Who God Sees

Romans 12:1-8

September 19, 2021 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So, most of us have a morning routine. We do it every morning and probably rarely think about it, let alone vary from it. At some point in that routine, most of us look in the mirror. I know I put it off for as long as I can. When I get up, I let Barnabas out, then we hit the couch for devotions and prayer. Then it’s breakfast time; he’s always happy about that. And then, and only then, do I venture a look in the mirror. I’m always amazed at the guy who looks back at me. He doesn't look a thing like I think he does. Anyone else have that experience, or is it just me? I mean, in my mind I’m still the guy I was in my twenties. But the mirror shows me…this old guy. Not only am I willing to bet you look in the mirror every morning, I’m also willing to bet you don’t leave things like you find them first thing in the morning. I mean, I know it may be hard to believe, but I don’t look this good when I first get up. No, there are certain things the mirror tells me I need to do in order to look and be my best for the day. The mirror is a mixed bag because it always tells us the truth.

James (in the New Testament) compares the mirror to God’s word. He calls his congregation to not just listen to what the Scripture says. He knows it’s easy to hear the word and walk away unchanged, but he also knows that’s not what should happen, even if it is what happens much of the time. No, God’s word, like a good mirror, should not only show us what is but what work we have to do in order to get to where we want to be (cf. James 1:22-24). It’s the same message Paul has for us at the beginning of the second half of his letter to the Romans. Paul says what he hopes we will see in the mirror are people who are becoming living sacrifices (12:1).

This morning, we’re continuing our series on worship, called “Becoming Hallelujahs.” That word, “Hallelujah,” is actually a Hebrew word that means “praise God” or “praise Yahweh,” which is our best guess at God’s personal name. Hallelu-jah. Anyway, this morning, we want to focus on the “becoming” part. How do we become people who offer praise to God with everything in us? How do we become worshippers, as opposed to just people who happen to go to a worship service once in a while? That’s what’s behind Paul’s image of a living sacrifice, so we’re going to settle in with that for a little while this morning and see what the Holy Spirit has to say to us.

So let’s remember first who Paul is writing to. Well, the letter is called “Romans,” so obviously he is writing to the church in Rome. But there are a couple of things to remember about Rome at this time in history. For one, it was the center of the civilized world. Rome in the first century was the capital of this grand empire and as the capital, Rome set the standard for everyone else in the empire. Paul, however, had never actually been to Rome. In fact, a lot of scholars believe this letter was meant as sort of an introduction of Paul to the Roman church. In other words, it’s sort of a summary of what Paul teaches, a way for them to get to know Paul before he arrives in town. Because he wants to go to Rome. He wants to go through Rome, actually, in pursuit of a planned mission to Spain. (Whether he actually made it to Spain or not is still a matter of scholarly debate, but we do know he made it to Rome as a prisoner.) So, in contrast to Paul’s other letters, he’s writing to a church he did not start and has not yet preached to (cf. Ultimate Bible Guide, pg. 366).

Still, Paul is a Roman citizen and he knows that the Romans are a very religious people. By that, I don’t mean they were particularly devout; religion for most Romans was more about what they could get out of their many gods. It was sort of “Ask not what you can do for your gods, but rather what your gods can do for you.” And a lot of that attitude was because of the kinds of gods Rome had. They tolerated a lot of religions, including Judaism, but their own faith was in the personification of things in creation, or things they feared, or things they thought they could trust (cf. Wright, Here Are Your Gods, pgs. 35-42). Worship consisted of certain rituals you would perform to particular gods in order to get what you wanted. If you wanted your crops to grow better, you would go down to the crop-god temple and offer some sort of sacrifice. If you wanted protection from harm on your next trip, you might go to the death-god’s temple and offer a sacrifice hoping to appease that god so that he wouldn’t visit you. It was a system of give and take. You give, the gods take, and you hope the gods give back what you ask for. That was pagan worship, and the problem was, as Christopher Wright says, “False gods never fail to fail” (38). Now, we owe a lot of our culture and civilization to Rome. I can thank Rome that I had to read The Odyssey and The Iliad in college, but we also owe Rome for systems of government, for our understanding of justice, for architecture and so much more. Unfortunately, we have also often adapted their style of worship. Every time we approach our God with the attitude of, “God, I’ll do this if you’ll do this for me,” we’re practicing pagan worship. Every time we try to bargain with God, every time we try to manipulate God, every time we put conditions on God—that’s not Christian worship. That’s pagan, and that’s what Paul is hoping to move the Roman church away from in the first couple of verses of chapter 12.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy…” (12:1). Here’s the key difference for Paul. It’s not that we do something to try to get God to notice us and do what we want. Paul knows God has already done more for us than we could every imagine or ask for. God made the first move by calling us his children, by saving us from sin, by coming in Jesus to die on the cross in our place. God has shown us “mercy,” which is more than we deserve. And so, in view of that, in view of God’s overwhelming generosity, Paul says, we are called to do the same (Osborne, Romans [IVPNTC], pgs. 318-319).

“In view of God’s mercy…offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship” (12:1). Someone said this may be one of the densest sentences ever written; Paul has packed a whole lot into just a few words, so let’s dig around here and see what we find. Paul’s basic call to the Romans (and to us) in this verse is that we should become sacrifices. Whether the original readers were Gentiles or Jews, they all knew what a sacrifice was. As I said, for the Gentiles, it would have brought up images of giving up something (maybe some incense, maybe some money) to try to manipulate the gods. For the Jew, it was about giving something precious (usually an animal) to ask forgiveness for your sin. This past week was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is the day when the Jews are given a new start, when all their sins of the past year are wiped away and they draw close to God again. And while there are no animal sacrifices today, in ancient times, in Roman times, they would have offered the best of their animals. But the Jews did not practice any sort of human sacrifice, which makes this call to become a sacrifice rather startling. Paul is encouraging, urging, the believers in Rome not to offer their best animal but to offer themselves. What is he talking about? We need to not miss the three characteristics of this sacrifice that Paul mentions. Here they are.

First of all, this sacrifice is living. A “living” sacrifice is generally a contradiction in terms. To “sacrifice” something meant to take its life, but this sacrifice is still alive. In other words, it’s not our death God wants, but our life, our whole selves. When Paul says “offer your bodies,” the body is actually a stand-in for our whole self, our life, all that we are (cf. Mohrlang, “Romans,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 14, pg. 185). And that is only useful to God’s kingdom when we are living. The main problem with “living sacrifices,” however, is that they have a tendency to crawl off the altar. You know what I mean. On Sunday, we might sing:

Lord, I give you my heart, I give you my soul,

I live for You alone

Every breath that I take, every moment I'm awake

Lord have Your way in me

We sing those words, and we really mean them. On Sunday. And then, on Monday, maybe even by Sunday afternoon, we live in such a way that we’re telling God, “You know that part about giving you everything I am? I’d like to keep just this part for myself. And maybe this part. And definitely this other part.” Living sacrifices have a tendency to crawl off the altar, which is why, I think, the language here has to do with an ongoing giving, an ongoing sacrifice. It’s not just once. It’s constantly. We give ourselves over and over and over again—at least every day, probably many times a day. Because the sacrifice is living.

And it’s holy. “Holy” means to be “dedicated” or “set apart” (Osborne 319), but too often that’s understood to mean separation. And so in history, some people went out into the desert, literally, so that they wouldn’t be tempted by the “things of the world.” Others today surround themselves with only Christian things and believe that is what it means to be “holy.” (My favorite example of this are the breath mints called “Testamints.” Christian breath mints.) But Scripture has a higher calling, a different understanding of “holy.” It means to have a “moral separation, not physical isolation” (Mohrlang 191). Paul never meant for us to not have contact with the world around us. After all, he was well aware of the culture and the setting of every city he entered. How can you reach people with the Gospel if you don’t know their world? No, the calling—from the beginning—has been to live in a distinctive way, to live God’s way. Being “holy” is not so much about following a list of rules as it is about building our whole lives around the one we worship. We’ll talk more about this in a moment. So our sacrifice is living, it’s holy, and it’s pleasing to God.

N. T. Wright tells about a friend of his, William, who had been the chairman of his company for about a year when they got together for lunch. When he was asked how it was going, William said, “Oh, it’s been wonderful in several ways.” Hearing in that response that maybe not everything was great, Wright pushed William a bit more. “Why only several ways?” he asked. And William proceeded to tell him that the first year was spent mostly figuring out how to make everyone happy. Everybody had different expectations and understandings of what the chairman should do, but after a while, he realized that everyone else’s expectations had become primary and his work was unsustainable and he was frustrated (Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans Part Two, pg. 68). What William learned in that year is that he had to figure out who exactly he should listen to. The same thing is true in our lives; there are a lot of voices out there, a lot of people who have ideas about how we should live and how our lives should be shaped. What is going to shape the way you live? Politics? Technology? Do you shape your life around everything your kids or grandkids do? Are the rules of man-made religion controlling your choices? Are you trying to satisfy that voice from the past that is never satisfied, that parent or teacher who told you you weren’t worthy anything? Or, like William’s experience, are there so many voices that you can never please? Paul says none of those other voices are what matters. We should live our lives in a way that pleases God—not just first, but only.

So in the next verse Paul goes on to tell us how to do that, and this is a verse that’s probably familiar to many of us. How do we offer our lives as a sacrifice? “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:2). J. B. Phillips translated that verse in this memorable way: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould.” And Eugene Peterson, more recently, put it this way in The Message: “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.” Wow! We do that, don’t we? We don’t want to “stand out like a sore thumb” around other people. We don’t want to be called a religious fanatic or a “Jesus freak.” So we work to fit in a little here, a little there. I heard a podcast this week with a man who has just returned to the United States after thirty years serving God’s kingdom overseas, and one of his frustrations is now that he’s back in this culture, the things we all take for granted (owning a car, owning a house, paying his bills) are taking so much of his time that he doesn’t have as much time to love his neighbors. Even in a short time, he’s felt the pressure to fit in, go along to get along, become well-adjusted to a culture that does not honor God. “Don’t conform” Paul says, but it’s so easy, and it feels so comfortable when we do conform. Besides, what’s the alternative?

Paul says it’s this: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:2). And it doesn’t say it only happens once. A literal translation would be something like, “Be continually transformed.” It’s meant to be an ongoing process as we allow the Holy Spirit to change us more every day (Mohrlang 185-186). It happens as we spend time in prayer. And I mean time. I find I can send off quick prayers—emergency prayers, maybe, something along the lines of, “God, heal this person. God, fix this situation”—and though God will respond, it really doesn’t build our relationship and it doesn’t renew my mind. No, that result will only come as we spend time in God’s presence, as we spend time talking with God and allowing him to shape our minds and our hearts. It also happens as we spend time reading the Scriptures. I read a lot, and I read a lot of different sorts of books. Science fiction, novels, Christian inspirational books, some deep theology works, challenging stuff on social justice and such. And all of those are good and helpful. In fact, I can probably name two or three books through the years that have really shaped the way I think and who I am, but none of those compare to the way Scripture shapes me. What shapes the way you think the most? Another person’s opinions? The news network that plays 24 hours a day? A popular preacher or politician? Social media? So many things and personalities want to have that power, that shaping influence. Only one deserves it.

Several years ago, in a confirmation class, I was talking about the power of the Bible and one of the youth asked me, “What do you do when you’ve read it all and preached it all?” Since her grandfather had been a pastor, I wanted to suggest she go ask him, but I resisted that urge. Because the reality is you never get to the end of what Scripture can teach you. For me, I tend to leak. I forget what I’ve learned. I will uncover what I think is something new in the Scripture, only to discover that it was new to me the last time I preached that passage also. I leak. But it’s also my experience that God is continually showing me new things, not “new” as in beyond Scripture, but things I never noticed before. If you don’t have a regular practice—a daily practice—of prayer and reading the Scripture, there is no better time than today to start because that’s how the Holy Spirit will renew your mind and shape your life.

And that’s how the Spirit will enable you to become a “hallelujah,” to be a person whose every action and every word is an act of worship. That is what Paul says will happen, after all. He says when your mind is renewed, when you have spent time in prayer and Scripture reading, you will be able to recognize God’s will—a will which, by the way, is “pleasing.” And more than that, you will become a living act of worship. When we are a living as a sacrifice, living, holy and pleasing, every moment of every day becomes an act of worship (Osborne 320). Then, this time of worship that we share on Sunday mornings becomes a launching pad rather than an anomaly or an interruption in your week. “The corporate service is a launching of daily worship” (Osborne 320). That’s our rhythm; that’s our life as followers of Jesus. Every moment, every act, every thought, every word “is your true and proper worship” when we are living sacrifices (cf. 12:1).

But we can’t become hallelujahs if we’re not offering “the real me.” The temptation is to offer a facade, a fake, because we don’t think “me” is good enough, “worthy” enough. There is a whole industry today dedicated to “image management,” to making people look…well, let’s just say “different” than they really are. (Whether or not they look “better” is up to the individual to decide.) So these “image managers” especially work the media—with a strong focus on social media these days—to put out the right image. When their client messes up, maybe says or tweets something that gets people upset, the image manager has to go into “spin” mode, to make it seem or sound like it wasn’t that bad. The whole movement of “cancel culture” today comes out of image management, with a few trying to decide what our culture should look like.

The Christian version of image management shows up in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it shows up in churches deciding what sort of people are welcome and what sort aren’t, so a homeless person is escorted out rather than welcomed in. Or it shows up in having to wear a certain kind of clothing to be acceptable to God—and to the church people. It also shows up in what we might call “false humility.” Pastor Manuel Luz tells of approaching a singer one time after a worship service and told the singer he sang particularly well that morning. The singer said, “No, that wasn’t me. That was God.” To which Pastor Luz replied, “Actually, no. It wasn’t that good” (cf. Honest Worship, pg. 57). Put that in the category of “things I wish I’d thought to say”! 

And we do the image management thing with God. We want to be the ones who decide what goes on the altar, what parts of us God gets. Somehow we think we can hide parts of our lives from him, which is ridiculous if we really think about it. God sees the whole you. Listen to how one author puts it: “He has seen every bit of us—good, bad, and ugly. He’s seen every embarrassing moment, every mistake and failure, every soul wound, every concealed sin. And here’s the amazing part: he loves us” (Luz 58). He loves us because he can see who he made us to be rather than just who we are. He sees beyond all our mistakes to who we can become if we would just trust him. He can see his very image in us, because he put it there. From the very beginning, we were created in the image of God (cf. Genesis 1:27), and as such we were made to worship him.

Do you know who God sees when he looks at you? “You are a child of God, who he dearly loves. You are a member of a chosen race, a people for God’s own possession. You are an heir of God. You are a joint heir with Christ, sharing in his inheritance. You are righteous and holy, set apart for God’s purposes and for his glory. You are an expression of the very life of Christ. You are his workmanship, in whom God’s love is being perfected, God’s beloved” (Luz 59). You are a person in whom Christ dwells and delights and you live in the unshakeable kingdom of God (James Bryan Smith). Paul puts it this way (again, from the Phillips translation): “The secret is simply this: Christ in you! Yes, Christ in you bringing with him the hope of all glorious things to come” (Colossians 1:27). I could go on, but I think you probably get the idea. God sees the whole you, and he sees the real you, which is more valuable than you can imagine.

This is what Paul means in the next verse, verse 3, where he says, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment” (12:3). He’s not putting you or me down, but he is wanting us to see ourselves the way God sees us—holy, loved, his child. There is no point in trying to hide from God. He sees the whole you and he wants the whole you, not a made-up identity or facade that you put on. He wants you as a living sacrifice, an act of praise, a hallelujah, to the world.

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you” (12:1-2, MSG). That’s who God sees; that’s who God wants. Let’s pray and offer ourselves to him this morning and every morning.