our culture.
• You see, there is socially acceptable way these days of giving over something of yourself for another. It’s called volunteering.
• Do you volunteer?
• Everybody loves a volunteer, don’t they? The government loves it, our friends and neighbours love it, the people we help love it, and we love it. Everybody loves it.
• And there are many here today who get involved in volunteering. And it’s a commendable thing.
• But whatever you do, please don’t bring the volunteer mentality into your service of God.
• What do I mean by the volunteer mentality?
• Well, think about it. For most people, volunteering actually involves minimal cost. You give up a couple of hours a week, say. It’s just a slot in your diary. Nothing more.
• And it involves maximum control. If you’re tired or have a better offer, you can just say: ‘sorry I’m going to take this week off’
• And it involves a sense of personal fulfilment. If I stop getting something out of it for myself, I’ll probably give it up and do something else.
• Do you see? Minimum cost, maximum control, self-fulfilment.
• I know there’s more to be said about volunteering than that. And please believe me when I say it’s a great thing to do, although you can see why we try and avoid the language of volunteering for all the roles that need to be done here at church; we tend to use the language of serving.
• But regardless of the words we might use, do you see the danger when you bring that approach into your worship of God?
• With God, your act of worship involves maximum cost: offer your bodies – everything you are.
o You can’t reduce worship to one thing, like singing say, or even just to church – it’s the whole of every day. It starts from the moment you wake up each morning
o It involves your time, your energy;
o your relationships, your money;
o your work life, your home life;
o your on-time, your downtime;
o your actions and words, your attitudes and thoughts.
o Everything.
• And your act of worship involves minimal control.
o A living sacrifice means death to our independent agenda.
o It means death to our personal ambition
o It means death to our autonomous plans and schemes
o Because we’re handing over the keys to all of that to God
o If I hand over my house keys to you when I go away, I’m accepting that anything could happen to my house (and probably will, depending on who it is), and I’m ok with that.
• And worshipping God means death to pleasing myself; my life may well bring me great joy, but that’s not the point. My great purpose in life is to bring pleasure to God: ‘holy and pleasing’. I’m to sacrifice myself daily in such a way that when the aroma of that sacrifice reaches the nostrils of God it might bring a smile to his face.
That’s the breadth of the Christian life: it’s our very bodies that are on the altar.
Finally, and just quickly, let’s make sure we clear on the right access point. It is our minds that spark the change.
#28
Verse 2 is the business end, you might say, of this little paragraph. What does Paul write?
2 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.
I was filling out my insurance renewal the other day, and you know how it is – it’s just option after option. Do I want legal protection? Do I want no-claims discount protection? I don’t know. You tell me! So many options to shape my insurance schedule!
But there’s only two options, it turns out, for the schedule of our lives. Do you see them there?
• There’s what Paul calls ‘the pattern of the world’.
• And there’s the ‘will of God’.
That’s it.
And so the only choice we’re really making is: which of those two will we take as blueprints for our lives?
• The first doesn’t require me to do anything at all, does it?
• The pattern of the world – well that will just seep into me all day every day without me doing anything.
• I just have to exist.
• The conversation of colleagues at work, the values that drip out of my Tik Tok feed, the characters in whatever Netflix series I’m working through… I’m living and breathing it all, with zero effort.
• But the second option – following the will of God – well that’s different, isn’t it? That’s going to involve a fight. It’s going to involve deliberately turning my back in what is driving everyone around me. And it’s going to involve changing from what the world has made me to what God desires for me.
• Be transformed – says Paul.
• And that’s hard. Change is always hard.
• The world around us doesn’t know what it thinks about change, does it:
• Is change a bad thing? Yes! Don’t tell me to change who I am. It’s all I have! I have to be who I am! I need to be true to myself.
• Or is it a good thing? Yes: I do need a better look, better confidence, better muscles, better outlook – whatever!
• So the world is confused.
• But the Bible is clear.
o Change is a necessary thing. And it’s a daily thing.
o ‘Be transformed’.
• And the way this change happens, you notice, is primarily through the mind.
It’s not the only way it happens, but it’s the way it happens most securely and long-lastingly.
I mean, take some of the different aspects of who you are – your behaviour, your emotions, your conscience.
You can change those things in non mind-ways.
• You can make a new year’s resolution about not losing your temper, or eating less fast food, or something. You can just change your behaviour
• Or you can change your emotions in a non-mind way. We could do something with music and light and tone of voice and so on and you might feel different.
• Or I could guilt you into supporting me on my sponsored charity marathon – which by the way I’m not planning! I could go straight to conscience.
But none of things will last the distance, unless your mind is involved.
Which is why if we want to change, be transformed - grow in our spiritual maturity, emotional maturity, follow Jesus more closely… we’ll need to have our thinking moulded by God.
And the way we do that is of course – by listening to his word.
And however much we know that, it’s hard, isn’t it? It’s hard to keep coming back and engaging with the Bible and checking our understanding and modifying our take on things.
The easy thing is to look like we’re listening to God’s word, but in fact, in our hearts, to be just looking for confirmation that we had it right all along. But if that’s our approach, we will never really find his good, pleasing and perfect will, and we will never truly be transformed.
That’s why we spend so much time in church wrestling with God’s word. Because that is how God changes us. And do please take the time to wrestle with God yourself, if you want to be transformed.
It is our minds – moulded by the word of God under the power of the Spirit – that spark the change we need.
The right foundation, the right breadth, the right access point.
So if you want to clarify your mission in life,
#29
what it looks like for you to be a faithful worshipper of God with all that you are, get those building blocks in place, and you’ll have a good start!