A Godly Life

Paul’s letters tend to follow a pattern: after a greeting offering praise to God and expressing gratitude for the steadfast witness of the faithful, there’s a dive into theological discussion, exploring and explaining the faith.  Paul seeks to flesh out the why by way of the who: Jesus Christ.  Life for us is now in, by, and for Christ.  What does that life look like?  The topics of Paul’s theological expositions typically arise because of a situation or concern within a congregation: disorder in the fellowship at Corinth, the attraction of false teaching in Colossae, or the Thessalonians’ questions about the Second Coming.  After laying out the theological principles, Paul proceeds to application: from why to therefore, from why to what now.  We have reached the point in Romans where Paul shifts from the why to the what now, from theology to ethics, from knowing God better to loving one another better, putting what we now know into active practice.  Knowledge put into active practice becomes wisdom.  We know many things, but do we do what we know; are we getting our living aligned with our knowledge?

Knowing God, we love one another better.  If we are not, let us spend more time getting to know God and desiring His way to guide and govern.  If we do not know God especially well, this will show in our life together, here and out there.  Christ’s love does not go along with the world’s tales of love.

God gave the law.  The law required good works—loving one another—so we nailed Jesus to a cross.  God gave the Spirit.  Now, increasingly, we want to do good works: to share Jesus with one another and with every neighbor, even the ones we don’t exactly like.  This newfound inner desire to do what is pleasing to God is one piece of the evidence that He has committed Himself to changing us, giving us a reformed outlook in place of the deformed values we had inherited as our common lot with fallen, broken humanity.  Deformed values are on display wherever we go in this world—moral deformity is not unique to or confined to the contemporary western world.  People anywhere in the world are aware that the quickest way to get people to do something is to force them to do it.  This is not always a matter of violent coercion; the force the world prefers is the immutable pervasive belief that there is no better choice, no other choice, that the world’s ways are really the only ways available; it may be rotten, but what can you do?

In Christ, we have been called to a comprehensive offering to God: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship” (12:1).  We can look around for ourselves at the world today and see what happens when people offer themselves to the world’s ways.  It’s on full display.  Keep the reality of God’s mercy in vivid view, at all times.  All those old songs about the cross and the blood—a vivid view of God’s mercy.

No one is beyond God’s mercy, Amen!  God is merciful every day: morning by morning, new mercies we see.  Carry God’s mercy in your heart; like the old hymn sings: take the name of Jesus with you.  Jesus is the mercy of God.  The mercy of God is really what Paul has been getting at over the first eleven chapters of Romans, that amazing grace, changing everything, radically.  God affords us an opportunity.  We can each of us look back at some opportunities that came along we wish we had taken.  If only.  What if.  Well, now it’s too late.  Don’t let it become too late.  It doesn’t have to be too late again.  Paul urges us as those with the gift of the Spirit to hold on to God’s offered hand.  We discover that God has always already been holding ours.

We hold on to what God offers as we “offer [our] bodies as a living sacrifice”—giving ourselves to God’s service and the worship of God; putting what God asks before what we want, and discovering, as we do, that what we are now desiring by the Spirit is what God has been asking all along.  The self-giving, more and more, becomes a joyful and not a resentful, resistant, reluctant offering.  This joyful self-giving is a sacrifice “holy and pleasing to God,” exactly what He asks of us—God says just what He said in the Garden: I will bless you in ways you cannot even begin to comprehend as you devote your life to Me, listening, trusting, obeying.

It’s not difficult to think we have some sort of legal contract with God—we do what He says and He gives us stuff—blessing, we call it.  Paul has been urging us to realize that we do not live God’s way to get God’s stuff; rather, we live God’s way because God’s way is the best, most beautiful, joyful way—it is truest, best life!  Because knowing God is worthwhile.  Because there is no love like God’s love, no peace like God’s peace.  There is no one else, nothing else, higher, better, brighter than God—to devote ourselves to anything less, now, would be unthinkable; it would be idolatry.  When we live God’s way we get God.

God’s grace, mercy, and love are often characterized like a fountain, overflowing; elsewhere, God’s abundance is described as a river, all along whose banks lush vegetation grows and much fruit, in every season—Eden.  Jesus asks, even pleads, with all who thirst to come and drink, come and be filled.  Let us be like sponges, drawing in the grace, love, and mercy flowing from God.  You know how it is with sponges: once they are full, we must squeeze them.  We’ve felt that firm pressure on more than one occasion.  The squeezing releases the water, pouring down, pouring out.  We are recipients and benefactors of God’s mercy, love, and grace, Amen!  We do not just hold in all this blessing for ourselves.  It overflows from us; it is supposed to.  And, sometimes, we are squeezed.  But a squeezed sponge is now ready for what?  More filling.  The process repeats: that’s how it works.

A God-devoted life pleases God; it is a holy life.  We want many things.  Do we want holiness more than all?  We would like there to be many changes in our lives, in our situation.  Would we like above all to become godly?  We don’t hear such adjectives used much, anymore: holy, godly.  The words sort of make us, along with most everyone else, a bit irritable.  Such prim, pious, prunish words.  Where’s the zest?  Where’s the heat, the fire?  Who wants to live a holy, godly life?  Ha.  God wants us to live a holy, godly life.  He can show us that a holy, godly life doesn’t really look like what angry comedians tell us.  A holy, godly life looks remarkably like a Jesus life.  But we don’t want to live like Jesus; we mostly just want what he doles out.  We love Christmas, yet we are an Easter people.

Each of us can live a God-devoted life right where we are, alongside the people among whom God has placed us.  Why here?  Why now?  To make a difference for the Lord.  To exhibit the grace, mercy, and love of God.  What does God want me to do?  Why is God keeping me around?  To show Christ, even now, even still.  We’ve known beautiful saints, all too human just as the rest of us, who have made God a little more visible for us, in whose company we could sense the touch of God.  As we live more the way they were pursuing, we, also, begin to show the holiness of God.  Our God is unlike the other options available.  Our God is unlike the divinity some churches seem to be proclaiming today.  God’s Word tells us truth; it is the truthful Word.  We came of age in a skeptical age.  We tell ourselves we shall decide for ourselves what is true.  That’s a very old move, indeed, and the Bible includes the earliest record of that decision and provides a long and rather thorough examination of the consequences of such deciding.

A God-devoted life, Paul tells us, is our “true and proper worship” (12:1).  John Piper, one of the bigger names in American Christianity over the past twenty years or so, writes: “Don’t think worship services when you think worship.  That is a huge limitation which is not in the Bible.  All of life is supposed to be worship.”[1]  How we live—supposed to be worship.  What we do, do as worship, offering it to God.  “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17).  Worship proclaims the worthiness of God, the glory, grace, and goodness of God; the presence of God.  Worship—worshipful living—is how God makes it possible for us to make the grace, glory, love and peace of God—His presence—more visible for those around us.

A quarter century ago, Rick Warren leapt to national prominence with his Purpose Driven Life.  Over thirty-two million copies sold.  If nothing else, that should remind us that people, though many profess middling or less interest in becoming part of any church, people are searching for a sense of purpose: what am I here for?  Do I matter?  Does my life matter?  Our purpose is worship: living that points to God; living such a way that God’s mercy, love, and grace may be sensed, even experienced, by those around us.  Our Presbyterian Westminster Shorter Catechism, meant to teach the basics to young disciples, asks, as its first question: what is the key purpose of humanity.  The answer—to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.  Worship glorifies God, which, when we worship in Spirit and truth, sets our hearts right with God—that is blessing!  We may not leave church every Sunday feeling flattered and praiseworthy, but we do leave, each Sunday—if I do say so myself!—we go from here each Sunday having encountered God.

A worshipful life glorifies God, under the holy conviction that love looks like something.  Offer it all, first, to God.  When he took the bread in the upper room with his inner circle, Jesus was making a very old, solemn, beautiful, holy gesture.  Our Father in heaven didn’t eat any of the bread Jesus lifted as an offering; God doesn’t need our bread—He wants our love, our loving and our living to be lifted to Him as our best offering, so that He can pour us out for those around us, pour His grace through us for others.  Offer yourself first to God, and He will fit you for loving others.  The world knows what it knows about what it calls love; God who is love knows about the love of holiness.

We were exposed to the world’s tales about what it calls love as we grew to maturity, as we were educated in the world and became knowledgeable about the world’s ways, wisdoms, and values.  We know enough about the world.  (We may all still be in a little bit of denial about it, too.)  What we all of us—including me—need to know more about is God.  Even today, we come to church very much wearing the lenses the world affixed.  We know how the world thinks, and all of us, to one extent or another, continue largely to think the world’s way; we still suspect, in some corner of these world-shaded hearts, that the world is right, after all, and that the Bible could be a little wrong, maybe even about several things.  We are heirs to a history of skepticism.  What really matters, after all, is what the modern, thoughtful, compassionate people today think and believe, not what some ancient, toxic, misogynist, xenophobic homophobes said about God thousands of years ago.

A tautology is a technical term for a statement that cannot be false—in other words, it is always true, it is supposed to be undeniable and obvious.  Love is love, we are told, and as tautologies go, it’s pretty enough, but a tautology has no true content.  One is one.  Sky is sky.  Green is green.  Water is water.  A rose is a rose is a rose.  The underlying idea is that even though it might not look like your love, it’s still love, and love, being good, means whatever love is good.  Don’t judge.  Love—whatever love—is undeniably good.  If it is love.  Is there a test to know whether it’s love?  There are lots of pop songs singing to that question.  We know of all sorts of desires of the flesh that are not good, cravings that are, in fact, wicked.  We know there is a real difference between love and craving; deep, sustained friendship is not quite the issue, here, people.  We don’t even need to know or trust the Bible to know these things.

The underlying premise is that, if you don’t like one variety or another of love—if you’re repelled and offended by love “our way,” you’re an ignorant small-minded bigot, because there really is no difference, only ugly prejudice and irrational hatred.  That’s all it can be, because what else could it be?  You know, name-calling isn’t really argument, it’s just angry insult.  We might even learn, by arguing; we learn nothing by insult.  And God calls us to difference, to be a people separate from the fallen ways of this broken world.  God calls us to holiness, which  puts everything in another light, true light, brilliant, cleansing.  A holy people offers their lives, every dimension, to God as worship.  God does not accept all worship, as Cain discovered.  God accepts worship only in Spirit and truth.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:2).  It’s good to memorize Bible verses that especially speak to you.  Romans 12:2 might not be one, yet I encourage you to get this one by heart, also.  Over the last thirty years particularly, the pressure within the church to bend, to reinterpret, to re-imagine—to allow—has been astounding, and what you and I can hear on YouTube, Facebook and other platforms—what we can hear coming from across the church, pulpit and pew alike, can more than astonish us.

People who like to pay attention to such trends never cease to shake their heads and cluck their tongues about the state of the PC(USA)—as if every congregation and every person worshiping at any PC(USA)-affiliated church was just a lost, hopeless backslider.  Probably damned, thank God.  There are those who have left us because they couldn’t bring themselves to associate with such people as us—you know, unlike the truly righteous people at that pure church down the road.  Beloved, there is no denomination and no congregation of any notable size that is not under social, cultural duress—accommodate, allow, affirm, conform.  Culture is always making its inroads because all of us, saturated with this culture as we are, bring the culture with us into church.  For some, maybe many, these inroads feel like progress, evolution.  O brave new world!  Let us always remember that Christ calls us, even as we are and must be in this world, nevertheless not to be of this world.  “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  With the mind, we strive to understand what’s happening; as we arrive at fuller understanding, by the mind, we also begin to evaluate, determine, and decide.  Without the renewal Paul mentions, we shall remain no different from those around us in the world—Paul discusses their state in the first chapter of Romans.  This renewal is by the Spirit, by the Word, and, by grace through faith, by the Sacrament before us this morning.

“Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (12:2).  Until that Spirit-transformation gets underway, we will be and must remain conformed to the ways of this world, unable either to test, to try out, let alone approve of God’s will as revealed to us in this book, the Word of God.  This is not merely some compendium of ancient bigotries and biases.  Oh, people reject it, ignore it, read it to fit current, fashionable notions of compassion, fallen fables of righteousness.  Paul spoke about all this at the beginning of Romans; he speaks of it elsewhere in his letters, also.

We are each at a place along the journey from conformed to transformed, deformed to reformed.  It does no good to rank one other; the only good is to be in continual, fervent prayer that God would continue His good work in each of us and to hold together as He works in us and among us.  That work is one work: transformation, from conformity to the world to conformity to Christ.  This work of God in each of us calls for a few key virtues: patience, perseverance, love of purity, and prayer.

This Word I’m proclaiming to you today, not by any virtue of mine but only by the grace of God, is a call to transformation, commitment to be transformed; this Word is energy for that transformation.  This table before us this morning is an invitation: Christ’s call to take, taste and see.  This table is the reminder of God’s promise that He has the ability, the good will, and the abundant grace to cause this transformation, to continue it throughout this life’s stumbling journey, and to perfect our transformation on that day known to Him alone, to the praise of the glory of His name.

[1] John Piper Devotional, BibleGateway.com, June 9