Transformative Love: Living Sacrificially in Christ

Thank you, worship team. I was going to say something like, it's amazing how the worship team keeps going when half the team is gone. But I think it's more than half of the people that are normally up here are gone. And we've got people filling in and doing all sorts of things. So it's a wonderful blessing, the worship team that we have. [00:23:26]

And the challenge is, when we say things like, Father, not my will, but yours be done. Let me live my life the way you want me to live, God. That sounds really nice, and it's really easy to say that in the abstract. But when we talk about the actual details of what that looks like today, what that looks like when you leave the sanctuary today, what that looks like tomorrow when you go into work with that insufferable know-it-all, or whoever it is that may be in your life, right? It gets really difficult. And so the challenge, the command, is not difficult. [00:25:05]

Module 1 is the work of the gospel, the work of Christ, the work of the cross. And if you haven't experienced the work of the cross, then nothing that happens from here on out is really going to make any sense because Paul is challenging us to live in a way that's different from what everyone in the world would tell you is the right way to live. And if you haven't experienced this sort of transforming power of the gospel, it's not going to make sense. So in that respect, this message today is for believers, really is the core of what it's for. [00:26:42]

And if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Similarly, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. So there is this free and open access to the mercy that comes via the work of the cross. That's all been sort of laid out in the beginning of Romans. And to add to it, I don't know if this is officially part of the Romans road, if you were going to look it up, you know, talk about the Romans road, but it gets talked about as well. Romans 8 says, There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. [00:29:37]

So, what does it mean to be a living sacrifice? I suspect it means something like this. If you remember in the Old Testament, Abraham and Sarah are promised a child, right? And God says, I'm going to bless the whole world through your offspring. All of the nations will be blessed through your offspring. And he's got this son, Isaac. They finally have the son, and they're old, it's a child of their old age. They finally get this son, and then God asks Abraham to take Isaac up a mountain and kill him. Sacrifice him back to God. This child that they've been waiting their whole lives for, that they've been promised is going to be used to fulfill some great blessing to all the nations of the earth. You have to kill the child. Of course, when you read that story, as they go up the mountain, Isaac is walking up the mountain to die. [00:32:56]

And so, here's the question we could ask Isaac. You were meant to die. That's what should have happened to you. But you live. So, what are you going to do about it? What you should do is, you as a Christian now should be thinking, I was meant to die, but Christ went to that cross for me. And now I live in this power, and I have this power. Or what can I do with it? What does it mean for me to live as a sacrifice? [00:33:52]

Christians are to adjust their way of thinking about everything in accordance with the newness of their life in the spirit. This reprogramming of the mind does not take place overnight, but is a lifelong process by which our way of thinking is to resemble more and more the way God wants us to think. [00:36:03]

What you think is good and what God's Word says is good is the age-old problem. It's exactly the problem that Eve was wrestling with in the garden when she decided that the fruit was good for something, even though it was not good, right? And so she made that decision herself. And since then, read Scripture, think about your own life. We've been making that decision for ourselves all along, right, since then. So that's what's in the background here. But the question is, okay, when my mind is being renewed, I'm rethinking what it means to be good, what does that look like? What do I eject all of the sort of preloaded stuff that culture has given me? What do I replace it with? And that's what we'll be working on today. And we start here. [00:37:56]

And so we see on here this connection to the law, right? We see all this list of laws, and these things come from like the second table of the... Sorry. I just about said that in the most pretentious way I probably could have. This comes from the second half of the Ten Commandments, which is, you know, this list of laws. And Paul is saying something like, remember those laws that, you know, you used to try to follow the law all the time, Jewish believers, you know, and you never could do it. You know, read the Old Testament. You always failed all the time, and we never could. But there's something about these laws that is right, and it is good. And so what can we sort of take away from that? So as we think about this question today, and this is what we'll be reflecting on here in a moment, this question, who can you love better? And we're going to start with, what does it mean to love? So we have this unpayable debt of love that you can never pay off. You can never pay it off. But what is it exactly that you're supposed to be sending to the debtors, right? It's not a check. It's something different, right? What is it? What does it look like to love your neighbor? [00:40:27]

The universalistic language that both precedes and follows this command demands that the love Paul is exhorting Christians to display is ultimately not to be restricted to fellow Christians. We are called to love the other, and as Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan so vividly illustrates, this other may be someone quite unknown to us or even hostile toward us. As Paul has already made clear, sincere love means that we are to bless our persecutors and seek to do good to all people. The picture that I see here, when I think about the stories that unfold over the course of scripture, I'm drawn to the story of Daniel. [00:49:57]

Now, we've got Christian principles that we need to be thinking about, and there's certain places where we draw those lines, and that's not the point of this message today, isn't never draw a line, but I do suspect that we probably draw more lines than maybe we should sometimes. I think probably it's the case that we should be thinking more about how can I work to the welfare and the benefit of those people around me without compromising my own integrity, that sort of thing. How can I actively work for that? How can I represent that kind of love to the world? That's what we're being asked to do. So that's what we owe. That's how much we owe. That's who we owe it to. We owe a lot, and we owe it to everyone. [00:52:29]

I promise that the message would be simple today, right? Love people. Love them better. And I'm not going to complicate it any more than that. I'm going to remind you of what my recommendation for you is as you walk away from this sermon today. First is, if you're stuck in that Romans 1 through 11 and you feel like you haven't experienced the life-transforming power of the gospel, and you'd like to live differently, you'd like to live for Christ, talk to me. Talk to somebody near you. We'll be happy to talk to you about that and tell you more. [01:19:00]