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. 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.”
Session I addressed the idea that there are New Covenant sacrifices. Today’s verse describes the first one. Our lives (bodies) are to be offered as living sacrifices.
How do we do this? First off, we tell The Lord that we are His and He is to do with us what He wills. Next, we live it out. Verse two describes how we do this.
Don’t be conformed to the world. To be conformed indicates that it would be the natural thing to do. Like going down stream. This is how we’ve lived our lives. An obvious measure of how we follow the world is to look at fashion. We get our cues from the fashion industry. We also gain fadish language and attitudes. Much of this is fine. It’s the part that conflicts with God’s Word, that needs to be changed.
The next part of today’s verse say to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind”. We march to different orders. As we read the bible and hear messages from church. Those are to be our new creeds. There are many cultural issues that are unbiblical. That’s where we become set apart from it.
This renewing of our minds is more than adopting new beliefs or attitudes. Ezekiel 36:26,27 tells us that God gives us new hearts and He gives us His Spirit to help us walk in His ways. The new heart means we have His desires. We want to do these new things. This differentiates christianity from other religions. We don’t have to, but want to.
Lord, help us to dedicate ourselves to You. Thank You that You’ve given us a new heart and want to fill our desires.