Therefore

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. If the gospel you believe is true, what would your prospects be without Jesus?

It would be nothing except for pain and misery in this life with no hope and then eternal condemnation in the next. And so in light of what he's done, how would you not just enthusiastically say about your life, you can have all of it. Hey, welcome to Summit Life with pastor, teacher, and apologist J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Now, if you grew up going to church, you may have viewed the gospel as a starting point in Christianity, you know, a prayer that started it all. And then you had a bunch of new things that you had to do once you were saved.

We all remember that long list of do's and don'ts, right? Well, today pastor J.D. teaches us the two things that summarize what Christianity is really about. That's right.

Just two. So grab your pen and your Bible and let's join pastor J.D. as he begins teaching about one of the most important words in the Bible.

And that word is therefore. You have a Bible, I want you to open it to Romans 12. Since day one in this series, I've told you that one of the most important ideas in the book of Romans is that the gospel is not just the way that we begin in Christ. The gospel is also the way that we grow in Christ. And when I say gospel, of course, what I mean is the completely unique religious message that Paul, the apostle, has spent 11 chapters unpacking. That message that God accepts us not because of what we do or do not do, which is what every other religion teaches, but God accepts us because of what Jesus has done and offers to us as a gift if we will receive it. That separates the gospel from every other religious message in the world.

And anybody that says otherwise does not know what they're talking about. Every religion in the world, except for the gospel, operates, I've told you, according to this premise, I obey. If I obey well enough, if I do enough things, then I will be accepted. But the gospel flips that on its head. The gospel says, no, no, no. I am accepted by a gift of God's grace.

Therefore, I will obey in response. That message, Paul says, that message contains power. Told you when we went through chapter one that the gospel is the only thing in all of scripture other than Jesus himself that is referred to directly as the power of God. This gospel has power not just for the unbeliever, it has power also for the believer.

And today, in Romans 12, you're probably gonna see that more clearly than maybe anywhere else in the Bible. You see, for most of us in the church, if you grew up in the church, we grew up thinking of the gospel as only Christianity's entry point. We thought of the gospel as the prayer that you prayed to begin the Christian life, the ABCs of Christianity, the diving board off of which you jump into the pool of Christianity. And thus, we thought the gospel was primarily a message for people on the outside. That's for unbelievers because once you've experienced the gospel, well, you move on from it, right? And once you go through the ABCs, you need to get to the rest of the alphabet. And so Christian growth from that point on consists of learning new Bible facts and mastering new techniques spiritually, five principles for having a better marriage and three steps to being a good church member and four ways to get along with annoying people and endless amounts of lists.

I certainly grew up this way. I've told you I grew up in a church that taught the Bible, but for some reason, I grew up thinking that Christianity was primarily a series of new things to learn and to do, new spiritual levels to attain. I think I've told you before it started when I was a kid because the church service, they always had the envelope. We used to put your offering in the envelope in the pew rack in front of you. And the envelopes that we used, I think they were kind of standard in Baptist churches, but they had a list of things that you were supposed to do every week. And there was a little checklist and you were literally supposed to check them off.

So you were turning in your, I think the intent was, I'm not just giving my money, I'm giving my life. But the effect was for a sixth grader that it was the checklist, then my little game was, could I commence and complete all the activities from the time they call for the offering to when the plate got back to me? So I would be like, I'd read my Bible real quick, I'd throw up a quick prayer, have you share Christ with anybody? I would witness to my sister, you need Jesus.

And then I would check all those things off and drop it in the offering plate. The result was I just grew up with this thinking that Christian people were busy people. In fact, the more busy you were, the busier you were, then that meant the more spiritual that you were and that good Christians were tired Christians. And every time a new speaker would come and he would give me something else to do, real Christians care for the poor, real Christians are involved in adoption, real Christians go to mission trips, real Christians do X, Y, and Z. I just plunged in with both feet.

All right, I was busy. But after a while, I've told you that I realized that all my attempts to please God and all those things, my heart wasn't really changing. If anything, my efforts in religion seemed to be having the opposite effect on my heart. I was growing weary of God. I was starting to resent God, even to hate God, because God was like this merciless taskmaster who was always standing over me, yelling, not enough, you gotta do more.

If you wanna please me, you gotta do more. It felt like the closer my feet tried to follow the ways of Jesus, the farther my heart pulled away. I've told you in this series that it's what Martin Luther called the dilemma of the great commandment. The great commandment, you know what it is?

Love God with all your heart, love everybody else like you love yourself. Martin Luther said the dilemma of the great commandment is God is commanding us something that by definition really cannot be commanded, right? Because if you love something, you don't need to be commanded to do it. You never have to command me.

I told you to eat a steak or kiss my wife or take a nap. I just do those things as I love them. On the other side, if you don't love something, then no command can change that. You can't be commanded to pursue and love something that you don't really love. And Luther said, that's the dilemma of the great commandment. It's the dilemma of the gospel because God is commanding us something that by definition should not be commanded. So the question of the book of Romans is, how can I fix my heart?

How can I change my desire so that I wanna love God and I wanna love people and I don't have to be compelled to do those things? Well, in Romans 12, one and two, Paul encapsulates his answer for that as well as anywhere else in the Bible. Here it is, verse one of chapter 12.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, because this is your true worship. That therefore, there in verse one, that therefore that starts that chapter is the hinge of the entire book of Romans. You see, Romans, if you're doing it in the simplest way to think about it, Romans is divided into two major sections. Chapters one through 11, Paul is telling you all about what the gospel is.

11 chapters worth. In the last five chapters, he's gonna start to unpack what you should be because of the gospel. And those two sections, what the gospel is and what you should be, are joined together by a single word.

One word that's the hinge of the whole book, that word is therefore. Therefore, in light of all that we've just learned about the gospel, this is what you should be. Following that word, therefore, Paul is in that first verse gonna give you two things that serve as a concise summary of the Christian life. He urges you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, that's the first one, holy and pleasing to God, because that is a true act of worship.

That's your second one. For the next five chapters, he's gonna show you what that looks like very practically. But this is the summary, presenting your body to God as a living sacrifice, as an act of worship.

Paul continues his charge in the second verse. Do not be conformed, he says, to this world, but be transformed. Transformed, transformed by the renewing of your minds. The key word in that verse is the word transformed. Transformed, it's the Greek word metamorpho. And it's where we get the word, obviously, metamorphosis.

It means to be changed from within. It's the word we now use to describe what happens to a caterpillar when they sow themselves up in a cocoon and then emerge a few weeks later as a butterfly. This may surprise some of you, but I am not an expert on butterflies or insects.

I do recall a very few key insights that I learned from one of my favorite books, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. And what I learned was when the caterpillar is hung up in that cocoon, it's not just rearranging pieces on his body. What happens is the caterpillar's body releases this enzyme. This is, by the way, in the footnotes of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

You had to follow this down. But he releases an enzyme that actually breaks down his body into a kind of soup is really the best way to describe it. And then those same enzymes enact the DNA that's hidden in those cells so that those little clumps of cells reform into what is going to emerge in a few weeks as that butterfly. Then when he comes and he nibbles that hole in that cocoon and out pops his butterfly, he begins to fly without any classes, any coaching, or any coercion.

He just flies. Paul probably didn't know much about butterflies either, but something similar is happening to the believer. You're not merely learning new behavior.

You're not conforming your life to new behavior. God is transforming you into a new creation. He's reshaping your heart. And how does that happen?

How does it happen? Verse two. Verse two, it happens by the renewing of your minds.

The renewing of your minds in what? When I grew up going to youth camp, the verse was like one that everybody preached it on. And they always will talk about it as you got to stop listening to Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg, or when I was a teenager, it wasn't those two. But you got to stop listening to those people and start listening to Chris Tomlin and Israel Albin.

And that's probably a good idea. But specifically, Paul's not talking about the kind of music you're listening to. Paul's talking about renewing your minds in the beauties of the gospel. And he's just been 11 chapters talking about, right?

I mean, that just makes sense. He's saying you got to renew your mind and all these things I've been talking about, because when your mind is renewed, then you will be transformed. The gospel therefore is not just for unbelievers. Because as you renew your minds and the beauties of the gospel, as you saturate yourself in the beauty of the gospel, you are transformed into the kind of person who begins to obey God from the heart. You see, it's like I've told you, the gospel is able to do what nothing else can do. It transforms your heart so that obedience to God becomes your desire. Let me go all the way back to chapter one real quick with you, okay? I told you there's two ways that you can try to bring about spiritual change in your life.

And the reason I belabor this is because this is kind of everything Paul's been trying to tell you. The first way is mechanical change, right? Mechanical change, that's where you try to change your behavior to conform your behavior.

You change it externally. To go back to the analogy of the butterfly, it'd be like screwing wings under the caterpillar and trying to teach it to flap. Here's another analogy of mechanical growth. How do you grow a sand pile? Remember when my oldest daughter was four years old, I looked out in the backyard and she had a watering can and she was pouring water on the sand pile.

And I walked out and I was like, what are you doing? And she said, well, you know, I'm trying to grow the sand pile. And I'm like, she said, well, this is what mommy does to grow the flowers. You know, and so I'm trying to grow the sand pile.

And I'm like, you can boil water on it you want. That's not how the sand pile grows. Daddy goes to Home Depot and buys more sand and brings it back. That's how the sand pile grows because the sand is not alive. That is mechanical change. And it's a pretty good picture of how a lot of people try to change spiritually.

They just always add more religious stuff. It's always making you busy, but it's tiring. It's tiring and it never feels like it's finished. The caterpillar doesn't know how to fly. It just doesn't have the equipment to fly. And if you manage to attach some mechanical wings and it flapped out a few beats, it would tire out very quickly. There are so many of you with religion. That's why you're so exhausted.

You just don't have the heart make up for it. That's mechanical change. And that's the way that I'd say 90% of the people in the church are trying to change. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I wanted to take a second to shout out a very special group of people, our gospel partners, the team that gives so generously to this ministry each and every month. It's not an exaggeration to say that they are the financial fuel behind everything that we do, including broadcasting Summit Life every weekday. We call them gospel partners because that's exactly what they do. They are actually partnering with us to help make the gospel known around the globe. This month, we are sending each of our faithful givers a copy of In View of God's Mercy, the second part of a two-part study through Romans, written by the late Pastor Tim Keller. To give a one-time gift or to join us as a monthly gospel partner, as well as to get your copy of In View of God's Mercy, call us right away.

The number is 866-335-5220, or you can visit us online at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD on Summit Life. The other kind of change is organic change, and that's where you change because your desire changes.

Your behavior changes because something internally changes. That's what the gospel is talking about. God releases gospel enzymes into your heart that restructure your heart so that spiritual flight becomes second nature. If you were to take a metal beam and you were to lay it on top of a building or something so that part of it was hanging off the end, most kinds of metal, the weight of gravity, would just sort of bend that metal beam a little bit.

It bends a little bit because of the pressure of gravity, but if you were to try to take that metal beam and try to tie it up into a knot, it's going to break a long time before you can bend it like that. That's people's hearts without the gospel is that we're trying to bend it into the shape that God wants, and it's resisting. You come to a point where you just break spiritually, and you're like, I just hate this. I'll feel like all these rules, and pastor will yell me about this, parents tell me about that, and I just hate it.

I feel like I'm captive, and I want to go be the real me. Well, see, if you could take a blowtorch and heat that metal, you could then get it into a state where you could do whatever you wanted to with it. That's what the gospel does is it changes you at the heart level. It changes your desires.

It met a morphosizes you, or to use the analogy of this metal beam, it heats the metal so that you can bend it. As we've said throughout this series, God's not just after obedience. God's after a whole new kind of obedience, an obedience that grows out of desire, an obedience where your behavior changes because you change, and the way that God does that is by renewing your heart in the gospel. That's what the whole point is. It's why we say the gospel is like a well. You get the best water from the well, not by widening the circumference of the well, but by going deeper into it. Gospel's not just the ABCs. It's the A through Z. It's not the diving board.

It's the whole pool. Renewing yourself and the love of God for you is what produces love for God in you. So what I want to do is go back through verse one, and what I want to show you is how he summarizes the Christian life and then show you how the ability to do that is fueled only by the gospel. I hope today is very liberating for some of you because you're going to realize what Christianity is so hard and why you've been doing it wrong. And then at the end, I'm going to show you how this concept is the key to discovering something a lot of people ask me about, and that is the will of God for their lives. How do I know what the will of God is?

All right, so here we go. Number one, here's the Christian life, Paul says, as living sacrifice. The Christian life is living sacrifice.

Therefore, I urge you to present your body as a living sacrifice. Paul obviously is drawing on Jewish imagery here. Jews, of course, grew up offering sacrifices to God, but even Gentiles in those days would have been familiar with this concept. Paul's admonition to present your body as a sacrifice, though it draws on Jewish imagery, he's going to distinguish it from other sacrifices in two ways. The first, he says, is that the Christian sacrifice of their body is living. Sacrifices in the Old Testament were always dead. For us, Paul says, after we offer ourselves to God, we stay alive. The problem with a living sacrifice is that it wants to keep getting up and crawling down off the altar. But what it shows me is that every single day, I've got to re-offer myself to God, and not just every day, but with every new situation.

This was not a once-for-all deal. When I was 16 years old, I walked forward at a youth camp one night, and I took this little, the way they wanted to do the invitation was, you grabbed a stick that represented your life, and you walked up, and you threw it in the fire. And that represented I'm dying to control my life and coming alive into Jesus. And we were singing, I have decided to follow Jesus, and it was a really special and important moment, and I really meant it.

But ever since then, I've had to constantly re-up. Almost every day, you say, God, today is a day that's going to belong to you, and I'm going to die to what I want and come alive to what you want. I've told you even recently that my wife and I have decided every year in January to just open our hands to God and say, God, is this what you want from our lives? I mean, I love being in this church. I feel like I'm called to be here, but in some ways, I'm doing what I love, and I love being here. I love these people. I love the situation.

I love my job. Have I lost this kind of living sacrifice sense? God, is this the year that you want to take us out of here and put us somewhere across the world in a place where we're not nearly as comfortable? So far as I've done that, God said, nope, I've got you right where I want you, but I don't ever want to take it off of living sacrifice and get into where God has just become my servant again. Can you say that all you are, all that you have, all that your talents, your possessions, and your future, that all of it is right now on an altar to God? I used to emphasize to high school and college students the need to offer their lives as a blank check to God. I used to contrast that with a gift card. I'd be like, a gift card, you have a fixed amount. Could be a very generous gift card, but a blank check means that they have full access to your bank account.

Whenever I said that to high school and college students in the last four or five years, they look at me like, I don't even know what you're talking about. What is a check? So I've had to change it. It didn't sing nearly as well, but it's like, I told them, it's like a Venmo request. You always get to approve it, right? You need 25 bucks from me?

No, denied. Or yes, I'm going to give it to you. That's different than giving somebody my login and password on my bank account.

Because if I just give them those things, they can take out whatever they want, when they want. A lot of us have a Venmo relationship with God. Hey, you ask it, I'll consider it.

Hey, I'm even going to give you my email address and my user ID and you can look me up, right? But what God wants is for you to say, I don't have any limits. What I have is what you have. And anytime you say anything, it's on the altar. It's a living sacrifice. All that I have belongs to you.

Have you done that? Most of us would not be nearly as familiar with sacrifices as Paul's original audience was. And to be honest, in some ways I'm kind of grateful for that because sacrifices are not a, they're disturbing. I never realized, I knew all about sacrifices. I'd never seen one until I went overseas as a missionary and Muslims will still do a ritual sacrifice at least once a year. It's the most horrendous thing I've ever seen in my life. You had to wear white robes to it. It's like symbolically.

I'm standing up there at the front. About seven men hold this bull down. And this, I mean, it's disturbing even just telling you about it. The priest, their version of a priest takes a knife, starts to cut through the neck of this animal. It starts to kick and wheeze and blood just spews everywhere. The front of me is just covered in blood.

And for about, probably about 90 seconds, it just lays there and gasps and wheeze and dies. And I remember standing there and for the first time feel like I understood what Romans 12 one was asking me to do. Not any of us I think in college are like, yep, that's what I want to be the picture of my life. You know, we think, oh, I want victory. I want success. I want prosperity. And Jesus is going to help me do all that.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Yeah, okay. But are you ready for that to be the picture of your life? For that dying animal in weakness and helplessness that has no ability to resist, say that's what God has called me to. And that's what I enthusiastically embrace. That's what Paul is telling you. This is what you should do.

And here's why you should do it, right? You should do it in response to the gospel. That's the second way that this is different than an Old Testament sacrifice or a pagan sacrifice. It's not done to obtain salvation.

It's done in response to it. You see religious sacrifices in those days, particularly pagan ones, were done to gain something from God, forgiveness or blessing or whatever. Well, Paul spent 11 chapters telling you, you've already got that as a gift in Christ. It's impossible to be more forgiven or more blessed than you already are in him, right? So in response to that sacrifice, Paul says, why would you not want to offer your life to him? You're not doing it because you need favor.

You're doing it because he gave it to you. And in light of that, shouldn't you want to offer your life to him? I mean, ever think about it? Where would you be without Jesus? If the gospel you believe is true, what would your prospects be without Jesus?

There would be nothing except for pain and misery in this life with no hope and then eternal condemnation in the next. And so in light of what he's done, how would you not just enthusiastically say about your life? You can have all of it.

The way I've illustrated that over the years is a little story De Martin Lloyd-Jones tells. He's like, if you get home and there's a friend sitting on your front porch and the friend's like, hey, I just want you to know that while you were out, somebody came by that you owed money to, but don't worry about it. I paid the money for you. Well, I asked, what was your response fee to that person?

Your answer should be, it depends on how much they paid. Because if the postman came by and he was like, hey, you've got to put a stamp on here. And I took care of the, whatever it is now, 50 cents to put a stamp on here. Then you pat them on the back. You say, hey man, I appreciate that. I'll get you next time. Right?

If your friend's like, well, it was the mafia and you owed $9 million in gambling debts and they were here to kill you, but don't worry about it. I took care of it for you. At that point, a slap on the back is not appropriate. At that point, you fall to your knees and you open your hands and you say, command me.

Right? Or the rest of my life belongs to you because you've delivered me from death. What Paul is saying is in light of what God has actually saved you from that I've told you for 11 chapters, how would you not want to just offer your life back to him? And speaking of that, why would you even trust anybody else with your life? I will never understand how somebody could believe that God did what he said he did in the gospel and then not trust him with their relationships. If he's trustworthy with your soul and eternity, he's trustworthy in your marriage today, or he's trustworthy in who you date today or in your finances today.

You can trust him with everything. Up to this point, we've spent 11 chapters marinating in the truth of what the gospel is. And today we begin the journey through the final five chapters to answer the question of now what? So Pastor JD, Romans can be so intimidating.

What's our goal in studying it on our own through the use of a study guide? There's so much here. I mentioned earlier that I think it was D. Martin Lloyd-Jones who preached 29 weeks on the first 32 verses.

So it shows you that even with this series, as long as it's been, there's just so much there. We're offering along with this a resource called Tim Keller, but it's basically a study in how to go deeper into the gospel, into God's mercy in Romans and the difference it makes in your life. Dr. Timothy Keller, who in many ways was a mentor of mine and so incredibly shaping on my preaching here, he says that Romans 8 contains the secret to real life change, real life change. And so that's where the second volume picks up there in Romans 8. Christians will learn how to relate to each other, how to relate to their jobs, how to relate to the government, how to relate to people that disappoint you and how to be a friend to your friends.

We offered the first part of this study earlier this year. So hopefully you got that. You can get the second half now that includes Shepherds 8 through 16. You can get that right now at JDGrier.com. To give today, call us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or visit JDGrier.com right now to partner with us. I'm Molly Vitovich. Tomorrow, Pastor JD will explain how we can know the will of God in our lives. See you Friday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.