Because God
is God, he should be the ultimate end in everything that we do. Because God is God, he is infinitely worthy of
every part of our lives. He is
infinitely worthy of my heart and all its affections, motives, and
emotions. He is infinitely worthy of my
obedience. He is infinitely worthy of my
love. He is infinitely worthy of my
energy, my time, and the full strength of my body to do his will. God is worthy. The creatures in heaven cry out Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to
receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will
they existed and were created. God
is worthy, infinitely worthy simply because of who he is.
Paul writes in Romans 12:1-2, I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the
mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be
transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what
is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. On the basis of this passage I want to
make some observations.
1. Paul does give us something to
do. He tells us how to live. He tells us how to respond. There is action that is required on our parts…
We are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God,
which is our spiritual worship. This is
another way of saying that we must present our whole selves to God. This is the action on our part.
2. Our call to this action of presenting
ourselves as living sacrifices does not drop out of nowhere, unconnected from
everything else that Paul has said. Some
of us read the Bible that way, though.
We know, of course, that the Bible is true and useful, so we tend to drop
in at random on different spots. It is
like reaching in and grabbing a verse or two and holding it up like a shiny
nugget. We say, “Look what I found!” But we are maybe too lazy to care much about
the context. But in reading that way, we
unintentionally do violence to the authors of Scripture. You wouldn’t pick up a novel and flip to a
random place in the middle and be satisfied with just a paragraph or two. You wouldn’t know what was going on! In saying this, I do not at all intend to
communicate that the Holy Spirit is unable to use a single verse pulled in this
way powerfully in a person’s life. Of
course he can. I do intend to
communicate that if this is your regular practice you are like a man or woman
in the desert who bypasses an oasis, a spring overflowing with water to settle
for a thimble of water. Different books
are written differently, and they are meant to be read according to the way
they’ve been written. So in this case,
with Paul in the book of Romans, he is not just giving us a bunch of true
things that just happen to be sort of loosely connected. Paul doesn’t waste words, and God doesn’t
waste words through Paul. Paul
argues. He is crafting arguments! The way that you read Paul will be
revolutionized if you realize that he is crafting arguments and that he is
trying to get you to follow his arguments.
As I said, our call to the action of giving our bodies up as living
sacrifices does not fall out of the sky unconnected from everything else Paul
is saying, but it comes at a critically important place in Paul’s gospel argument
that we call the book of Romans. It is really
the turning place of the book. Paul has
just spent 11 packed, glorious chapters talking in detail about God’s holiness,
man’s sinfulness, salvation, justification, adoption, sanctification, God’s
sovereignty, his plan for Israel, and how all of this stuff fits together to
bring him glory and to bring us good.
But in those earlier 11 chapters, he doesn’t tell us to do
anything. It is all bedrock truths about
what God has done for us already, prior to our doing of stuff. The connector word is therefore. Whenever you read “therefore”, you should ask
what it is there for? Paul spends the
next four chapters concluding his book by telling us how to live, but it all
comes back to God’s prior mercies, explained in the first 11 chapters. The gospel order here is significant. We are not good in order that God may accept
us. But rather, in light of God’s
merciful acceptance of us, we find the proper motivation and freedom to become
truly good. This second point comes down
to the fact that our obedience to any of God’s commands must be a response to
his character, his mercy, or else it is an obedience that merely serves our
pride, a sort of disobedient obedience.
3. We are told not to be conformed to
this world. I tend to think this is what happens if we allow ourselves to run
on cruise control, turn our brains off, and do what comes natural. This
requires resistance and effort and the help of God. Paul presents for us the antithesis and shows
us what the opposite of this is, what we should do in order to truly avoid being
conformed to the world. We are to be
transformed by the renewing of our minds.
God calls for our transformation, and the way he tells us that this will
happen is by the renewing of our minds.
The way that we will be transformed is by thinking. It will, of course, be thinking in ways
shaped by God’s Word and in accordance with his Spirit, but our minds are an
essential and explicit player in our transformation into what God wants us to
become in order to worship him the way should.
The result of this transformation is an increased ability to discern God’s
will.
I started
this talk with the sentence, “Because God is God, he should be the ultimate end
in everything that we do.” From him and
to him and through him are all things.
There are means and there are ends.
For many of you, you view school as a means to an end. Perhaps school is a means to your future
livelihood. Perhaps it is a means to get
into college. Perhaps it is a means to
keep your parents happy with you. When
we give our lives to God in worship, we are attempting to bring everything else
together as a means to the end of knowing and delighting in God, so that he is
back of everything. For example, I go to
school, so I can get a job, so I can provide for my family as a way to glorify
God. He becomes the answer to every
string of “why” questions.
As I explained when I went over the syllabus, I will be taking time
through this course to show how mathematics may be done to the glory of
God. In the beginning weeks of this
course, I will be starting by arguing for the importance of thinking in general
before moving to the importance of mathematics specifically as a means of glorifying
God. To give a broad overview statement,
thinking is a created means of loving and glorifying God, and mathematics is a
means of becoming a better thinker in general.
This is one of several ways that we see math itself doing what it was
meant to do in God’s creation – point to God. During the first few weeks, many of my
thoughts about thinking in general will be shaped by the book entitled “Think”
by John Piper, which I recommend. It is
fairly short and fairly readable but it will… make you think.
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