Gooding, David: 7 - The Magnitude of the Gospel

Shall we begin to read this evening from the Epistle to the Romans and chapter twelve. The Epistle to the Romans, chapter twelve. Romans um twelve verse one. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And be not fashioned according to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. For I say unto you, through the grace that was given to me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but so to think as to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to each man a measure of faith. For even as we have many members in one body, and all the members have not the same office, so we who are many are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another. And having gifts differing according to the grace that was given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of our faith, or ministry, let us give ourselves to our ministry, or he that teacheth to his teaching, or he that exhorteth to his exhorting. He that giveth, let him do it with liberality. He that ruleth with diligence, he that showeth mercy with cheerfulness. The Lord continue with us in our meditation on his word. Now we have in this series of talks only more, two more talks, that is one tonight and one, if God will, next. So that I am proposing to do what most preachers do with the Epistle to the Romans, that is to leave out chapters eleven— uh, ten, nine, ten, and eleven. And that simply for time's sake. They are difficult chapters, and to do them justice, one would wish more than one talk, even on each chapter. Let me just say, however, before we proceed to chapter twelve, that I do not omit these intervening chapters nine, ten, and eleven because I think they are unimportant. They are exceedingly important. I do not omit them because I think they are unprofitable. Some people have made them unprofitable by the way they have discussed them, pushing extreme views to worse extremes and getting themselves teased and annoyed about it. I regard these three chapters as being exceedingly profitable, calculated to lift the heart in profound worship to God. Nor do I omit them because I do not regard them as practical. They are exceedingly practical as well as profitable. I had last evening an unexpected visit from a gentleman. He is an academic by profession and not long since found the Savior. He told me how he found the Lord, and we talked about the Lord's things, uh, over dinner. I was very interested to hear him say that one of the remaining things that is a difficult to him on occasions is just this. His fellow lecturers constantly tell him, of course, that they are disappointed that anyone so intellectual as he should become a Christian. They tell me it's all psychological imagination. And he said, sometimes I do fall to thinking, said he, well, what, after all, how can I be sure that this experience I've had is a real experience and is not just some psychological thing that's happened to me? How can I be sure? And then he gave me various reasons that the Lord had shown him why he, why he could be sure that it wasn't just psychology. I submitted to him, well, I have seen that difficulty myself too, haven't you? I submitted to him that there is one strand of evidence that is exceedingly important in this matter that will show us that our experience of God is not just our self-deception, not just a piece of psychology, and that is the historical aspect of our faith. The Christian faith that we have embraced is not a philosophy. It is not a scheme of philosophy that someone thought up one day and to which now we have adhered ourselves. Our Christian faith has its roots in history. Think of it for a moment that our Lord Jesus Christ didn't come the moment Adam sinned, did he? Why didn't he? Why did God wait all those many thousands of years before he sent his son in the likeness of sinful flesh. Why all those long years when God was dealing with Israel, when he spoke the law to them from Sinai, when he gave them animal sacrifices and raised them up kings and dealt with them politically? Why all those long years? Why, because Christianity, you see, is not a philosophy. Christianity is, so to speak, the mature fruit of God's long, long dealings with men down the centuries, in which he was preparing the way for the Lord Jesus to come. You wouldn't go to a doctor to be cured unless you were sure you were ill. And before men could be in the position to see how desperately they needed Christ, how and exactly Christ could fit their need. God had to spend centuries teaching them the elementary lessons. Teaching them what sin was, teaching them what his standards of morality were, wrestling with the problems of idolatry, demonstrating man's inadequacy, whether personal or moral or spiritual or political or what have you. And so preparing men for the coming of Christ. And as we look back over those centuries, the two or three strands of evidence stand out very, very clearly. That is that among all the nations that have ever been on the face of this earth, it is literally true to say, I use the word advisedly, that the Jewish nation is absolutely unique. You cannot cite another nation like that Jewish nation. There is not another nation that has been scattered abroad over the face of the earth and has maintained its identity and has at last gone back to the land of i- its inheritance. Yes, but there is not another nation like it that has produced a book like the Jewish nation has produced. Oh, there are many holy books. Most religions have a holy book somewhere along the line, but among all the holy books there are, this book called the Old Testament stands out again, literally unique. We can trace it back through history, we can date it sufficiently to show that amongst its contemporaries, its standards of morality towers like some snow-capped peak above all the other moralities of the Old Testament world. So high is the morality of the Ten Commandments. So lofty its concept of God, its monotheism, that many of the hostile critics of the Old Testament have said, look, Moses could not possibly have written Exodus. Oh, why couldn't he have written Exodus? Why, Exodus contains the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments say that in six days God made heaven and earth and all that is therein. In other words, the Ten Commandments in their prelude are talking about a God who made the whole universe, that is one supreme God. At that stage, when Israel wrote that, the surrounding nations, the best they could do was to think of many gods for one tribe, or perhaps each tribe had a special god to itself. The idea that there was one supreme God, we'll have to go to Israel for that. And as I say, many of the hostile critics, when they come across this in the Old Testament, this early statement that there is one God. They are so flabbergasted that they say Moses couldn't have written it. This must have been written ages later than Moses. Why must it? Well, they say Moses would never have thought it up himself. The Bible doesn't say he thought it up. This is just the point. This unique book was inspired of God. It tells how God took out of the nations a special nation. That's why the Jews are unique. It tells us that to them he gave a special revelation. That's why its law is so unique. And thirdly, the third great strand of evidence, that nation and that book are utterly unlike any other nation and any other book, in that for centuries that nation began to say, and went on saying, and then wrote it down in this inspired volume, that through the Jewish nation, God was eventually going to send into this world a Messiah, a savior of the world. You'll never find it anywhere else. You'll find many books of wisdom in the ancient world. They'll tell you how to behave, how to run your farm, how to run your politics, how to conduct your morals. You will not find another book in the world that has begun to say and kept on saying, century by century, that one day God would send through such and such a nation and through such and such a tribe and through such and such a family within that tribe and within that nation, would send a savior of the world. These three strands of evidence, evidence are unique. And it is Christianity's claim that is this Christianity is not a something that someone thought up one day, being a very bright philosopher. It is a something that God introduced into the world after centuries of preparation. How did Christianity begin? Well, you listen to Matthew in his chapter one. uh Our Lord Jesus, he says, comes. Yes, how did he come into this world? He came as a son of a family that will stretch right back to King David and to Father Abraham. That is very interesting. Because, you see, if Christianity were a philosophy, well, anybody can decide to join a group of philosophers. But Christianity isn't a philosophy. Christianity says that God intervened to take out Israel and out of Israel to take the family of David and to make him king, and that he promised from David's physical descendants he would bring into this world the Messiah. And you know, choosing what parents you're going to be born of the seed of David. And so you will find Paul the Apostle, when he begins his letter to the Romans to expound his gospel, he begins like this: Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, which he promised afore by his prophets in Holy Scripture. Concerning his son, who was born of the seed of David, according to the flesh. I wonder, do you see the relevance of that now? You who try to do some personal witness for the Lord amongst your fellow colleagues at school or business, you might do worse than to take notice of that. Our Lord was born, raised according to these Old Testament prophecies. He came of the seed of David. If we're going to be effective witnesses for the Lord presently, we shall have to know our Old Testament, can't we? To do like Paul did, to be able to demonstrate how that our Lord, the subject of that unique book, the Old Testament, and its many prophecies, was born as the Bible prophesied he would be born. Christianity is built, therefore, on the Old Testament, its prophets, and its kings. But now you fancy Paul for a moment, he's writing a letter to Romans. And the letter comes to the assembly at Rome, to the church of Rome, and the Christians read it, and they begin to talk, and they're witnessing one of these days to one of their educated Roman friends. Oh, says this educated Roman, aha, now you're Christians. You're a funny little lot, aren't you? Our historian Tacitus thinks you're a terrible crowd. The veritable scum of the earth. How can you prove that your Jesus is what you say he is? All right, one of these early Christians says, ah, I can prove it too. Look what the Old Testament prophesies. Oh yes, says the Roman, and what is this Old Testament? Well, it's the sacred writings of the Jewish nation. Oh, I say yes. Ah. Now, just a moment. Do all the Jews believe what you say? Are all the Jews Christians? Oh, no, not all the Jews are Christians. Oh. Suppose I were to take the Old Testament along to, to the Jews, and in particular to their theologians and to their university-trained men. Suppose I took the Old Testament along to the Jews, and I said to the Jews, tell us now, and we've met some of these Christians, and they say Jesus was prophesied in the Old Testament, and Christianity is a fulfillment of the Old Testament. What do you say? After all, you're the leaders of Judaism. What do you say? Oh. That would be difficult, wouldn't it? Because the great majority of the Jews themselves deny that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. And I can imagine your educated Romans saying to the Christian, well, they, wow, what's the good of your claiming that Jesus fulfills the Old Testament when all the Jews who gave us the Bible, at least most of the Jews who gave us the Bible, reject Jesus and say he doesn't fulfill the Old Testament? How will you explain that? Therefore, Paul, if he is to expound his gospel fully, must face this very practical problem. He says that Christianity is founded on the Old Testament scriptures. He must face the problem, why then does the nation who gave us those scriptures reject Christianity? It's a fair question, isn't it? Paul proceeds in chapters nine, ten, and eleven to answer that very big question. He answers it in three ways. He says in chapter nine, if I might, uh, paraphrase him quickly, he says, well, the fact that the majority of Jews do not accept Jesus, do not accept their promised Messiah, this is not to be wondered at. So far from proving us wrong, it proves scripture right. And he takes us back in chapter nine all through the Old Testament years to prove this, and he cites three examples to prove it, that they are not all Israel which are of Israel, neither because they are Abraham's seed are they all children. That being a Jew physically doesn't really mean you are a genuine spiritual Jew, that you are Abraham's seed. And he proceeds to show how that all down these centuries, Abram's children, some of them have gone one way and some of them have gone another. And the fact that the multitude of them have rejected God and his revelation and his gospel, this in the end is nothing to be wondered at. Certainly it does not, um, invalidate God's word, rather does it substantiate it. And in chapter ten, however, he comes at the thing another way round, and he says, you know, of course it isn't God's fault that Israel are lost. Say what you will about election, it remains true that the reason why Israel are not saved is that they have had the gospel preached to them. God has stretched out his arms to them all day long and pleaded with them to come, and they have obstinately refused to obey. You'll never blame it on God that they won't save. It is their own fault. And then finally, in chapter eleven, he says, but look how marvelous God is. God is going to turn Israel's disobedience to the maximum benefit. How is that, you say? Well, first of all, God has used Israel's disobedience in order to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. Because Israel disobeyed, they had to be set on one side. How wonderful, you say, because if Israel had been the center of everything to this present, many of us Gentiles wouldn't have wanted anything to do with it. But when Israel refused it, God said, righto, you refuse it, and took the gospel to the Gentiles. Ah, but, says God, I've got more things in mind. I'm hoping that one of these days, the Jews, as they look over the Gentiles and see the vast multitude of Gentiles that have been converted, I hope to move the very Jews to jealousy, to bring them back. Mm. Moreover, says God, you can't save anybody until he's aware that he's a sinner, and you can't save any man until that man is prepared to own his bankruptcy and, uh, take salvation free. The Jews have stumbled on this very point. They're not prepared to admit themselves bankrupt. They're not prepared to have salvation free. They want to work for it, says God. I've got to let them learn. And I'm going to use the very judgments that must come on them as a result of their refusing Christ. I'm going to use those very judgments to bring Israel to her very knees, where Israel as a nation is prepared to turn round and acknowledge her error and receive Jesus as her Messiah after all. When Paul thinks about that, how God is prepared to take a nation's sin and perversity and use it to the maximum blessing of all his creatures, including the very nation that has been perverse. Paul breaks out in a great paean of praise and worship for God. Permit me that little, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, and very brief, uh, bird's eye view. That's all we have time for anyway. But I did want to make the point that those chapters nine, ten, and eleven are neither unprofitable nor impractical. An understanding of them is exceedingly important in the question of the evidences of the Christian faith. But now we come to what is popularly termed the practical, uh, chap- the practical chapters of this epistle. Beginning here in chapter twelve, we resume the subject that we were talking about on the last occasion and in the first eight chapters of the letter. As we ended last week, you may remember, we were thinking of our Christian hope. The hope that we shall attain the very glory of God. The hope that one day we shall grow up and cease to be spiritual babies and become grown up sons of God. The hope that when our spiritual education is complete, the very creation will be delivered from the bondage of corruption and handed over for the administration by those of us who are Christian. And we saw how that that hope was guaranteed, guaranteed initially by the resolute and unchanging purpose of God, and fulfilled for us by the energy of the Holy Spirit's intercession, and finally assured to us by the death and resurrection and living ministry of Christ. So then God is determined to make us holy. What does that mean? Does that mean one of these Monday mornings I shall wake up and find myself holy? In word, in thought, and deed, complete? Oh no, no, no. Says the holy apostle, I beseech you therefore, because of all that God has done and is determined to do, I beseech you on your part, I beseech you by the very mercies of God to present your body a living sacrifice. And I beseech you that you be renewed and transformed by the renewing of your mind. In a word, God now appeals to us. He wants our bodies and he wants our mind. Body and mind, they spell out the whole man. Now, as we start this practical side of the epistle, how will God actually work this out in me, and in terms of real daily living, says God, we shall do it this way. I want your body, and I want your mind. I want your body offered as a living sacrifice, the whole of it. And I want you to present it. The authorized version says that we are to yield our bodies a living sacrifice, and all right, that's not too bad a translation, but for some people it might suggest that somehow we were unwilling and this sacrifice was being dragged out of us, and at length we yield. It's not that. It's something far more positive than that. It calls upon me as a Christian man to present my body a living sacrifice, holy, does that mean simply that I must, uh, be careful not to stain and smudge my body with sin and vice? Well, certainly it does mean that. But it will mean more than that, won't it? It doesn't just mean that I keep clear of the grosser sins, so that at the end of the day my body is pure. It means that I take my body, that is the whole man, and all my life and its powers, and I give them as a sacrifice to God. Not a sacrifice that can be laid on an altar, killed, and finished with, but a living sacrifice. For, says the apostle, God has a will. And he has a will for every single Christian. The God who designed our bodies and designed our minds has designed a life for us. He has a role for us to fill. He has a job of work for us to do. He has a purpose for life. God has not made us and then thrown us into the world and said, get on with it, do the best you can or what you will. The God who made our minds and made our bodies has a will for us to fulfill. Just as every little mechanism of my body has a part to play designed by the Creator, so I myself, in this vast world of men and women around me, and in relation to eternity, I have a part to play that the creator designed. And sin, if you would like to describe it once more, sin is this, that I have gone my own way. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way. It isn't that we've gone and knocked policemen's hats off, or cut people's throats or done anything diabolically wicked. It is that we were made to do God's will and go his way and fulfill his purpose, and we have just gone our own way. If then I would be holy, it's not enough for me just to get saved, is it, in the sense that I know I'm forgiven and I'm, I'm going to heaven, that I shall never be lost in hell? That's not enough. I'm going to be saved and made holy. I am to discover what God's will for my life is, and I am determined to determine to do that will one uh hundred percent. Do you believe God has a will for your life? I speak as sympathetically as I know how. It is my experience that with some Christians, right from the very word go, so to speak, from the time they get converted, they see it clearly. Conversion for them is such a right about face that the moment they get converted, they determine to live for God as hard and fully as they lived for self before they got converted. You think of that man called Saul who wrote this letter. Before he got converted, he wasn't content just to meander through life, he had a purpose in life. It was a foolish purpose, it was a perverse purpose, but it was a purpose. And so keen and thorough was he in fulfilling that purpose in life that when the Christians got in the way, he pursued them to prison. He was, in fact, driving up the Damascus Road as hard as he could go with the dust behind him when he got converted. And from the moment Paul got converted, he determined to live as hard and fully and thoroughly for God as ever he had done in his unconverted days. Or you listen to him talk and give advice to younger men. The kind of Christianity Paul believed in was really giving his body to God and disciplining his body and disciplining his life, so he brings in the analogy of the Greek games. He says there's a prize at the end, and I'm going to run this race as a man that runs it. I'm gonna run it hard. In the race, says Paul, you know there are many entrants, many competitors, only one receives the prize. You run so that you shall be a prize winner. You know as well as I do that in your in for a race, you've got to make that race the thing. You can't afford halfway around the race to say, oh well now, just a minute, I've got tired of this race a minute, I'll just have a rest here for a moment, and uh, I think I'll go pulling daisies for a moment. Well, so you might. But you won't win the race. And it's no good you're protesting at the end, well, there's nothing wrong in pulling daisies. Well, there isn't, no. Of course there isn't. But you can pull daisies, but you won't win the race. I want you, says Paul, in the name of God, I want you to take your body and present it to God as a living sacrifice for the doing of his will as the supreme object in your life. Oh, of course, it won't mean that I shall become a sanctimonious monk. It won't necessarily mean that I got to go and be a missionary. But it will mean that throughout the whole of life, the idea of God's will and what God wants me to do is going to be preeminent and prominent, isn't it? At school, for instance. It's going to mean, isn't it, there's not going to be slacking at school. Certainly there's not going to be cheating. For a Christian man or girl at school who wants to yield his body a living sacrifice to the Lord, it'll mean taking school seriously. Not putting old heads onto young shoulders, of course not, but taking it seriously. Offering God the opportunity. Now look here, Lord, I want this part of my life to count for you and do your will. I don't know what you may have in store for me in the future, but I, I want it to fulfill your will. Lord, now let me do this thing as unto you, won't it? It'll mean as we step out our on life into life's business, that it won't necessarily be where can I make the biggest money, or how soon can I get married? It'll be, Lord, what do you want me to do with life? And how may I best use life to fulfill your will? You are in Armagh, surely, or wherever you live, you're there, aren't you, because you really believe God wants you there? And you're doing your present job, aren't you, because you really believe this is the job God wants you to do. It will mean even in our leisure time, oh yes, we shall have leisure time, I hope, and time for recreation, but it will mean that, uh, we're on call for the Lord, won't you? If there's some old dear soul's floor to be scrubbed. Or if there's a practical job of work to be done for a neighbor or a friend or in the home. It'll be not so much a question what I want to do, will it? It will be what will the Lord have me do, won't it? It will mean taking every day and giving my body to God to do his will. And my experience is that not all Christians do that. Some Christians, as I say, see it right from the very beginning, don't they? But they don't all see it. I was one of them. I didn't see it right from the beginning. I was brought up in a Christian home. And I hated going to meetings with all my heart. I hated going to meetings. All I knew I wanted to be saved, and I got saved. And I was prepared to believe the Bible was God's word, and if you had pushed me to it, uh, yes, I would have stood up to defended it, uh, and defended it and defended the Lord. But I wasn't wanting to take it too seriously. I wanted my own way. I wanted to do the things I liked. And there had to come a time for me when I had to make up my mind. Now, what am I going to do with this Christianity business? Is it going to be just a hobby that I engage in on Sundays? Or is it going to be the prime thing in my life. I had to make that decision. And it seems to me that that is the decision that Paul is calling for here, that I may face, I should must face this thing, and he wants me to determine to take my life and present it to the Lord one hundred percent uh for the doing of his will. It will call for decision. I shan't wake up one morning, as I say, and found I'd done it. It will call for decision. I must think this thing out and determine to do it. And therefore, God appeals to us. He wants our body, he wants our minds, and to get them, he appeals to our hearts. Did you notice that? He says he wants us to present our bodies a living sacrifice. He wants us to present our minds to him so that they can be renewed. And to get us to do these things, he appeals to our hearts. I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies and you renew your minds. He appeals to our hearts. You may remember when we started our studies, we traced the trouble right down to here, didn't we? To our hearts. When they knew God, they didn't like to retain the knowledge of him as God. They were not faithful to God. They wanted independence. It was in our hearts that the trouble went wrong. It's in our hearts that the trouble will have to be put right. All this is not some law, thou shalt, thou shalt, thou shalt, or there's a penalty attached. It is now a question of God appealing to our heart, our very affection, the very springs of our love and affection. By the very mercies of God, I plead with you, says Paul. Present your body. Shall we think about that a moment? By the mercies of God. You know, I haven't got a right to salvation. Does me good to think about that, doesn't it? And I think in this modern age, you know, ever more necessary. If you will allow me for a moment to talk like an old gray-bearded Methuselah, then I could perhaps be allowed to say that there is a little difference between our modern age and what used to be before the war. Before the war, do you know, things were so difficult economically that many folks went threadbare. And because they had to go without so many good things in life, and at last they got them, they valued them. Since the war, if one can make a general observation, people have inclined to be so well off... that a lot of things that we as youngsters between the war never dreamed of ever having, people nowadays take for granted. Yeah? And we wouldn't want them to go back to the difficult days we knew, would we? But there is a danger in taking things for granted that you cease to value them. You imagine you have a right to them. You take them as a matter of course. And I fear with this all, there is a danger of taking our salvation as a matter of course. How easily we slip into it. Kind of think it's our right that we shall go to heaven. Kind of think it's our right. We never question how we got that ball. Kind of take it as a right that we have the privilege of coming to a meeting like this. We can go to so many meetings that, well, we don't value them, do we? Ah, if we were in Russia for a little while or in China, we'd begin to understand what the mercies of God mean, wouldn't we? What? If we knew what it is to have to write out a whole Bible by hand, ah, if we could think for a moment of the men that were burned at stakes to give us this Bible. We shouldn't take it for granted, should we? We should begin to understand what the mercies of God were. But preeminently and above all, we had no right to salvation, you know. God wasn't obliged to save us. He could have let us gone on and perish forever. He wasn't obliged to save us. Of his mercy he saved me. I think for a moment, in our Lord's wisdom, he has asked Christian folks to come and break bread from time to time, to take bread and wine in remembrance of the Lord. Why do you think the Lord has done that? I think there's one very clear reason, don't you? As we take that bread from that plate, the Lord says to me, look, I gave my body for you. I want you to give your body to me. How do you find it? I want the Lord to give me his body. Yes, if he hadn't have given his body for me, I should have perished forever. How can I take that bread week by week and realize he gave his body for me, and then turn around and say, yes, but Lord, I don't, I don't want to give my body for you just like that. Really? I beseech you, by the mercies of God, present your body. When we think of our Lord giving his body for us, you know, what did it mean? Did it mean merely that he went through life comfortably and refrained from sinning, and at the end he hadn't done any vice or wickedness? Oh, my dear friend, if that had been so, we should have perished forever. When Christ gave his body for us, it was a question of his giving the whole of life and all his activity for us and for our salvation. He expects nothing less than that in return, doesn't he? And then the apostle says, I want you not only to give your body, but I want you to be renewed in your mind. Be not conformed to this world, says he, but be you transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. And I want you to notice that, please. For here he talks about our mind, that is to say, our intellect, the thing we think with. In a moment we shall think of mind in another sense, but for the moment when he says, I want you to be renewed in your mind, he's talking about the mind, the gray matter here, the stuff we think with and work our problems out with. I want you, says the apostle, to be renewed in your mind. And this is exceedingly important. Some people think, you know, that the Christian life is all a matter of emotion. They're waiting around until some very big thrill gets hold of them and moves them to be a keen Christian or something. They imagine that the missionaries that go to the far quarters of the earth have a tremendous emotional experience, and on the tide of it they go through. No, true holiness doesn't come that way, or very rarely does it come that way. It comes the very unpopular way, through letting God renew our thinking. The great sacrifice he offers us of yielding our bodies to him isn't a thing to be done on the wave of an emotion, for emotions go. It's a thing he wants us to think out, think hard about, and every time and all the way along the line to think it through. He wants it to be a reasonable service. He wants in the word to have our minds. Could I speak to my younger brethren and sisters, what there are here? Has God got hold of your mind? If it were your career, you would think it reasonable, wouldn't you, to read physics and chemistry, biology and English, all right? And you'd be prepared, maybe, to go to O levels or A levels, according to your ability. I tell you, A level physics is enough to stand anybody on his head who didn't know any physics. You don't get it very easily, do you? What? It requires a lot of tough thinking. Young folk, why do you suppose that being a Christian is going to be a kind of a soft option, just a matter of singing rather sloppy emotional choruses? Not you know. God will demand of you every ounce of intellectual stamina you've got to think it through. I sometimes think why we evangelicals don't cut much ice with the modern public is because we have become old fashioned in our thinking, not prepared to use our minds for God and think our faith through. Oh, would you say it's hard? Of course it's hard. But surely we're not going to say we're going to give the Lord less of our mind than we're prepared to give a schoolmaster, are we? He wants our mind to be renewed. You see, the only way not to be conformed to this world, really, is by having our mind renewed. Did you notice that expression? Says he, I plead with you that you be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Oh, how important this is. The matter of worldliness, you know, is a matter of the mind and the heart. You won't get rid of worldliness merely by changing the externals, will you? When I was a little boy, ladies wore black stockings. And had any lady come to the breaking of bread in those yellowy colored stockings that were see-through, they'd have nearly been put out for being worldly. Because transparent stockings, why, they were the height of worldliness. But then fashions changed, you know. And there came a day when these, uh, color stockings you can see through, they were all the rage. I believe they now are again. But they became all the rage, and all the ladies wore transparent stockings. And it so happened in England, I can't tell you whether it happened here, that there came a time when the really fashionable girls that were right in the height of fashion, they wore black stockings. There was a time in my part of the world that if a young lady had come to the breaking of bread in black stockings, what she would have been saying was that she wanted to be in the absolute height of fashion. How curious. The back stockings that used to be the last word of sobriety have now become the height of fashion. Ah yes, externals have a way of changing, don't they? You're not being unworldly if you're merely conforming to what the brethren say, as though it were a code of rule. God wants something deeper than that. He wants to get right into your thinking, into the basic way you look at life. It's there he wants you to be renewed, and that isn't going to take five minutes, it's going to take a whole lifetime. He wants to get in right below your value judgments and your standards and your ambitions. And instead of the world's way of looking at life, he wants to put his way of looking at life. That's why he asks us to give him our minds, so that his word may penetrate right into our minds and begin to make us think like God thinks. So that we shall look at life as he looks at it, and not as the world looks at it. So then he wants our bodies and he wants our minds. But will you notice that first he asks for our bodies and then our minds? And not first our minds and then our bodies? You say, what are you getting at? Well, this. If we let God have our minds, and we're prepared to soak our minds with his word, we shall come to see that God's will is best. We shall prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. We shall prove his will is best. Of course, it always is, but then we don't always see it that way, do we? No, because our minds, as they are normally, look at things the way the world looks at them, and God's will seems hard and unpleasant and unpalatable. We don't naturally want it. It is only when our minds get penetrated by God's word and enlightened by his spirit that we begin to see that, after all, God's will was best. It was perfect. It was acceptable. It was right. It was our will that was silly and foolish and hurtful and wasteful. His will is best. I can't see that all at once, and as a young Christian, I'm in danger of not seeing it scarcely at all. What shall I do? Shall I wait until I'm forty and God's word has penetrated my mind? Shall I wait till I'm then and then say, well, now I can see, of course, that God's will for my life, yeah, that would be best. Ah, but then all those years of life have gone by. Now look, says God, what I ask you to do is first of all, give me your body, give me your life. Right now. And dare to trust me now. And live for me now. And as you let me renew your mind, you will come to see that this has been indeed there. I count that very important. In my little travels around this world, it is not, uh, seldom happened to me this way round that I've been sitting in a drawing room with a man in his fifties or sixties and he said to me, oh, David, if only somebody had told me when I was a young man. All the years I've wasted. Yes, but you see, when he was a young man, he was looking at as the world looked at him, and of course God's way didn't seem very attractive. Now, by this time at fifty, he begins to see that God's will would have been best anyway. Oh, if only the man had trusted the Lord when he was a young man and dared to believe him without understanding. He could have been saved years of literally wasted living. First, then yield your body, then let God renew your mind. It'll come down to this, young man and young woman. Can you trust the Savior with your life. Even if what he seems to ask of you seems to you to be unreasonable, dare you trust him? And we come back to this, I beseech you, by the mercies of God, yield your body. It is the Christ who gave his body for you on the tree that's asking him, you now to trust him with your body, with your life. And what will that mean? Well, finally, for the moment, it won't merely mean that all, all the ordinary everyday details of life, that God's will shall be the uttermost, utmost and decisive thing. But it will mean that as a Christian, I have a special, specific job of work to do. It is not only that I shall live a healthy, ordinary life, but now that I have become a Christian, I have become a member of the body of Christ, and I have a task to do for him in the salvation of others. You know, that's why Christian people are likely to have more claims on their life and time than non-Christian folk. And now we are saved, Christ wants us as members of his body, available to him, that he might reach other folks through us. Yielding our bodies to the Lord will mean that we make it our deliberate business to discover from God what job it is he wants me to do to help forward his gospel and his kingdom. This likewise will need some thinking. It says, Paul, I want you, and this I say first of all to every man that is among you, I want you to think. And I want you to beware of thinking of yourselves more than you ought to think. I want you to, on the other hand, to learn to think so that you can think in a very well-balanced fashion. But above all, I want you to think. And I want you to work out before God what job it is that God has given you to do, and then to do it. Now here we make some mistakes, don't we? God isn't asking us to do some terrible, difficult task that we can't do. Every man has been given his special job, his special grace, and along with the job will come the faith to do it. So we read, uh, o- of the prophet. He is to prophesy according to the proportion of faith. That is to say, that if you're going to be a prophet, you will need that kind of faith that can hear God's voice and be certain it is God's voice and dare to preach God's word in the name of God, with all that that means, come what may, summer or winter, approbation or censure. And with the gift of being a prophet will come enough faith to be a prophet. Now, says Paul, I want you to think this through. Beware of danger number one, thinking of yourself more than you ought to think. Why is it, I wonder, that in some Christian circles, serving the Lord means standing on a platform? We're not all called to stand on platforms. Preaching is only a tiny, tiny part of the Lord's work. Don't get it into your head that unless you can stand on a platform, you're no good. The world is gasping for the gospel outside because too many of us stand on platforms inside. On the other hand, uh, think soberly and don't underestimate your importance, will you? For we are members, and each has a task. And finally for tonight, as you get on with your task, says Paul, you will find your task for the Lord to be a means in his hand of developing you spiritually. This way round. If it's your job, says Paul, to, um, uh, uh, give, then let it be your aim and object to see that you give liberally and with a clear single heart, without ulterior motive. If your job is to rule, then see that you rule with diligence. If your job is to teach, see that you carry on teaching. I can't speak about ruling. I can't speak much about giving, but I can speak to you a little bit about trying to teach. And do you know one of the hardest things about teaching for the Lord is just that, going on teaching? The glamour of standing on a platform wears off very quickly. If you were an evangelist and you were seeing thousands of souls saved every d- every year, ooh, what a glamour. But just to teach, year in and year out, to slog away teaching God's word, the greatest temptation to a teacher is to stop teaching. Each one of our gifts that God has given us will require of us such grace that as we go about the job, we shall constantly be having to seek the grace from the Lord to do the job, and as we constantly seek grace from the Lord to do the job, don't you see what's happening? He's being able to mold us and make us more holy. What a wonderfully wise God God is. Young man, young woman, if I have any advice to you at this juncture to give, as a slightly older Christian, I would plead with you. If you're sitting on the fence letting other folks do the work, do get off the fence and get doing something. Find out what work you can do for God and get doing the work, for it will save you in the very doing of it. It will make you pray. It will make you read his word. And as it makes you pray and read his word, it's getting you nearer the Lord, and it's beginning to save your life. Oh, young friend, if you really take this seriously tonight, that you are to present your body a living sacrifice to the Lord, then really mean business and ask God to show you what your job in life for God is, and by his grace start to do it and keep on doing it. These are practical things, aren't they? They don't lift our hearts to heaven and fill us with great overflowing exuberance and emotion. They weren't meant to. They were meant to bring us down from the skies to the actual realities of life. All the lovely things we have studied in past weeks, they will do us very little good, unless now, by God's grace, we are determined to say, Lord, if never before, yet now, I want to present my body. I want to give you my mind. I want to met me, I want you to help me to make your will absolutely predominant. Therefore, Lord, show me what job of work you want me to do, and give me the grace to do it with all my might and may. It's a very practical business, this Christianity.