Awakening to Salvation and Transformation

Well, we'll think that that's got it all started, at least I've tried to follow the instructions. Every time I get somebody who wants to do that, they quit coming, so not a very good success. Yes, March the 16th, 2014. In Romans chapter 13, I want to begin at verse 11, if you'd like to find that in your scriptures. Paul is sort of ending what we call two chapters of discussion about the nature of the Christian life. And if you go all the way back to chapter 12, and I keep going there because all of these things are written in the context of chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. Therefore I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercies, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform any longer 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. And then Paul begins to discuss in some detail what he sees the will of God to be. That's what chapter 12 and 13 are really about. Now when he comes to the end of chapter 13, he ends it by going back to that passage and reflecting on this. Verse 11 says, And do this, understanding the present time, the hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. And do this, the reference to this, I think, is back to that chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. What is he saying? You do this. You no longer are conformed to the thinking of the world, but your mind is transformed in new ways. And this is what he's referring to. This is what we're supposed to be doing. And understand that the present time, if you'll notice, there are several references to time. This, current time, present time, the hour that's come, the night is nearly over, the day is almost here. All of those are references to the passing of time. And he's emphasizing the immediacy of this transformation that ought to be taking place in the lives of believers. What does God want us to do in light of the fact that we're living in the time after Christ has come in the presence of his return again? Well, we're to be able to keep looking at this emphasis that he places on we're to turn away from thinking like the world thinks, and instead we're to begin to think with a transformed mind by the Spirit of God. We do all of this understanding that the time in which we're living is present hour. This time that we're here is now closer to the time that the end of life and the end of the world is coming. We're to recognize that the current hour of our life, we're to be awakened from the, he says slumber here, but we're to be awakened to the reality that we're living in a time in which God expects us to live a transformed life in the presence of all this. He wakes, he talks about a pattern of things. The first one is wake up from your slumber because our salvation is near, nearer now than when we first finished. The second thing he says, the night is nearly over. The day is almost here. The third thing he says, so let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Now he uses this series of couples to describe what it is that he wants us to be awake to and what he wants us to be concerned about. The hour has come. We're to wake up from our slumber because our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. Now he uses the term salvation. So when people talk about being saved, they generally talk about the present tense. But he talks about our salvation in a future tense as if it has not arrived yet. The Bible uses the concept of salvation in three different ways. Sometimes it's referred to in the past as whenever Tim was talking about his daughter this morning, he said she was saved and she said she was saved when she was nine years old. So he referred to it in the past. What he meant was that she made her initial commitment to Christ at that period of time in her life. Now we can also use, and the Bible also uses this to say I am in the process of being saved. It means by that that God is working in our lives so that the things that we're dealing with day by day, he rescues us from the temptations of sin that come, sets us free from the sins that have captured our lives so that we're in the process of growing to be more like Christ. So we're in the process of being saved. The Bible also uses the word salvation with reference to the future. What we hope will happen to us is the time that we die and that we're taken to heaven, many of the difficulties we have in decision making and temptations are no longer there. Most of us, I think, expect that when we get to heaven, maybe some of the things that we've had such difficulty with, our temper, whatever else it is we see in our lives we're trying to get rid of. Now we're free from those and our salvation will be complete. We'll be in a place where the presence of Satan and the temptations that we face now are all behind us. So salvation in the Bible is used in three different tenses. A past tense for you when you look back on when you began your walk with Christ, present now that you're walking with Christ, what he's doing to redeem and heal you, and the future when you hope that the fullness of what God is trying to do in your life will actually come to pass. Well, here he uses this as a reference to the future, but he's not talking about individuals here. He's talking about the whole community of faith. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber because our salvation, he's not talking about individuals but the community, our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. His reference is to the future of what God is intending to do. So that's going to be the future. What are we to do now? Wake up from our slumber. Wake up from being asleep. We live in a world where there are all kinds of temptations to distract us from what God is trying to get us to do so that we lose the enthusiasm and vigor of the commitment that we've made to him. It is true that the longer you walk with Christ, the temptation is to take for granted what he does, and so we don't become nearly as convicted about the things in our life that are wrong as we did when we first came to know Christ. He urges these followers of Christ to be alert to this. Be careful that you don't allow yourself to go to sleep in the process of your following Christ. It is easy because once you know that you've given your life to Christ, then the temptations that come to you, maybe your sin doesn't look as painful or doesn't look as vicious or doesn't look as vivid as it did before you came to him. The conviction of your sin is not as strong as it is. We live among each other and we look at other people around us who are followers of Christ and we're satisfied if we're kind of as good as the rest of the people around us. It causes us to sort of get lax in what we're doing in our devotion to Christ. The book that's so popular now about Are You a Fan or a Follower of Christ is intended to shake us up to look again at the intensity of what Christ asked for out of the people that followed him. I ask you to give me your life. I ask you to risk yourself. I ask you to devote to me all of your life. Everything that you have. All of your time. All of your energy. All of your effort. I will use of it what I choose, but I want you to give me all of it. All of it is available on the table for me to say to you, here's what I want from you. And when we get sort of comfortable with that, we begin to do what he calls sleeping or slumber. We begin to be able to see these things not as necessarily as significant. So he urges us to keep awake to the call of Christ. What does Christ want from me? What is he trying to say to me? How does he want me to address the issues that are around me? Don't simply go on autopilot. Have you ever been driving down the road and you're not even conscious of the last five or ten miles? You're just driving along. Not paying attention to anything. And that can happen in your spiritual life. I mean, I've found in times, you know, when you sit down and you get up in the morning and you've got a regimen. You say, okay, I'm going to read this much of the Bible. I'm going to carry on my list and I'm going to do this and this and this. That you get up and you start doing that. And after a while it gets to be not nearly as meaningful as it was when you started it. So sometimes it's helpful to change the routine that you have. Change the daily devotional things that you do. Sometimes it's helpful to change your posture. If you sit all the time, sometimes it may be helpful to kneel. It may be helpful to close your eyes sometimes. It may be helpful to open your eyes sometimes and act like you're looking at God. Sometimes it's helpful to be in different groups of people. You have the same Sunday school class forever and ever and ever. You all have kind of adjusted yourself to each other. You accept each other the way you are, even though you know you need to change. You get in another group of people. I think some of you experienced this in the story. I'm discovering new people and I'm having to face things that they say and adapt myself to that. There are different ways accepting new responsibilities. Trying something in service to God you haven't done before. All of those are ways in which we keep ourselves alert, aware. What do you do when you're driving down the road and you're really sleepy? You have to do something to stay awake. And it always is something different than what you were doing when you were sleepy. So what Paul is urging us to do, going back to chapter 12 verse 1, don't allow yourself to be conformed by the world around you. That's what puts you to sleep. What you need to do is be transformed. What does he mean by that? He means identifying in your life the things that God does not want there. It can be a change of your attitude. It can be a change in the way you treat people. It can be a change in the job that you're doing. It can be a change in the people you're trying to witness to or to begin witnessing, starting something you've never done before, changing something you've done to something else. All of these things allow God to simply change us. Transform me to be like Christ. And if you read the Gospels and you read the story of Jesus, it's really helpful when you're reading that to ask yourself if what Jesus does and says is like what you do and say. How do I see Jesus as different in the demands on his life than what I place on myself? When you look at what Jesus did and the words he said and the teachings he gave and you say, I'm going to apply those. We get so used to them, we read them. We don't really stop to say, am I doing this? Now, this transformation of your mind that Paul talks about in chapter 12 verse 1 is opposite of what the world says and does. How does the world live and what does God expect differently from me? So his message is to do not allow yourself in this present hour because the time for our living in this world is limited. This time for you to wake up from this slumber that you're in and renew yourself so that you're constantly being transformed. The reason for it is our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. All of us know that the days of our life get shorter and shorter. The end of our life is shorter. We're all, in terms of the normal lifespan of a person, closer to the end of our lives than we were when we came to Christ. We don't know when Christ is going to come. Paul is not saying necessarily that he expects Christ to come in this time that he's writing, but he is telling us that whenever that time is, we should be prepared for his arrival. All those things that you want to put off. Someday I plan to. I'm going to start some other time. Don't delay them. Make sure that whatever God wants for you, you begin to do that now because the time is shorter than it was in the past. He says the second idea that he brings up is the night is nearly over. This is an unusual phrase for Paul because normally in the Bible the night or the darkness is the evil side of things. But here he talks about the night as the slumber that we're in. This slumber of the world that we're in is nearly over and the day is almost here. He talks about the day in light of Christ coming. When Christ arrives in this world, it will be the brightness of the day. So he talks about this world as being a world of darkness and evil and nighttime. When Christ comes, then that new life that we will have will be the light of day. So he focuses on this comparison between night and day and sort of a reversal of what we normally think of as the darkness of sin and the light of righteousness. So he talks about this world and the Christian life that we're living now is the night and then salvation comes and the day will be there for us. So what he urges us to do is put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. His concern for us is that what he calls the armor in Ephesians is the protection or the Christ-like nature that God gives us. When he goes back to chapter 12, verses 1 and 2, we're to put aside the things of this world and to be transformed into the nature and character of Christ. Putting on Christ. The idea is sort of like you put on a robe that Christ would so cover our lives and our bodies that people, when they saw us, would see the nature and character of Christ. What God wants us constantly to be doing is comparing our own lifestyle with his life and his lifestyle. He wants us to look at ourselves and see how much we look like the rest of the world and how much he wants us to look like him. The Bible's method of evangelism is very different than ours. What Paul thought in his letters was if all the people in the churches he was writing to lived their lives like Christ, that everyone who knew them would be startled by the difference between their lifestyle and the lifestyle of the follower of Christ who was among them. Whenever we begin to compromise ourselves, which is what the slumber is, when we begin to compromise ourselves so that the world doesn't see much difference between us and the world, then we lose this power of witness. I think that this is a problem the church has found itself in. Whenever you read, Carol was mentioning this the other day, reading obituaries, when you read the name of somebody who dies and they say they're a member of a church, do we automatically assume that they're a Christ follower and their life is a witness to God? Sometimes when you see people who die and you go to their funeral, they sound a lot more religious in the obituaries than they did in the lifestyle that you saw them living. Whenever people in the church live like the people in the world, then we've lost that witness that God helps us to have in the world, to say to people, this is the way you should live by our own actions and our nature. The night is nearly over, day is almost here. We put aside the deeds of darkness, the way of living in the world, so that's out of our life. Instead, we become more and more like Christ. That's what he means by the armor of light. Now, he comes in verse 13 a little more specific. In the first part, he's talking about what you stop. Beginning with the second half of chapter 12, he begins to talk about the positive side. He says, we're to wake up, the night is nearly over, the day is almost here. Then, in the second section, he starts talking about what we're to do. Put off the deeds of darkness, put on the armor of light. The second thing, verse 13, he says, let's behave decently as in the daytime. Now, he begins to focus on particular things that he sees are problems in the Christian community. Not in orgies or drunkenness, both of which would take place in the darkness of night. Most parties or wild parties are usually nighttime events. So, he's talking about people who participate in sexual immorality and in drunkenness. The Bible does not emphasize not drinking alcohol. What it condemns is drunkenness. And the reason it condemns drunkenness is because whenever your mind is controlled by drugs or alcohol, Christ cannot control you. And when you say to God, I give you my life, then you have to have a consciousness to begin to live that life out. And whenever you do take drugs or alcohol so that they keep you from being able to listen and respond to God, then God is taken out of your life and he's no longer in control. That's the big issue with drinking in the Bible. It's probably true that Jesus drank wine that had some alcoholic content. But the Bible condemns specifically drinking things that would cause you to lose control or consciousness of your body and your behavior and your actions. Because that in itself is like the rest of the world does. I want to drink to get away from my problems. I want to drink so that I don't know what's going on. I want to drink to remove all the inhibitions. Whatever it is that drunkenness would provide for you or the enjoyment it would give to you when it takes away your inhibitions is contrary to what God wants. So sexual misbehavior of any kind, he's talking about, and any kind of drug addictions that would cause you to be out of control, and we're talking about not only alcohol. We're talking about any kind of drugs that you would take, either prescription drugs or drugs that you would buy from somebody who's making them. All of those are not a part of the kingdom of God. And if a person's engaged in any of that, they need to cut that out of their lives because it is a characteristic of what takes place in the world. This is the daytime living he's asking us to have. Behaving in the daytime as if we were seen in the light of Christ. Not in sexual immorality or debauchery. So he used another common way of talking about sin. Any kind of immorality. Now he talks about orgies of sexual immoralities, and now he identifies specifically as sexual immoralities and debauchery. Kind of living your life in indulgence. Indulging your human flesh in any kind of way. Debauchery can be anything from banquets and dinners where you just feast and feast and feast. It was common in many of the Roman banquets for people to eat all day long. And they would eat and have a room where you'd go and regurgitate and come back and eat some more just to gorge yourself with food. Those were seen by Paul as contrary to what God wants us to do. So those things should be cut out of our lives. And then he ends this by talking about what it is that affects the community of faith. And Paul is really sort of summarizing in this section what he's made longer lists of. In chapter 8, I think it is, verse 29, Paul makes a list of these sins that he sees as contrary to the nature of the Christian life. For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. So anything that keeps us from reflecting the likeness of Christ would be what he's forbidden for us. It's not just this list that he has here. It's the list of sins that he's made in chapter 1, where he goes at great length to talk about the nature and power of sin and how it contrasts with what Christ wants us to be, how he wants us to live. Because God gave them over to shameful lusts, even the women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones, in the same way men abandoned natural relationships with women, were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, received in themselves the pure penalty of their perversions. God gave them over to the sinful desires of their heart, to sexual impurity, to degrading their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, worshipped and served the created things rather than the Creator who is forever praised. Forevermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, depravity, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree, that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these things, but also approve of those who practice them. This short list that he's giving us is just sort of a summary of what the human flesh does to attract a person to rebel against God. Now, the last two of these he talks about in terms of the community of faith. That we as followers of Christ are not to be in dissension. It means to have groups that are opposed to each other in the fellowship of believers. The Bible sees unity in the life of the church as a sign of the authority of God exercised over our lives. The Bible's view of the Christian life is simple. I say to God, I give my life to you, and I will live the way you want me to live. If Carol says the same thing, and we sit down to decide about how we deal with our time, money, or even our relationships with our kids, the rules by which we raised them, we should be able to find a common direction. Because we're listening to the same source for this. The same thing is true in the church. So if you have a group of people who are saying to God, what should we do about any kind of project we're doing, whether it's a musical event, or where it's hiring staff, or whether it's making some starting a program in the church, we should all find the same answer from God as we start about this. Because there is one God directing each of us. When there is dissension, it means that some person is listening to one director, and other persons are listening to another director. And whenever you have people who are divided, so that they're listening to different sources of information to make choices by, then it means that Christ is not fully in control of what's going on. That's the way the world works, where there is dissension. And you see it all around you. You see it in the workplace, you see it in the families around you, we see it in the political arena of our world, where conflict is generated, expected, and approved of. The more resistance you can give to the other party or the other group, the more hero you become to the people who are on your side. The Bible does not focus on this among believers. It says that among those who are in the community of faith, there should be a clear direction. What does God want us to do? There is only one will for God. Now it doesn't mean that people wouldn't have differences of opinion about it, for sometimes what God does to help us learn how to cooperate with each other, he gives someone some idea and another person a little bit of a different idea, and then when they get together and discuss it, they see both of them have some value and they join together, and they're then together. But he's teaching them to depend on each other to find the will of God. So someone says, here's what I think needs to be done, and another says, here's what I think needs to be done. Well, how could this be helpful and true? So we listen and say, okay, God, it seems like that's right. The other person, we listen to them, it seems like they're right too, so we put them together. We had one time when we were going to call a staff person, we were having a business meeting, and in that meeting everybody voted to do that except one person. And I said to the person, I appreciate you expressing your thoughts about this. What is it that you see to be the problem? And he said, I'm just concerned if we call this person, our budget can't support them, and then we get them here and we can't pay them. Do you think that's a big problem? If I were coming, I'd want to know for sure that they could pay me. So I said to the group, how could we make sure that if everybody thinks we should do this, that there would be enough money for us to be able to do it? And we talked about it a few minutes, and someone said, well, what if some of us would just say, I'm going to commit some more money out of my own, you know, I'm going to give more money this from now on so that we'll help make sure that there's more money available for that staff position. And somebody said, well, I'd be willing to give $10 a week. And somebody else said, well, I'd be able to give five. So we just, as we looked at it, the person said, I think we're short this much from being able to do this. And there in that group, people said, to make sure that we solve the problem you see, here's how we're going to solve it. And we walked out of that meeting together. Sometimes God helps us by allowing other people to show us concerns that we should address. But in the end, we should all say, this is what God wants, so that there's unity in it. And what oftentimes happens in churches is somebody says, I don't agree with that. And they get talking to all their friends, and they're going to go in there and hire this staff person. We don't have enough money to do it. We all go into the business meeting and tell them, no, we're not going to do that. The other group says, I think they're going to make us, I hear they're going to come and vote against this, and they're going to get all their people. Let's get all our people there, and we're going to say we're going to do it no matter what. And you have a fight, and a split, and divisions, and quarreling, and fussing, and hard feelings, and anger, and resentment, and bitterness. This is contrary to what Paul sees as the nature of a spirit-led life. There should be no dissension among you. You should have differences of opinion. But it shouldn't result in alienating you from each other, causing you to think that other people in the fellowship of believers are enemies. Instead, there should be a way by which you come to find one Lord. Now, the world sees opposition, division, as opportunity. I can win. In the church, we see it as an enemy. It causes us to be aware that we do not have completely and fully God's will about this matter. I've talked to sometimes in the couples who are struggling about the will of God for their family at home to say, you should not do anything until you both can agree. I mean, both are Christians, and they read the Bible, and they pray. You should not make any decision until you come to a common decision about what to do. Because each of you may see only a part of the picture. And until you can see together the full picture of what God wants, then you haven't found His will. The Bible tells us that we should have unity. There should be a connection between what God's will is and our actions and our behavior. And not being able to get the common agreement on what God wants means that there is some difficulty between God speaking to us and us hearing Him. If He's the head, then all the members of the body should work in coordination. I've often used this illustration to say to people, if you're going to eat an ice cream cone, and you go to get the ice cream cone, and you're ready to eat it, and you're going to put it in your mouth, and you go plop, your problem is not that you've lost an ice cream cone. It's there's something wrong between the communication of your head to your hand. And you need to get to see a doctor as soon as you can. Forget the ice cream. Because your body should coordinate itself, so if you have the ice cream in the hand and the mouth open, they should both go exactly in the same place. So if the body of Christ does not function as it ought to, to find unity and oneness, then there's a short circuit between the head, Christ, and the members of the body. And that short circuit, or nerve damage, must be repaired before you go on. Because if you have nerve damage so that your hand doesn't know what it's supposed to do, you're not safe to drive, or to be around with a knife, or a gun, or anything. If you don't control your hands, your mind does not tell your hands what to do, and the hands do them correctly, you're in desperate trouble. The same is true for the people of God. If the head, Christ, does not control the members, then there is nothing that you can do that's going to be successful. This is the danger of dissensions and jealousies. There are times that we get in the church whenever you evaluate what's an important place. We've had times in the past when people would say, Why don't I ever get to teach a Sunday school class? And they want to have a class. And they want to have the things that they think are important. And they want things to go the way they want to do it. And it can be almost anything in the world that causes them to say, I want to have things my way. See, whenever you start that, you're really elevating yourself to the position of importance and significance, which means you're jealous of any other person who would get attention, or get their way, or things would be done the way they want them to be done. In the church, what we're concerned to do is to be servants to God. And whatever else that God gives another person in terms of their service, or their opportunities, or even their successes, it should all be a joy to the rest of us because we're part of the body of Christ. That's what Paul uses so often as an illustration. Who would look at their big toe and say, Well, I tell you, some people look at my big toe and they say it's so beautiful, they don't notice the rest of me, I'm just going to cut it off. It would be absurd. So whenever you see people jealous of others in the church, jealous that their Sunday school class is growing, or jealous that they're getting attention, or jealous that they have an opportunity to serve, jealous that people are applauding them, you think of your body and think how ridiculous it would be for you to look at one part of your body and all the rest be angry at that part because of some success it has, or some visibility it has. Paul sees jealousy as a sign of the world's way of thinking. Let success to come to somebody in the world. And I don't care who it is, if they're famous enough, the next day there'll be an article on the Internet or in the newspaper about something that's wrong with them. That's just the way the world is. We must not allow this. It is the thinking of Satan, not the body of Christ. So he says instead of these, let us behave decently as in the daytime, not in orgies, drunkenness, not in sexual immorality, botchery, not in dissension or jealousy, rather clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. Cover your life with the character and nature of Christ. Make your will like His. Make your conversation like His. Make your values like Christ's. Model yourself after the nature and character of Christ. He talks about it like putting on a coat that you'd put on. So if you had a long coat and you put it on, that's all that people could see. So that you cover your behavior, your life, with the behavior of Christ and the attitudes of Christ so that when people see you, they don't see your nature, your human nature. They see the person God has transformed you to be. I used to be this way, and now I'm transformed to think this way and act this way. So cover yourself with Christ. It means that a focus for our attention and how we should behave is focused on the Gospels. How is it that Christ lived? How did He treat people in the circumstances like we are living in ourselves? Do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature. See, that's where He started when He talked about chapter 12. Offer your bodies as living sacrifices. Here He says, do not think about gratifying the desires of your human nature. The first part is negative, and this part is positive. Do not think about gratification. Instead, you think about sacrifice. Do not conform to the pattern of this world. Instead, do not allow yourself to satisfy the desires of this world, the desires of your sinful human nature. He starts with saying we must be transformed from the way the world thinks to be thinking like Christ, and He ends these two chapters by saying we're to think about how we might be made like Christ and putting aside the desires of our sinful human nature. Not talking about our human nature, but our sinful human nature. All these qualities He's identified in the book of Romans as coming from our flesh. And then we clothe ourselves. That's how we clothe ourselves in the Lord Jesus Christ. God expects us to see as the model for our lives, Christ. He expects us to see, to be day by day, identifying the ways we're not like Him, asking God to change our thinking, and to become like Him. This is the model we have for what God wants us to do. Paul thought if every member of a Christian church was doing this, that the people who knew them, who worked with them, who were neighbors with them, would want to live like those people want to live. They would find in these people such a difference that they would ask, how can I learn to live like you live? How can I have a family like you have? How can I live in the way that you and your family lives? And we can say to them simply, Jesus Christ has given me His life to live. Receive Him as your Lord, and you will find the life you long for. When we come to talk to people, oftentimes about a commitment to Christ, much of their reaction is, I see people who live in your church, and I don't want to be like that. This is why evangelism is difficult for us. Because people who wear the name of Christ live fleshly lives. Paul's idea is if you are transformed, the evangelism will take care of itself. People will want to have the life that you found. And if you do, then you'll be fulfilling the mission of Christ as well as living the character of Christ. I'd like for you to pray with me. I'd like you to pray, first of all, this simple prayer. Lord, I'd like you to show me one thing about my life that you want to change. Now ask yourself, what would you need to sacrifice or to change for that to take place? Can you say to God, I want you to do in my mind and heart whatever it takes for me to obey you, regardless of the cost. We ask you to confront us with how our lives are not like yours, that we might fulfill what you've asked of us, to be clothed with Christ Jesus our Lord. It's in His name we pray. Amen. Amen. I'll take your offering over there. Where? Oh, you do.