Grace Community Church, Arlington, TX

What I want to emphasize during these three weeks leading up to the Fall Series is, don’t be like a jelly fish and be swept along by the tides of culture. Be like a dolphin and cut through the cultural tides and lies, and think like you should think, and go where you should go, and do what you should do.

We all do swim in the cultural oceans of this planet. To be alive is to be in a culture shaped by the world. Jesus prayed in

We need help. We need to know how to swim against the tide like a dolphin. That is why the Apostle Paul exhorts us the way he does in Romans 12. He gives us three steps on how to cut through the sinful current of worldly culture.

I. Surrender Yourself to God “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice…” Rom 12:1

Your progress and growth in your Christian life is not primarily dependent on what you can get from God. It’s dependent on what you give to Him. Give yourself as a living sacrifice.

That’s priestly language, sacrificial language. We’re called on not to offer dead sacrifices. That system is gone. It was dismissed when Jesus died on the cross and the veil on the temple was rent.

Now, there is a new kind of sacrifice in the new covenant, in the New Testament economy, and that is a living sacrifice. It’s not an animal. It’s you! You cannot please God if you don’t give yourself to Him, your soul, the essence of who you are.

A. Motivation for Surrender — “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God...”

For 11 chapters, the apostle Paul has been delineating the mercies of God. One of the mercies of God is “divine love,” and that is celebrated in the first 11 chapters numerous times, starting in first chapter in verse 7 and moving all the way through these chapters and finding its culmination at the end of chapter 8.

A second mercy of God is “grace,” grace to provide the salvation that the sinner cannot earn. You find that, also, in chapter 1, verse 7. You find that as the theme in chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, and ongoing. The theme of grace, that is a mercy of God.

And then you begin to expand that, and you find that God grants us, as a mercy, the gift of the “Holy Spirit,” the Holy Spirit who takes up residence in us. The Spirit of God sheds, abroad, love in our hearts. The Spirit of God secures us. You find the expansive instruction about the work of the Spirit in chapter 8.

Then, another mercy is “peace,” chapter 1, 2, 5, 8, talks about peace with God that is granted to us as a mercy from God.

Twenty times in the opening eleven chapters, “faith” is granted to us, faith to believe and apprehend salvation as a mercy of God.

You find “comfort,” chapter 1, verse 12; “power,” chapter 1, verse 16; “hope,” chapter 5; “hope” again, chapter 8.

In chapter 9 and through chapter 11, another mercy that God extends to us is “patience” – patience, forbearance.

Another mercy that God extends to us is “kindness,” chapter 2, verse 4.

Another mercy that God extends to us is a “share in His glory,” chapter 2, chapter 5, chapter 8, chapter 9.

God shares with us, also, His “honor,” chapter 2, verse 10, and repeated again in chapter 9.

Perhaps, leading the list for us is “righteousness.” That’s the theme starting in chapter 1 and running all the way through, chapter 10 – righteousness. It appears again and again and again.

Righteousness – the righteousness of God is credited and imputed to us.

“Forgiveness,” chapter 4; “reconciliation,” chapter 5; and then 15 times, “justification” – justification literally being declared before God as just. Another mercy is “security.” We are secured forever by the Holy Spirit, chapter 5, chapter 8. Another is “eternal life.” Another is “freedom” – freedom from the power and penalty of sin. Another is “resurrection,” chapter 8. Another is “sonship,” adopted as sons. Another is “ongoing intercession” by, both, the Spirit and the Son, chapter 8.

This is so overwhelming that, in verse 33 of chapter 11 – as Paul has now concluded his run through the mercies of God, he says, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to Him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”

He just launches into a doxology over the mercies of God.

Now these become the motivation for us to make the living sacrifice. It’s an act of thanks, an act of worship in response to this massive array of mercies.

The more you understand about the greatness of your salvation and the richer your grasp of it, the greater your motivation to offer yourself constantly as a living sacrifice.

You have to keep doing it because we have a way of crawling back off the altar, don’t we?

Peter says that, “Sin is the result of forgetting what happened when you were saved.” He says,

“Present” is a temple term. It means to surrender up, to yield up, to offer up, and that is to hold nothing back.

“This is acceptable to God, that is pleasing to God, satisfactory to God.” This is your priestly duty, as a priest before God, to offer yourself.

“Spiritual” is logikos from which we get “logic.” This is logical. This only makes sense. Why? Because in your salvation, you declared God as your sovereign, Christ as your Lord and Master, and this is your responsibility, then, to come to worship Him and to offer yourself as a living sacrifice.

If you don’t program your mind correctly, your body will come off that altar. So how do we deal with the mind? Negative. Don’t be conformed to this ain, this age.

What do we mean “age”? The world fallen, unredeemed, the system of Satan. The evil world system, all the floating mass of ideas, thoughts, opinions, views, religions, philosophies, theories, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims, aspirations, temptations – all of it.

Don’t let it squeeze you into its mold.

Now, present your body, but in order for you to keep on presenting your body – present tense – you’re going to have to reprogram your mind away from the corruption of this age.

Suschmatiz refers to being literally “stamped out” with the world’s stamp, molded like the world – mold. Don’t let that happen. On the other hand, “...be transformed by the renewing of your mind..., the metamorphosis of your mind, the transformation of your mind.

How do you renew your mind? You renew your mind through the Word of God.

The Word of God is the source of renewal,

You’re going to do that when your mind is saturated with divine truth, and there’s no shortcut to this. You say, “I want to give myself fully to the Lord.” That’s going to depend on the mind because the mind, then, becomes the battleground where the spirit of the age fights with you.

The living sacrifice of yourself to God can only be sustained as an offering to God when the mind is constantly being renewed by the truth of the Word of God.

You prove, by your life, what the will of God is – prove not in the sense that you validate God but in the sense that you demonstrate it. You put the will of God on display because you do His will. You show the world the approved will of God by doing it.

When our lives are surrendered and our minds renewed, we don’t have to guess at God’s will — we start to recognize it. His will isn’t something to dread; it’s described as good, pleasing, and perfect.

The more we know Him, the more we want what He wants — and we find joy in following Him.

Final Challenge:
Will you put yourself on the altar today — living, breathing, surrendered — and say, “Lord, shape my mind, my heart, and my life for Your glory”?