Hope Church NYC exists to lead people into a transforming relationship with Jesus. Can I hear you say a transforming relationship with Jesus? That's right. Not just any kind of relationship with Jesus, but hopefully one that transforms us. That makes a radical difference in our lives.
[00:02:12]
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. Now, this is a metaphorical way of simply saying give all of who you are, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world. Instead, 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.
[00:03:23]
If anyone is in Christ, in other words, if someone actually makes this decision, says, I want to follow Jesus. And I want Jesus to be someone who, in my being, that every part of me is completely transformed. If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old has gone, the new is here.
[00:05:44]
Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator. This idea of an old self and a new self with all of its practices, with all of its kind of the themes of a new self, a new heart, new behaviors. All of these different ways, someone is being transformed completely and wholly.
[00:06:13]
So, here's what I want you to do. God helping you. Take your everyday, ordinary life. You're sleeping. You're eating. You're going to work and walking around life. Now, again, this is a summary of just kind of the normal, everyday practices that we have. And place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for Him.
[00:07:02]
Don't become so well -adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed, and this is the translation of that idea of being transformed. You'll be changed from the inside out.
[00:07:30]
Paul is talking about, no, I'm talking about a wholesale kind of change. A change from the inside out. The way you appear. The way you show up in your family. The way you show up in your neighborhood. With your roommates. In your workplace. With your school friends. Whatever else it might be in the city around us. How do we show up as people who have been fully changed from the inside out?
[00:09:00]
Paul's vision for what change looks like and how we're to show up in the world. It's more than simply just surface level behavior. It's actually wholesale, transformational, inside out kind of change.
[00:09:23]
He's basically taking this teaching that many people have heard before, but he's actually giving a different kind of moral vision. He's basically like, listen, all these laws and what you've heard about the way that you're supposed to live, I want to go deeper than that. I want to actually get into your heart. I'm talking about a kind of transformation that's not just about following rules and laws and behaviors in ways in which we're supposed to live. I want to get at your heart.
[00:13:59]
But I tell you this, that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Now, time and again, Jesus would actually reference this. He'd basically say, you have heard this was said. In other words, you've heard halakha. You've heard about all these ways in which people have given you a vision for life that is full of do's and don'ts, ways of living. But I tell you this, that your transformation is not going deep enough.
[00:14:33]
There's something so profound about how Jesus could give this kind of vision for life that doesn't just kind of meet us on our surface level, but actually gets into the heart and the guts of our motives, of our hearts, of the ways in which we can often just change things on the surface, but not deeply and transformationally.
[00:16:09]
We hope that what you and I long for is not just a kind of relationship with God that somewhat tickles our ears every Sunday, or that, you know, provides pizza and granola bars and whatnot every Sunday. We do that, by the way. And, but actually, hopefully, there's a part of us that we want more of God. We don't want to settle for a relationship with God that just skims the surface and just addresses this 10%. But what does it mean to allow God and allow Jesus and the transformational work of Jesus to go deeper than that, to fundamentally change our wounds, our pain, our sadness, the way that we show up in the world, not just the way that we show up on Sunday mornings, the way in which we deal with our anxieties, our fears, our anger, our sadness.
[00:16:53]
What Jesus and Paul, what they're getting at is, they want to invite you and me and all of us into something more than simply just changing behaviors. It's about getting deep within the iceberg of our lives. into the private netherworlds of our hearts.
[00:17:52]
When we talk about a transformational relationship, we're talking about a life that's holistically changed, that's full of the word that we use often is integrity. The same root for integrity is the word integer, a whole number, that there's a wholeness to how we live and show up in the world.
[00:18:48]
This is the thesis that we often use with Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, which is part of our central discipleship course here. We say emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It's impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.
[00:20:47]
If at the end of the day, if as an integrated person, I'm unable to allow God into every part of my life, then I'm really not that mature. I could have degrees in theology and studied for years on end from some of the greatest thinkers around New Testament studies. But at the end of the day, if I'm really defensive with my wife, I'm really not that spiritually mature.
[00:21:39]
Who cares if I give a great sermon today, if honestly, if my wife experiences me as being touchy and harsh when I'm tired. At the end of the day, I'm not that spiritually mature.
[00:26:07]
Who cares how great my sermon is if I can't learn how to be present and attuned to our two -year -old and show him what a faithful loving presence might look like. Now, there's all sorts of ways I can rationalize and be like, oh, but look what I'm doing. I'm preparing for God's work. or maybe I'm just being immature and I'm not allowing God to change me from the inside out.
[00:29:31]
These people, they come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. These people, they prepare sermons and pray and yet they can neglect loving their families. These people, they have great profiles on social media and all these and yet it's hard for them to stand in the gap for the poor and the marginalized. These themes repeated throughout the teachings of Jesus are this theme of not letting us off the hook for just halfway transformation.
[00:30:24]
Woe to you teachers of the law and Pharisees. You hypocrites, you are like whitewashed tombs which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean in the same way on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. It's interesting, Jesus' harshest words are for religious people who think somehow that 10 % is enough and Jesus is like no, no, no, no, no, no. I want more for you. I want you to surrender every part of your life. Your private life. Your money. Your body. Your sexuality. Your parenting. Your marriage. Your singleness. Your emotional lives. Every single part of who you are. I want you to surrender all of that.
[00:31:40]
Remember I told you, look at what it says, Romans 12 .2. Remember how it says, don't conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed. Remember I told you it's present so it's ongoing but it's also passive. Isn't that interesting? It's be transformed. It's not transform. It's actually be transformed. It's passive. In other words, it's something that's done to us.
[00:33:28]
The Christian faith faith has always been about not us kind of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps but it's actually of us saying, God, will you transform me? Will you renew my mind? Will you be the person that does the work? The ongoing work from the inside out.
[00:33:57]
When it comes to every area of our lives, if we were to do just a personal audit of our own lives, it's to surrender your whole life. Your whole life. your relationships. Your private life. Your thought life. Your money. Your body. Your emotions. Surrender all of it.
[00:34:29]
The invitation is that after we've surrendered our whole life, the promise is you receive a whole life. An integrated life. And isn't that how all of us want to live? Where our public life and our private life, there's integration. That the ways that we show up, especially for the people closest to us, hopefully are in ways that have been deeply transformed. Not just in a performatory, performative way, but actually in a way in which we say, God, you have changed. You've changed how I respond to my deepest pain, my deepest sorrow, to all the ways in which I have not reflected who you are, God. I want to invite you. I want to surrender my whole life. That's it. To surrender my whole life. So that we can receive the whole life that Jesus has for us. all the areas.
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