Bible Text: Romans 12:1 | Pastor: Eric Danielson | Series: Romans 12-15 | The first sermon in a new sermon series from Romans chapters 12-15 to provide instruction for living in difficult times. But before we’re ready to follow instructions, we first have to go back to see and experience what our motivation is…

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In View of God’s Mercy

Romans 12:1

As I’ve sought to listen to the Lord for what he would like to say to us from his Word in the coming weeks, Romans 12-15 came and has remained at the forefront of my mind. These chapters come at the end of a letter Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome and are filled with instruction about how to live life as a follower of Christ. I believe we are to dwell on these chapters at this time in the life of our church because of all the turmoil, confusion, and tension we continue to be in. I anticipate it will only get worse as the election draws near and the fighting between the political candidates and their followers intensifies. These are troubling times in our world that are affecting all of us, and more than ever we need biblical direction for the circumstances we’re in. These chapters in Romans will provide that.

If you do a survey of these chapters, you will see that they address the following issues:

How you ought to view yourself in relationship to the rest of the people in the church family – not with spiritual pride but with humility and a willingness to fulfill your role in building up the church. (12:3-8)
What God’s love looks like when it’s lived out in the context of relationships with others. How to live in harmony and peace. How to act toward enemies. (12:9-21)
How you ought to behave in relationship to your governing authorities. (13:1-7)
The urgency to love each other and pursue holiness as we live in the last days. (13:8-14)
How to love your fellow believer when you disagree with them about secondary issues. How to not cast judgment or be a stumbling block to others. (14:1-23)
How to show grace to one another in the church family like Christ has shown to each of us. (15:1-7)

I think these things will be very helpful and encouraging for us at this time and by learning to walk according to them we will become more like Christ and that is our aim as a church – compelled by the love of Christ, we seek to become like Christ in every way so that Christ is glorified in us and we carry out his mission.

So that’s where we’re going, but before we dive in, we first need to grasp the foundational message in the preceding chapters. There’s a reason why Romans 12-15 comes after Romans 1-11 and it’s because the only way you’re going to have the right motivation to do the things in the back of the book is by personally owning, experiencing, and glorying in the truths found in the front of the book. And that’s what Paul points out in our key verse for today…

Read Romans 12:1.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

“Presenting your bodies as a living sacrifice to God” summarizes what we’re going to learn to do in chapters 12-15. It may sound nice and good, but anytime you’re talking about a sacrifice, you’re talking about something that that was slaughtered, cut up in pieces, laid on an altar, and set on fire… Paul is calling his readers to present themselves to God as people who have died to themselves and to the world, and who are offering their lives to him to use however he wills. It’s total devotion and surrender – a completely new way of life, and a very difficult road to follow.

Why should they do that? Paul says that the motivation comes from understanding the mercies of God that he wrote about in the first 11 chapters. “Because of the mercies of God, offer your lives completely to God, no longer to live for yourselves, but for God.” He says something very similar in 2 Cor. 5:14-15: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”

It isn’t until you reach the point of offering yourself to God as a sacrifice that you will be ready or willing to do what comes next in Romans, and no one is going to do that unless they understand and experience the mercies of God described in what came first. God cares most about our hearts. He doesn’t want us to fall in line and do what he tells us to do just because he tells us to do it. He wants more than that. He wants us to know and experience his love for us and out of that love see that he’s leading us in a much better way than we were going on our own. He wants us to want to follow him and become like him.

So before we go forward, we need to go back and look at the mercies of God in these chapters with the hope that it will awaken in us the joy of our salvation and a motivation to die to self and live to God. And rather than taking a year to do that (which would be easy to do), I’m going to try do it in about 20 minutes…

In the first 3 chapters of this letter, the point Paul is trying to get across is that everyone that has ever lived started out as a natural-born, rebellious sinner before God. Paul was writing to a church with a mix of Jew and Gentile believers, so he presented arguments to convince them that they were all on a level playing field in their sinfulness before God – something that was very difficult to swallow, especially for Jews. So after arguing that Gentiles were all sinful and that Jews were all sinful, he summarizes in Romans 3:9-18 by quoting a bunch of verses from the Old Testament.

Read Romans 3:9-18.

What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, 10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; 11 no one understands; no one seeks for God. 12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” 13 “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” 14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” 15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16  in their paths are ruin and misery, 17 and the way of peace they have not known.” 18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

How’s your self-esteem after reading that? Not very good? Well that’s kind of the whole point. Paul wants his readers to understand that nobody is better than anyone else when it comes to their righteous standing before God. Nobody has a step up. Nobody has a righteousness on their own that makes them more favorable to God than anyone else, and it’s because of our sin. It’s not because we were created as wretched beings for God to despise. He created us in his image and likeness so that we could have perfect fellowship with him, enjoy him, and glorify him like none other… No, it’s because of sin.

At its core, sin is rebellion against God. Romans 14:23 says, “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” This is what Paul describes in Romans 1:21-25: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”

Sin is a detestable stance of rebellion against a good and glorious Creator who created us to know and love him and enjoy fellowship with him forever. A refusal to marvel in him and his goodness and an insistence to go our own way. And ever since Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, it has been deeply engrained in who we are – all of us.

That’s the ‘uplifting’ message of Romans 1-3… Why does Paul have to be such a downer? Why does he have to rail on us so hard? Doesn’t he know we’re fragile beings who have feelings and feel crushed by that kind of language? I think Paul understands all that. But what he’s doing is breaking down any kind of faulty notion we may have that our goodness and righteousness comes from anything within ourselves. It’s such a common error to assume that goodness and righteousness comes from within, so Paul dismantles any possibility of us thinking that way. Goodness and righteousness do not come from within us. Sin, and rebellion comes from within us. We who were created in God’s image to be glorious demonstrators of his glory – Sin has destroyed that through and through. Adams’ sin, which we are born with is engrained in our very nature, and our own sin which we start to demonstrate as soon as we’re capable of exerting our will. And we have to come to grips with that.

But that’s just the first three chapters. Paul doesn’t end there, he just establishes a baseline of how desperate our need is and he then goes on to the incredible, life-changing, transforming, renewing, reconciling, realities of God’s mercy and grace that he poured out on us through Jesus Christ.  Romans 3:21-25 marks a huge transition in the book. It says, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”

So now, everything is completely different for the one who trusts in Jesus. Everything is completely different. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God… BUT those who put their faith in Jesus Christ are justified by his grace as a gift. That means that though they have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, they are declared to be righteous by God as a gift. They are forgiven and made righteous because of God’s grace. They are saved from their sins through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ – because he paid the price to purchase us from our bondage to sin by willingly laying down his life as a sacrifice and shedding his blood. Everything is completely different and it’s all because of God’s mercy.

Sin, as destructive and devastating and detestable as it was, is completely done away with by God’s mercy. Its penalty is completely broken, its power is broken, and its presence in our lives is in the process of being broken.

Jesus paid the penalty for our sins and there is no penalty left to be paid. He did it all; it’s completely gone.
Jesus destroyed the power of sin in our lives through our spiritual union with him so that our old, sinful self was put to death with him, but a new life and a new spirit was put inside us so that sin can’t have full control anymore. His Spirit is at work within us changing us and the more we resist the flesh and yield to the spirit, the more the power of sin is defeated and the power of the Spirit takes control.
And therefore Jesus is even breaking the presence of sin in our life – the fruits of darkness are being cast aside and the fruit of the spirit is coming into bloom. And this process continues and grows throughout our whole lives and will come to completion at last when we die and that old, dead sin nature is finally and totally removed – never to tempt or drag us down again.

God has done all these things for us freely, by his grace, as a gift. So there is this stark contrast between chapters 1-3 and chapters 4-11 in Romans. A monumental difference in our lives has happened, and it’s all because of God’s mercy.

So when you get to the beginning of chapter 12, Paul has prepared us to follow his instructions – “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” And what that looks like is what we’re going to unfold in the weeks to come.

One of the best pictures of how a life can be transformed by mercy is in the musical “Les Misérables.” It is the story of Jean Valjean who was a bitter and hardened ex-con. On the first night after his release he tried to find an inn where he could sleep, but he was rejected by everyone because he was a felon. He finally arrived at the home of a kind Bishop who opened his door and took him in. Jean Valjean returned his kindness by assaulting him, stealing his silverware and running away! The next day he was arrested and dragged back to the bishop to confirm his crime. But the Bishop did something shocking. Rather than condemning him, he scolded him for not taking more of the silver. He claimed the silver was a gift. This shocked the police officers who had no choice but to free him. The Bishop’s astonishing mercy changed Jean Valjean’s life forever. He was a different man from that point forward.

And God wants that to be true for our lives as well. What I think will be helpful for us this week and throughout the duration of this series, is that we each seek to spend time drawing near to God in quietness, anticipation, and submission, each and every day if possible. Recognizing the depth of how sinful we were and would be if it wasn’t for him, but then glorying in his kindness, compassion and favor that completely changed everything around for us – gave us life, eternal life, hope, joy, peace, a Father in heaven, brothers and sisters in Christ, a mission and purpose for life, spiritual gifts to build up the church, and much, much more. We are not who we were anymore. We are not who we could have been. We have been removed from that completely and given a radically new life so that we would now live for him who died and was raised for us.