Romans 12: 2 part 1

Here is the third of four messages on Romans 12:1-2

Romans 12:1-2 Week 3

Before I begin this morning, I want to share with you the good news we got this past week.

Back in October, my first scans showed that there were two large tumors in my liver and there were many multiple smaller lesions in the liver.  Now, there is only one tumor and it has shrunk by a third!  The other large tumor is gone!  All of the other multiple scattered cancerous lesions are also gone! 

The doctor said that it is very unusual to see this kind of improvement after only four months of chemo.  He went even further and called my improvement a statistical "outlier", meaning that the results are beyond what the chemo treatments are typically capable of doing.  The CEA tumor marker should be zero.  Last October, mine was nearly 1700.  Now it is 65, a 96% reduction. Praise God!

Thank you for your prayers. Prayer works. Do you believe that? If you are struggling in any area of your life, I encourage you to come forward and be prayed for in the time that is being set aside each week for prayer.

If you have your Bibles, turn with me to Romans 12. As you are turning I want to remind you that next week, I am going to share my testimony of my journey through cancer. It’s not a story about cancer. It’s a story of God’s faithfulness during a very difficult time in my life. 

Romans 12:1-2 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.  Verse 2 is where I want us to focus today. 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.

It seems to me that it is not a coincidence that Paul wrote verse 2 after just telling us that we need to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice. As we discussed last week, sacrifice is hard. It is not something we regularly talk or think about. Sacrificing goes against the way our culture thinks. And, I believe, that Paul is telling us that sacrifice is only going to happen when our minds have been renewed.

Paul tells us. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world. The wording would indicate that we must do something to prevent this happening to ourselves. It appears that we cannot be passive in preventing this conforming from taking place

As people who live in this world, we are continually influenced by it.  If you watch television, read a newspaper, use Facebook or surf the internet you are being impacted by our culture to conform to the pattern of this world. Our culture has become pretty much anti-Christian.  Increasingly, it seems that our culture is trying to make us conform to its way of thinking.  Over the past few years Christians have been told by the media and government officials that we need to change our beliefs for the common good.

Researchers tell us that the average American is spending 50 minutes per day on social media and almost 3 hours per day watching television and movies. This, of course, is in addition to whatever time is spent talking to friends and co-workers who are not Christians.

Would you agree with me that the average American is getting a lot of influence to conform to this world?

Then Paul wrote, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind

Webster defines transformation as a dramatic change in form, appearance or character.

The wording here tells us to be transformed. This implies that the transformation will be done to us and not by us. The tense of the verb indicates that it is an ongoing process. It is not a one-time event that takes place when we are saved.  Instead, it takes time and is ongoing.

And how are we to be transformed?  How is this dramatic change going to take place? By continually renewing our minds. Our thinking has to change in order for the transformation to take place. Our thinking is only going to change when we feed our minds with something other than this world’s culture. The part we play in this transformational process is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit by seeking to feed our minds with information in line with the God’s values and not this world’s values.

The result of this transformation, Paul says, is that we will know what God’s will is. We will have as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:16 “The mind of Christ”. We will be able to discern God’s will for our lives.  We will understand in what ways we need to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice.

We have already stated that the average American is spending almost 4 hours per day on social media, television and movies.  What about average Christians? How much time are they spending in mind renewal activities?

The Evangelical Alliance's study found that evangelical Christians struggle to find the time for both reading the Bible and praying each day. Only 31% said they set aside a substantial period of time each day to pray.  

18% said they do not have a fixed pattern of prayer but rather pray when the chance or need arises. 60% said they prayed "on the move", while walking or using transportation (essentially multi-tasking).

Nearly two-thirds admitted to being easily distracted when spending time with God. 88% agreed it was important for a Christian to read or study the Bible on a daily basis, in practice only half are managing to do this.  

We know how to renew our minds. It takes spending time in prayer, spending quiet time alone with God, reading God’s word, meditating on what we have read, listening to Christian music, listening to Godly preaching and teaching, etc. We know what to do, but we struggle to find time to do it.

Over the years, I too have been guilty of not making enough time for prayer and Bible reading. Fortunately, that changed about 6 years ago, when I started getting more serious about my relationship with God. I am so happy that I did not wait to start praying daily and reading God’s word until I got this diagnosis. My faith and positive attitude are a result of the time I spent with God prior to my diagnosis. As I will discuss next week, how we spend our time when we are not dealing with a crisis is a huge indication of how well we will survive the next crisis.

One of the areas of mind renewal that I would like to discuss today is prayer. Prayer time is essential to mind renewal. Search the Gospels and notice how often Jesus went away to pray. Think about that for a minute, Jesus, the son of God, felt that prayer time was necessary. How necessary is it for us?

Years ago I learned a prayer model that has served me well. You can Google and learn more about it.  It is called the ACTS prayer.

A for Adoration

C for Confession

T for Thanksgiving

S for Supplication

Adoration  -Psalms 68:35 “Praise be to God!” Adoration looks a lot like our worship time here on Sunday morning. It’s a time to praise and exalt God.  It’s a time to tell God how much we love Him. It’s a time to express just how much we appreciate Him.

Confession 1 John 1:9  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” -Confession is a time of reflection and asking for forgiveness. It’s not time to dig up old sins that have been confessed and forgiven. God says they are forgotten and we should forget them too. We should allow the Holy Spirit to direct us in areas of our lives that need fixing.

Thanksgiving  Psalms 69:30 Always “glorify him with thanksgiving” –Thanksgiving  is the time to be grateful for all of God’s blessings. We can thank God for His love, His faithfulness, His patience, His grace and mercy. We should express gratitude for what He’s doing in our lives. We should especially thank Him for answered prayers. If we pray about something and it happens then God deserves the glory and thanksgiving.

Supplication Philippians 4:6“Make your requests known to God.” – Supplication is when we finally bring our prayer requests before God. Not until we have praised and worshiped Him, confessed our faults, and thanked Him for all that He has done for us, are we ready to bring our list of needs and wants to God.

Allow me to talk about how I use this ACTS prayer in my life.

As I spend time in adoration of God, I frequently refer to Isaiah’s description of God on His throne that is found in Isaiah 6. God is high and exalted. He is large and powerful. He is mighty. He is everything that I am not and I believe the more that we picture Him in power and glory, the more likely we are to get our perspective right. The old expression says that “prayer changes things”. One of the most important things that it changes is us. It helps us to renew our minds. Whenever we praise someone, we are lowering ourselves as we lift them up. The more we praise and worship God, the more accurately we see the correct relationship between God and us.

This is a place where you might review the different names God used to describe Himself, such as: El Shaaddai, Lord God Almighty or my current favorite, Jehovah Rapha, the Lord that heals.

I frequently spend time here repeating what the angels in Revelation 4:8 say about God, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.” I consider the attributes of God. He is omnipresent (everywhere), He is omniscient (all-knowing) and He is omnipotent (all powerful).

Adoration helps me keep God and my problems in perspective. I need a really big God to heal me and the bigger God is to me in my prayer time, the greater my faith and the greater the peace that I have.

Since I am need of physical healing, I regularly focus on the God of creation. I remind myself that He took a handful of dirt, fashioned a man and breathed life into him. Surely a God that can create life out of the dirt can heal me of cancer.

Confession for me is a time of reflection and contrition. Obviously, any unconfessed sin needs to be addressed here. But it is also a time to address areas of my life that are not pleasing to God. I allow the Holy Spirit to speak to me about things I need to work on.

Thanksgiving has become a time of remembrance for me. In the 4 ½ months since my diagnosis, we have seen God’s hand at work in so many areas of our lives. In Joshua 4 God commanded Joshua to take stones out of the Jordan River and then build a monument near the river.  God said that when your decedents ask why the stones are there, tell them how your ancestors crossed the river on dry land here and at the Red Sea. We all need a way of remembering God’s past faithfulness to us.

Remembering God’s faithfulness keep us grateful and it gives us hope. We need be grateful to God for all He has done. As parents, we get tired of giving to our children when they act like we owe it to them. God deserves our gratitude.

We need to remember His faithfulness. Thanking Him for past answers to prayer is a great way to remind ourselves of His faithfulness. The God who delivered me in the past is the same God who can and will deliver me in the future.

Supplication for me is praying for my healing and then mostly a list of other people who need healing or salvation.

Some years ago, Steve Jones, the President of the Missionary Church, spoke here on prayer. He encouraged us to think of a heavy object held by a rope. He said our prayers should be like rifle shots at that rope, shooting it from many different perspectives.

With this in mind, my prayers have changed over the past few months from general prayers for my healing to specifics. I pray that God allows me to tolerate the chemo with minimal side effects. I pray that He protects my good cells from the side effects of the chemo. I ask God to destroy every cancerous cell in my body. I pray that He takes away the defense mechanisms that help cancer to resist the chemo. I ask that He take away the cancer’s source of nutrition. I pray that He supercharges the chemo to make it do above and beyond what it is capable of doing. Sometimes I get carried away and ask God to hold the cancer cells’ little mouths open and drown them in chemo.

Cause and effect is almost impossible to prove so I want to tread lightly here. As I stated at the beginning of this message we got some really good news this past week about the reduction of cancer in my body since the initial scans were taken in October and the follow up scans in December. The improvement since the December scans is remarkably better than from October to December. According to Joan’s journal notes, after the scans in December is when my prayers got more specific. I encourage you to pray for specific needs.

When I consider the value of this model of prayer, I think its most important feature is that it gets our supplication in the right perspective. It is only after I have placed God high on His throne and reduced myself to the mere speck of dust that I am, that I am ready to begin asking for things.

Not every time, but frequently, part of my prayer time is quiet time. Sometimes mid-way through a prayer or sometimes when I have finished praying, I spend time just in meditation and reflection. I try to still myself, if possible, and clear my mind of everything.  Sometimes, I can’t, so I allow my thoughts to roam as long as they are focused on God. Sometimes, He speaks to me. Sometimes I feel His presence. Sometimes I get nothing.

In John 10 Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.”

We learn to recognize the voice of God when we spend time, lots of time, with Him. He speaks through His word. He speaks in our quiet times of meditation and reflection. He speaks through Godly teaching, preaching and music. When God speaks to me, it is generally through scripture or song. If those scriptures and songs were not part of my mind, then I’m not sure I would hear from God.

My challenge today is that we get serious about how much time we spend on activities that can help us to renew our minds and become more like Christ. We can’t possibly counteract hours and hours of TV, Facebook and movie time with a 70 minute church service once a week. We have to be deliberate and intentional about spending time with God.

Have you ever kept track of how much time you spend watching TV, or on social media?  Maybe you should. Many of our phones and tablets will calculate that time for us. I think we would all be surprised just how much time, for example, we spend on social media.

Have you ever kept track of how much time you spend in prayer, Bible reading and other mind renewal activities? Again, if we did I think we would be surprised, but not in a good way, to see that number.

I’m a college professor so I get to assign homework. Our homework for this week is to keep track of at least the time spent on mind renewal activities.  If you also want to track your time on social media and watching TV that’s even better. Next week on the connection card there will be a place to write in how many hours we spent during the week on mind renewing activities. I’m going to do it how many of you will join me?  You can start with 70 minutes on Sunday morning. I pray you have a lot more by the end of the week.