Reservoir Presbyterian Sermons
Fractured lives: how Jesus makes us whole again (Romans 12:1-2)
Good morning everybody. As we turn to God's word, our first reading is taken from Romans chapter 1, beginning at verse 16 to verse 32. So Romans chapter 1, and that can be found on page 1600 of the Bibles in the seats there. So Romans chapter 1. "For I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claim to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator, who is forever praised, Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts, even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women, and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and receiving themselves the due penalty for their error. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents. They have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things, but also approve of those who practice them. Then we're going to turn over to Romans chapter 12, beginning at verse 1, Romans 12, found on page 1, 6, 1, 6. So Romans chapter 12, and we're going to read verses 1 and 2. "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. 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. He is good, pleasing and perfect will." This is the word of God. Fantastic. Great to be with you. Let me pray again before we have a closer look at Romans 12. Now, heavenly Father, we do praise you that you're a gracious and good God and that you've made yourself known as such. We read in your word that the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. And so we pray now that as we seek to listen to your words, that you might refresh our souls, that you might give us clarity of thought, and that you might empower us this morning that in the view of the mercy of Jesus, that we might live integrated lives. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I'm persuaded that there are some very significant ways in which we live fragmented and fractured lives. In fact, at least three ways I can think of that we live fractured and fragmented lives. And the first one is that we have these different realms of our lives. That is, you've got your work life over here. You've got your home life over here. You've got your sport. And then somehow God and church is another part of our lives. But what is it that gives coherence to all of that? What is it that gives direction? How do those different parts of our lives fit together? That's the first way. Another way in which I think we live fractured and fragmented lives is that often our desires and thinking and actions don't actually match up together. So there might be this good thing that you want to do, but somehow your mind and your thinking stops you from doing that. Or there might be something that you know and you desire not to do. But somehow your mind doesn't match up to that. The truth of what your thinking doesn't match. And so we have this disconnect between our desires and our thinking and our actions. That's the second way. The third way I think we live fractured and fragmented lives is that we all carry baggage with us. We've all been at some level mistreated by others, haven't we? We can feel resentment and bitterness towards others for how we've been treated. But the other part to that is that we've also been those who've mistreated others as well. And we carry that baggage with us. And that can lead us to leave these fractured lives, these broken lives. Now you might resonate with some of those more than others, but whether you feel like your life is fragmented or not, the Apostle Paul understood this challenge very well. And in Romans 12, 1-2, he offers us a vision of a reintegrated life. He offers us a life where our whole being, mind, body and spirit is transformed by God's mercy and reoriented towards God, an integrated life. That's what we're offered. And let me emphasize this, Paul's vision isn't about pulling up your socks. It's not about getting yourself together and getting organized, managing your time better. No, it's something much deeper than that. It's something beyond our own efforts that is needed for us to live this integrated life. And so what I want to do with you is to explore Paul's vision for a reintegrated life in Romans 12. Before, secondly, I want to contrast that with the disintegration that Paul describes earlier in Romans in Romans 1. And then finally, we'll consider how God can move us from fragmented living to a right direction for integrated living. So that's where we're going. And I hope we'll discover how Romans 12 offers us a powerful and compelling vision of what the Christian life is meant to be. It's a vision that welcomes broken people like you and me in need of mercy and shows us how God's grace in Christ can transform us towards wholeness. And my hope is that we find that vision inspiring and energizing both in our personal lives and in how we relate to one another as a community. Okay, so firstly, then let's look at the vision of the Christian life Paul sets out in chapter 12. Paul envisages the Christian life as one of wholeness of reintegration. It's a picture of the whole person, the whole life, reoriented in one direction. Now, let me read it to you again. Therefore, I urge you brothers and sisters in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. 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. And so there are four parts to this, I think. Firstly, worship restored, bodies offered, minds renewed, and we might say behavior activated or thinking to action, re-initiated. So the first is that the Christian life, according to Paul, is about the offering of our bodies in worship. Offer your bodies, he says, as living sacrifice is holy and pleasing to God. Now, I wonder if you noticed what was surprising about that image. Did you notice? You see, what is a sacrifice? A sacrifice is to take a life. A sacrifice is a dead body. The religious background of that phrase is of animals being killed in the temple and being offered to God. Well, Paul says, Christians are to become a sacrifice themselves. Christians are to offer their bodies as sacrifices, but not dead. Notice it, but living, alive sacrifices. Paul says, offer your bodies as living sacrifices. Why? Because this is your true and proper worship. This is what worship is meant to be. Now, let's just take a moment to register what an amazing way this is to imagine our lives as a living sacrifice offered to God in worship. This means, amongst other things, that worship is not just something you do at church. Of course, as worshipers of God, we worship in church as well, but it's not something we just do when we gather together. It's all of life worship. I think that's a very common way to think about churches. I worship at a place on an occasion once a week. I worship at Reservoir Presbyterian Church, but clearly here, worship is about far more than that. Worship is a whole of life thing. It incorporates every aspect of life to be directed to the honor and worship of God. And I think sometimes we compartmentalize our lives in that way. We don't think about our work as worship, for example. So worship is not just a religious ritual or religious formalities. It's about all of life oriented towards God. So, of course, we worship when we sing together. Of course, we worship when we read the Bible together, when we pray together, but we also worship when we're chatting together over morning tea. Our lives are still directed towards God when we do that, right? Or at school or at work or at study or whatever you do during the week. We worship in our homes as we care for each other. Paul says, and elsewhere, whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him. That is, the worship of God is not to be partitioned or severed off from the rest of life. God calls for holistic worship of Him. Think of what a difference this makes to the way you think about your body. This is what bodies are for in God's economy. They're for the worship of God. How do you think that would shape what you do with your energy, with your attention, with your hands? What is it that you do with your eyes, right? How would the worship of God with your eyes shape what you feast your eyes upon? What do you read? What visuals do you seek on your phone or your computer? See, God gave you those eyes and they're meant for the worship of Him. Do you worship God with your eyes? Or how about your feet? Do you worship God with your feet? Where do your feet take you? Do you worship God with your ears? What do you listen to? How does the worship of God shape how you dress? How does what you dress say about what you think of God? See, that's part of your worship of God, right? How would presenting your body as a sacrifice offered to God shape sexual expression? How does it shape how we approach mundane things like sleep and exercise? The Bible has quite a bit more to say about sleep than you might think. Psalm 127 talks about sleep as a gift from the Lord. He grants sleep to those he loves. It's not this is not being a downer on insomnia, but it's a recognition that our bodily creaturely limits of our lives are God's gift to us, right? Now, there's a lot more we could say here. We could explore each part of our bodies in terms of what we do with them and how we might offer them to God for worship. But for now, I just want you to notice the profound way this is to think about our bodies and our lives to offer our bodies as living sacrifices in worship of God. Number three, third thing to notice is what Paul says about the mind. Have a look at verse two. Do not conform to the pattern of this world rather, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now, minds are not to be stagnant. We're called to a transformation of the whole person. That includes body mind and the mind needs to be renewed. The idea behind that is our minds are out of whack and that they need to be realigned with a holistic worship of God. That means we need to think and learn in new ways. It's about having your thinking changed and then letting that shape your life in the verses that follow. Paul talks a lot about thinking and particularly Paul wants his readers thinking to be shaped by their awareness of what has happened in Jesus. That's actually been the case throughout Romans. Paul envisages that our renewed thinking that arises out of our hearing of the gospel is going to rearrange and gradually transform, particularly the way these Roman Christians go about their lives. That means the Christian growth is necessarily a cognitive process. Now, I don't probably need to say this to Presbyterians. You're fully on board with that, that there's learning involved, that there's actually rational processes involved in reading the word, in rethinking our lives. But sometimes you might feel like learning and listening and reading might be a heavy mental load. You might even be feeling that now. This is a heavy mental load. And I want to say I can sympathize with that. Sometimes wrestling with the word and thinking about our lives and thinking about how to apply the word of God to our lives can be really challenging, right? Mentally challenging. But what we see here is that we shouldn't be surprised by that. God has made us thinking beings with purpose, right? You can't know God unless you know something about God without knowing God's plans for the world. So we should expect some cognitive processes, right? That our minds might be renewed to rethink our lives in terms of who God is and who we are in light of who he is and then how we live in response to that. Christian growth comes through the renewal of our mind specifically says we're not to be conformed to the pattern of this world. Conforming means being shaped or molded in the likeness of something. It means gradually falling into step with something, right? Now without any additional influence, that's what's happening to us automatically, right? The world around us has a powerful influence that shapes and mould us. And if we're not paying attention to the ways in which it does that, right? To the undercurrents and the assumptions that we're listening to, right? That's going to shape our thinking and our lives. This is really happening to us all the time, isn't it? Just think about what your mind takes in every day. Think about all the signals and inputs and interpretations and explanations that we're hearing from so many different sources in the media, from friends, from people you met down the street, right? We're drinking in words and images and sounds from the world all the time. You see, wake up, what do you do? First thing in the morning, I think for some people, they check their phone, right? They're reading emails, they're looking at the news. Already there, our minds are beginning to be shaped by ways of the world, isn't it? Ideas and opinions, whatever the latest is, the latest take on life is that floods into our consciousness, doesn't it? And so I think for that reason, we need to find ways to integrate the Word of God into our life. So our minds are being renewed according to God's pattern for this world, his purposes for this world. One way you might do that is by beginning by praying through the Lord's Prayer the first thing in the morning, right? Hello, be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done. Already when you do that, your mind is beginning to be shaped by God's priorities for his world. You see, that's a way in which we can cry out to God that our approach to life will be aligned with his priorities. But of course, the issue is not just what we think first in the day, or even what we think about most in the day. Jesus reminds us that nothing goes into a man, makes him unclean. So Christians can overplay the worldly influence and how it can contaminate us or something like that, as if I'm exposed to some violent image or pagan idea and my innocence is going to be contaminated. No, that's not what he's talking about. The real issue is how is it shaping my thinking? How is it shaping what I believe about what is true? What weighty or controlling power do you give to those various images, ideas and words that you consume? What is the ballast in your boat that guides your ways, you navigate your way through the world? Is it God and his priorities, his word, or is it those influences from the world? How can we ensure that our minds are being renewed, according to the knowledge of God in Christ? That that will be the dominant priority, so that our knowledge of God in his word in the Bible shapes the direction in which we're headed, where we're going, and what we hope for in life. Paul's vision for the Christian life is that not only that we'd learn to think well, to think rightly, but that we'd be aware that we wouldn't be blindly following others as well. The Christian life involves growing in deliberately thoughtful ways. It's not about being super clever or academic or smart or highly educated, because smart and highly educated and academic people can just as easily be conformed to the buttons of this world. So this vision about the freedom to think differently is brought about by the knowledge of God in Christ by the Spirit. How can you ensure that you're being shaped by the good news of Jesus and not just by the patterns, images, and ideas of the world around you? What do you need to adjust in your life to enable that? What habits do you need to build and cultivate to be actively pursuing that, that shaping influence on your life? What can you be doing that will renew your thinking to align with God's? That's why we have Bible talks. That's why we have Bible study groups. That's why we're always on about reading the Bible. That's why we sing about the rich themes of the Bible, because we want God's thoughts, God's plans, God's priorities to be shaping our thinking, rather than just our responding to often the lies that are perpetuated in our world. Well that was number three. Number four, finally notice that all of this transformation and renewal is directed towards action. So the second half of verse two there, then you'll be able to test and approve what God's will is. He's good, pleasing, and perfect will. What does that mean? Well, test and approve might sound like we were standing in judgment over God's will at that point to evaluate God's will for ourselves. And when it's good, we give him a pat on the back. Well done, God. Nice job. I like what you did with that. That's probably not that sarcastic. What God has in what Paul has in mind here. So what does he mean? Well, it's often not easy to identify and recognize what is good and what is evil. Well, you've all experienced this, haven't you? Where there's some part of life where you don't know what to do. You don't know what is best, right? And we wrestle with that. What's wise and what's foolish in this situation? What's right for me in this situation? And so what God's renewal of our minds enables is actually a directing us towards our ability to appreciate the goodness of God's direction, God's commands. And then for when we can recognize the goodness of God's instructions, it enables us to obey it. I see if you're not persuaded that God's ways are good, then you're not going to do it, are you? But what the renewal of our minds does is it enables that, do you see? To the point where I can say, oh, yes, I can clearly see now why God says, do this, behave in this way, live in this way. As our minds are renewed, we become to be able to appreciate what God's will is for us. It's good, the goodness and pleasingness and perfectness of God's will. And then we'll be able to share in God's appraisals, God's judgments of what is good in his world. Almost as if we're being tuned in to the same frequency as God. We begin to be realigned then with the grain of God's universe. The Christian life then involves aligning our perceptions and evaluations of things in our world. As our minds are renewed, our ability to comprehend, judge and evaluate and act within God's world is tuned into the way that God comprehends, acts and judges our world. The renewal of our mind produces a renewal and a refinement of rightly assessing good and evil in our world. Over time, our minds are renewed. We learn to see the goodness of what God calls good and then it becomes more instinctive and appealing to us. I wonder what are the ways in which at the moment you're resistant to God's will? What are the things that God instructs us to do that you're just not ready to do it yet? There's always room for growth, isn't there? I think this is a massively untapped area for us to find real power and peace and wholeness in our lives as our minds are renewed by the grace of God in Christ. We all have a tremendous amount of room to grow here. Often objections to Christianity have moral dimensions. People might challenge Christian views on issues like sexuality or authority or justice and these aspects of Christian teaching can seem to people problematic and even harmful. However, if the Christian message is true, then it's not surprising that there's a real challenge for us there in resisting our conforming to the world's way of thinking in favour of us realigning ourselves with God's way. And this tension reveals something important. When we encounter the Bible saying something difficult or disagreeable to us, we think I don't know if I agree with that. What God says there, God sounds a bit nasty there or whatever it is. It might indicate then that our minds have more renewing to happen in this area. Now, of course, it's possible that we've misunderstood the Bible and what it's calling for at some points. That can happen. But we should also consider the possibility that we've been shaped by the world's thinking more than we realised. Unraveling that complexity is not always straightforward. Sometimes it involves quite emotional things, mental struggles, moral dilemmas, where things are really kind of personal for us. But scripture insists on the need for our renewing of our minds. So it's worth asking ourselves the question at that point. Maybe the problem lies in me. And in my experience that the best approach has been trying out God's way of thinking, even when I'm not persuaded fully of it, right, in my heart, giving it a go. And actually Paul commends this method elsewhere. As we carry out God's will, it actually grows us in our knowledge of him and helps us to see the goodness of his instructions. Give God's way a go, even if you're not yet persuaded in your heart. I think you'll find as been my experiences that God's way has been better. So a summary for God's vision for the Christian life of reintegrated wholeness. Firstly, our worship is restored. Secondly, our bodies are offered. Thirdly, our minds are renewed. And fourthly, our thinking to action is realigned. What I want to do now is look at another aspect of what Paul's doing here and kind of the counterpoint. To how Paul describes the condition of humanity in chapter 12. And that comes at the beginning of Romans in chapter one, where he describes humans as existing under the power of sin. And what he describes as the breakdown or disintegration of body worship of mind and of judgment, a disinteractoring, which is the opposite of the integrated life that God calls us to in chapter 12. Have a look at these. Romans 1 shows us that the basic problem with humanity is its failure to worship the one who is their creator. It's a failure of worship. So this next verse comes from verse 21. Although they knew God, they never glorified him as God, nor gave thanks to him. Or have a look at this one from verse 25. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the created things rather than the creator. Do you see how worship has become corrupted? Human beings are under sin. There's a chronic inability here to worship God rightly as God deserves. As Romans 1 describes, we all know of God. We have a natural awareness of his divinity, his rule. And what God would expect of us, and yet we've fully failed to live up to, is the wholehearted worship of him. But because we're made for God and for worshiping God, our worship tends to spin out in all these kind of wild directions. We start worshiping the created things rather than the creator. We've become distorted and disoriented in our worship. People live for things like football rather than the creator. That becomes their religion. Where something becomes more important, more valuable in people's eyes than the God who made them. By contrast, chapter 12, he says, you're true in proper worship, right? In Christ, true and proper worship is restored. The second worst thing we see in Romans 1 is the degradation of our minds. Have a look at these verses from verse 21. Their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claim to come wise, they became fools, degraded thinking. Do you see how sin has affected every aspect of our being? Our bodies, our minds, our hearts, degraded thinking, degraded minds. We no longer think straight. Once you kind of reject the creator and his rightful rule over us, our minds are corrupted and blinded and darkened from seeing reality clearly. By contrast, Romans 12 says, be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Also in Romans 1, there's a corresponding degradation of our bodies. Have a look at this verse, verse 24. Therefore, God gave them over in their sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, for the degrading of their bodies with one another. Again, by contrast, Romans 12, he says, offer your bodies as living sacrifices. You see the contrast. And finally, Romans 1, Paul describes a failure of judgment, a failure of thinking to action. Verse 28, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind. What does that do? So that they do what ought not to be done. Their thinking to action is completely misaligned. By contrast, in Romans 12, then you'll be able to test and approve what God's will is. In the Greek text here, the contrast is even sharper because the word for they did not think it worthwhile is the same word he uses for test and approve. It's that realm of wisdom. It moves from our thinking into action. Romans 1 is saying that's been completely jumbled up, mixed up, misaligned. Now it's being realigned through the gospel of Christ. So what Paul begins doing in Romans, chapter 12, is showing very deliberately that Christian life is about a reversal of the chaos, of the disintegration, of the natural condition of our lives under sin. Left to our own devices, the Bible says, we tend towards disintegration, disoriented worship that leads to disordered thinking and so corrupts our action. Body and mind will flail about in painful, damaging mess. That's what happens when sin takes hold. It leaves us with broken lives. That's the picture in Romans 1. Chapter 12 stands out all the more against this dark backdrop. Christian life is about a return to wholeness where there was disintegration, a return to peace where there was a mess, a return to ordered thinking where our thinking had become walked, a return to the best possible purpose of our bodies, where our bodies have been degraded. Now so particularly if you're someone who knows that you've been living life, the life patterns of Romans 1, shutting God out, Romans 12 becomes this glorious and realistic vision of hope. The Word of God sets before us a powerful and compelling alternative to living however we want. It's a life of renewal, a cognitive bodily moral spiritual reintegration to worship God again, rightly, the God who made us. The question is how is that possible? If you take Romans 1 seriously, how is it possible that the visions of Romans 12 could even be a reality for you? The distance between you two, those two, is not only 11 chapters of densely packed theology, it's just a vast gap in our imagination to bridge, to go from so corrupted to reintegrate it. How can someone living in Romans 1 find themselves in Romans 12? Well the answer is in a phrase from chapter 12 that we haven't looked at yet, it's a simple phrase that's easy to skip over and some of you may have guessed it already. It's there in the outline and it's this phrase, have a look at the start of chapter 12 there. Therefore I urge your brothers and sisters in view of God's mercy. That is the link that can take you from Romans 1 to Romans 12. It's the phrase that sums up the whole journey that's been taken from between Romans 1 and 12, the mercy of God. He summarizes that whole section in that one phrase and he puts this vision within our reach wonderfully. That's what bridges the gap between the disintegration and reintegration, it's the mercy of God. And that phrase is Paul's summary for what God has done for us in Christ. What is this mercy in Jesus? Well Romans 1 has shown us how humanity have failed to live up to the rule, live under rightly under the rule of the Creator. Chapter 2 shows us that even our best moral and religious efforts cannot help us reintegrate our lives. The conclusion of chapter 3 is that all everyone, Jew and Gentile, religious and irreligious, moral and immoral, all are imprisoned under sin. But in chapter 3 verse 21, Paul shows that God has provided a game changer for all of that. Out of God's mercy and grace he gave us his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the perfect one. God gave him as the atoning sacrifice for our sins, God gave him as the sufficient offering to deal with sin and he raised him from the dead so that we might have life in him by the power of the Spirit. It's through Jesus that we can have a new life live to righteousness, chapter 6. God has brought this into the world. In chapter 5 we're told that we have hope now. This is what lifts us up the good news of Jesus. We don't get this hope just by pulling up our socks. We don't get this hope by doing everything right or being sinless now. I see Paul goes out of his way a great length to say that you don't receive this mercy by good works, by earning it, by just nailing life and getting it right. That's how we tend to think. But that's not how the Christian life works again and again. Paul is showing our inability to do that for ourselves. God doesn't save people who are doing really well. It doesn't work like that. That path of earning your salvation, of making your life what it should be. No, says Paul. We receive this purely by the grace of God. It's a gift to us, not by works, but by faith, by trusting in Jesus. That's the mercy we've received. You see, God knows that we are lost, doesn't he? He knows that we're on this downward spiral that we can't get ourselves out of. And God goes out of his way at a great cost to himself to send his son, to draw us up, to draw us out, and to make us new. That's what the mercy of God is, the preppers of this vision in chapter 12. For Paul, it's the mercy of God that makes his vision of the Christian life and Christian community within our reach. It's the mercy of God that means that this vision is not totally beyond us. It's not just a promise of pie in the sky when you die. It's a real potential outcome for our lives. But it is more than the mercy of God doesn't just make this vision in chapter 12 of potentiality. It becomes the obviously right thing for us to shoot for, to aim for with our lives. It's the mercy of God that shapes Paul's vision. How can anything else now make sense? Once we've seen that mercy and grace of God in Christ, that God has forgiven us all our wrongdoings, He's forgiven us our sins. He's not counting them against us anymore. How can we want anything else for our lives other than to give our lives holy to Him, given the wonder of what He has done for us? Okay, I've got two challenges for us as we finish. And the first one is, do you know this mercy of God for yourself? Do you know the grace of God? Do you know that it's offered to you freely by God as a gift? Do you know that Jesus has done everything to reconcile you to God through His death on the cross? Can you say, yes, I know that Jesus died for me. Yes, I know that I'm forgiven. Yes, I know I stand before God a new person because of His grace to me. Can you say that? If you cannot, then that absolutely needs to be your first step. That needs to be the thing you work towards. You might not yet be persuaded of Jesus. Then you need to know more about Him. That's okay. But do it today. It's an urgent thing, right? If this is true, we need to know the mercy of God urgently. But if the mercy of God is true, then no other life makes sense. If Christ has died and risen, then living for anything else is empty and vain. But secondly, if you know the mercy of God for yourself, then well, let's get on board with Paul's vision and take it up. It means that we need to keep dwelling on and meditating upon the mercy of God in order for the renewal of our minds. This is how God transforms people. It's the grace of God who teaches us to say no to ungodliness. All right. This is what the Christian life is meant to be about. It's what your life can be about. Now you won't do it perfectly and we'll all fumble and flail as we go about it together. So you'll stumble, you'll fall, you'll face setbacks. It will be bumpy and it won't always look great. It'll look messy. That's been my experience. But this vision of your body offered to the Lord in true worship, of your mind renewed as you meditate on the mercy of God and all that he is to us. And of the transformation of our perceptions, of our evaluations of what's good and right, of the transformation of our affections and our powers of judgment, that is a vision for you and it's yours as a gift from God. So let's take it up. Let's make it our own and let's take it on board by the mercy of God. Well, I'm going to pray and then I'm going to hand back to Isaac. Our heavenly Father, we thank you that you don't leave us lost in our darkness, in our blindness, in our corruption, but that you have acted powerfully in the Lord Jesus Christ, in the sending of him, in his giving of his life for us, in his sacrificing himself on the cross for us, in him being raised from the dead for us. We thank you that in him is the promise of a renewed life and the hope of eternal life. And we pray that as we keep meditating on and thinking through your mercy that you would reorient our worship, that our whole lives might be lived in the worship of you, that you might undo that brokenness and that fracturedness of our lives, that you might reintegrate us. We pray that our thinking might be realigned. We pray that our bodies that we would think through how we're using our bodies in the worship of you. And we pray that in this way our discernment to of what is right and good and true might be realigned also. And we pray all of this that the mercy of God might continue to shape our lives for the glory of Jesus. Amen.