Renewing Your Mind

Rom 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. Rom 12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

The first thing Paul says in vs. 1 is I beseech you… He is now pivoting in his content. He is now taking all the information that he gave us in the first eleven chapters, all that information about the gospel, about our identification, about right division, all the doctrine we have reckoned as true in our lives, and he’s now going to appeal to us to change our minds about how we live our lives. It’s as if Paul is saying, “In light of everything we’ve covered, I now beseech you. I implore you.”

Beseech isn’t a command. It is a request with urgency. He is imploring or he is entreating your souls to consider the evidence he had just laid before you and now take action.

I cannot help but think of what Paul told Philemon. He said he could be bold enough to command Philemon. “Yet for love’s sake I rather beseech thee…” (Phm 1:9). In the realm of relationships, the nature of love implores you rather than commands you. The nature of grace also implores you rather than commands you. That’s how the nature of the attributes function.

When speaking out of a place of love and grace, one usually beseeches instead of commands. Commands are part of the law. But grace, the nature of grace, grace acts above the law, operating in a sphere of its own with its own guiding principles far superior to the law. Grace and love reason with you based upon the truth of God, based upon who He is and all the wonderful thing He has done for you and to you because of His overwhelming for you. By beseeching, Paul puts love forward. He put grace forward so that the decision you make is a decision in response to great love and grace. You would respond in grace to all the grace that’s already been bestowed upon you. Paul is showing grace so people would be wiling to accept that grace and then make decisions based upon that grace. Paul is trusting God’s grace to operate in you as God intended.

Next, Paul says, I beseech you therefore. Stam once made an interesting point about therefore in this verse. He basically said that if you look up therefore in the book of Roman, you see a logical progression in Paul’s thinking. Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man… (Rom_2:1). Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin (Rom_3:20). Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law (Rom_3:28). Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace… (Rom_4:16) Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom_5:1). Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life (Rom_5:18). Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life (Rom_6:4). Let not sin Therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof (Rom_6:12). Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh (Rom_8:12). And then finally back to Rom. 12, I beseech you Therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service (Rom_12:1). Stam would say that each therefore is a conclusion to each logical argument and doctrinal statement that comprise the epistle to Romans.

Then Paul would say by the mercies of God. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God. What exactly did He mean by the mercies of God? Everything Paul had articulated up until this point, the gospel, our identification, right division, the interruption of the prophetic program with the insertion of this age of grace, all of that were demonstrations of His character. We learned who God is by what He has done.

The mercies of God are not simply what God has done but it’s the essence of who He is demonstrated by what He has done. He is a God of overwhelming love and Grace and mercy demonstrated by the sacrifice of His Son, demonstrated by everything He made us in His Son, and demonstrated by the fact that instead of pouring out His wrath, He pre-determined to pour out His grace and His love onto all of us. He implemented this age of grace because He foreknew each one of us and He wanted to have a loving relationship with us, and He wanted to have each of us as part of His incredible family… when we never deserved it. Paul is imploring us with emotional reasoning, by the mercies of God, by who God is demonstrated by all that the great things He has done for you, Paul beseeches us to change our lives.

And notice that Paul would ask us to do three things in these passages. That ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, that we be not conformed to this world and that we would be transformed. All three of these objectives are accomplished by doing one thing, and that is by the renewing of your mind. The renewing of your mind is how you are able to present your body a living sacrifice. The renewing of your mind is how you avoid conformity to this world, and the renewing of your mind is how you completely transform your life. Let’s first talk about…

Presenting Your Bodies a Living Sacrifice

Paul says that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service… The phrase living sacrifice demands study and meditation. How do you explain that? What exactly does Paul mean by that?

Let’s first start with present your bodies. What does Paul mean by that? Bullinger would make the point that the word present is the same Greek word as yield. In other words, we are already standing before God, He is already watching us, and we are to now yield our entire bodies in a living service to Him. By saying bodies, Paul means the whole you, the entire spirit, soul, and body, all of you, yielding your life to God’s will and God’s wisdom on a daily basis just as the sacrifices in time past were daily.

William R. Newell would write, “We might have expected, ‘Yield your spirits, to be controlled by the Holy Spirit.’ But Paul says, ‘bodies.’ Now if a man should present his body for the service of another, willingly, it would carry ALL the man with it.” I think he’s right. By saying bodies, Paul means your entire self – spirit, soul, and body.

Then Paul writes, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice. Some books tried to make connections between our lives today and the sacrificial system in time past, which was just weird. I don’t think Paul’s making connections. I think he’s making a contrast. Unlike the dead sacrifices of time past, be a living sacrifice. Stam thought the same thing and he would write, “’A living sacrifice.’

This, of course, stands in contrast to the slain sacrifices required of Israel. God would have us live a life of sacrifice for Him day by day. He would have us sacrifice ourselves.”

Jordan would write, “Now what did you do with a sacrifice in Time Past? They killed it, but is this a dead sacrifice here that he is talking about? No. It is a living sacrifice. Well, how can you be a living sacrifice? You have to be a living dead person. Are you a living dead person? You are crucified with Christ back here. ‘Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.’ Don’t you understand that the issue of Romans 6 is that you have been identified with Christ in His death, His burial, His resurrection?”

I love that thought, because a living sacrifice is largely an expression of identification. You are one with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. Christ is risen and ascended. Yet, we are still alive here on this Earth, crucified with Him and yet, we live. We have entered into this mutually sacrificial relationship with God. Just as Christ offered Himself up for us, now we offer ourselves up for Him. Just as He offered Himself up for our sin, we offer ourselves up for His life given to us. Just as His sacrifice was an offering of love, our living sacrifice to Him is likewise an offering of love. Just as Christ released all rights He had to His own life, so too, we release all the rights we have to our own lives.

This is the offering Paul beseeches all of us to make, that we devote ourselves to God, as if we no longer have any claim for ourselves, and we are now willing to be used by God, to suffer for His glory, to be shining trophies of His grace in every circumstance of our lives. This is to be a living sacrifice to Christ and also a living sacrifice to the Father as well. Just as Christ offered up His body to be used by God for His good pleasure, we too, offer our bodies to be used by God to be used for His good pleasure.

Next, Paul would write, holy, acceptable unto God. The daily offering up of ourselves to God in service to Him is a result of our identification with Christ. We reckon the holy, perfect state of our standing before God as we commit our lives to service Him. We are serving Him knowing that we’re holy and acceptable to Him. The service to God is to now be in alignment with our standing before Him. We are now aligning our earthly walk with our new heavenly identity.

Then Paul says, which is your reasonable service. The Greek word for reasonable is log-ik-os, from which we get our word logic or logical. Stam would write, “Does not all logic and reason tell us that a life of worshipful sacrifice is due to the One who, in compassion and love, bore for us the shame and suffering that was our due?” End quote. And let’s not forget the big point here. Paul’s not simply saying that it’s reasonable, logical, rational to serve God. He’s saying that being a living sacrifice, the complete offering up of yourself to God IS your reason service. A life for a life, an offering for an offering, service for service. You completely giving yourself over to the will of God IS a decision that IS a reasonable, rational, response to all the mercies of God Himself. In light of everything, it’s unreasonable not to live for His glory in obedience to His will. We should point out here, as well, that the word service is inseparable from the concept of worship. Service is worship. You giving up your life and allowing yourself to yield your life to His ways is a means of worshipping God.

So how exactly you do present your body a living sacrifice? You study His Word. You renew your mind. You rewire your thinking and you come to know the will of God and you think, speak, and behave in the manner that God prescribes. You allow all that new changed thinking to change the way you live.

Be Not Conformed

Next, Paul writes in vs. 2, And be not conformed to this world… I’m not sure where I got this quote but someone in some book somewhere had written that “we are ever prone to adapt ourselves to our environment.” That is true! That is wonderfully illustrative of what it means to be “conformed.” You’re adapting yourself and your soul to your environment, to your world. You’re making yourself to resemble your environment, your world. You look and sound like everyone else who is on their way to Hell. You are not one of them anymore so don’t even try to resemble them anymore!

There are all these different types of people in all these different categories. They’re all headed in the same direction because they’re all part of the course of this world. You have people, like bikers in Daytona, for example, who dress and act the way that they do because they see themselves as not conforming to the world, that they’re somehow rebelling against the world, when in fact, they’re just conforming themselves to a certain group of people who are still part of the course of this world. Bikers is just another brand to be marketed to by the course of this world, because everyone who is part of the course of this world is headed to the same place when it’s all over unless they get reconciled to God. The course of this world is the ultimate Hegelian Dialectic: opposing groups headed for synthesis in the end.

In other words, these groups of the world opposed to each other are all headed to the Lake of Fire. I’m sure Satan loves the idea of opposing groups fighting each other, because the distraction of fighting keeps both groups from recognizing their need to be reconciled to God before they die. And in the midst of all this, we have the people of God, the true non-conformists, who are living sacrifices to God, pointing the way to eternal life. Conforming yourself to God is good for the mind. That is a rational, reasonable thing to do. Conforming yourself to the world will drive you absolutely bonkers crazy.

At the end of the day, no matter what worldly environment you find yourself in, that worldly environment is part of the course of this world headed straight to hell. There is no reward for you at the Bema Seat conforming yourself to the world. But by conforming yourself to God and His Son, you may plant seeds and harvest some souls you may join you in the eternal life and in the eternal rewards of God.

So how exactly you do avoid conformity to the world? You study His Word. You renew your mind. You rewire your thinking and you come to know the will of God and you think, speak, and behave in the manner that God prescribes. You allow all that new changed thinking to change the way you live.

Be Ye Transformed

Then Paul writes in vs. 2 but be ye transformed. What does he mean by be transformed? Of course, the word transformed is met-a-mor-phoo, from which we get the word metamorphose. In other words, be ye metamorphosed, be ye transfigured, be ye transformed… stand up and stand out in the world as a new person, with a new way of thinking, a new way of speaking, and a new way of interacting with everyone else – all stemming from this overflowing well of God’s life rooted in love and grace.

Paul telling us to be transformed is again a verse of identification. Acknowledge what God made you in Christ through the baptism of the Spirit and live like that saint He made you in Christ. Be utterly what you are now. You’re empowered to BE the person God made you. Therefore, BE that person, BE that saint. Live like who you are now and show off your new self to the world. The word transformed here also implies radical, thorough, universal change, both inwardly and outwardly. As you have been radically changed from within, now live like that radically changed person on the outside as well.

So how exactly you do avoid conformity to the world? You study His Word. You renew your mind. You rewire your thinking and you come to know the will of God and you think, speak, and behave in the manner that God prescribes. You allow all that new changed thinking to change the way you live.

By the Renewing of Your Mind

All of this brings us to the renewing of your mind. Paul had implored through emotional reasoning because of who God is which is why He has done everything for us, Paul now asks us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, to be not conformed to this world and to be transformed. Now he explains how we do that. All three of those objectives are accomplished by doing one thing, and that is, the renewing of your mind.

Is there a difference in saying “renewing your mind” or the renewing of your mind? There is no difference. Both mean the same.

What exactly does Paul mean by renewing? Webster would tell us it’s “making new again; repairing; re-establishing; repeating; reviving; renovating,” or “the act of making new, renewal.”  

One question I had was, “How can you revive or make new again something that was corrupt and sin-cursed from the beginning?” And this would necessitate a quick look at what the Word says about our minds before we got saved.

Every unsaved person, shaped in iniquity in their mother’s womb, cursed by sin, born into a bondage to sin in the flesh, every person grows up beyond the age of accountability to become what Paul calls “the natural man,” the natural state of every unbeliever in Adam. The natural man “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). Because the minds of unbelievers did not wish to “retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (Rom. 1:28). Thus, the natural man naturally resists “the things of the Spirit of God” because in his reprobate mind these spiritual matters “are foolishness unto him.”

The natural man prefers to live in bondage to sin minding the things of his flesh (Rom. 8:5), “fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind” (Eph. 2:3), with a carnal mind at enmity with God (Rom. 8:7; Col. 1:21), walking in the vanity of his mind (Eph. 4:17), and also living lockstep with the course of this world because his mind is blinded by the god of this world (Eph. 2:2; 2 Cor. 4:4).

In Gen. 6:5, we find, “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” We’re given insight into the cause of this great violence: the corrupt heart. Fascinating to me that the Lord highlights two leading factors to all the great violence and wickedness that was in the Earth at the time. He doesn’t talk about the soul or the mind or the spirit of man. He talks about the flesh and the heart.

And we have an interesting expression, that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Notice that the heart is an imaginative heart. Man imagines doing evil before carrying it out. Notice also that the heart thinks. The heart in close collaboration with the mind makes emotional decisions. Satisfying the desires of the flesh is an emotional decision, because there is an emotional greediness to it all (Eph. 4:19), even lust.

There is a close connection between the heart and the mind. Paul makes a fascinating connection between the two in Eph. 4:18. He says that the unbelieving Gentiles have their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. When one is in a state of alienation from the life of God with their willful ignorance, the heart is darkened being cut off from His light, which leads to a corruption of your emotional life, and as a result, the corruption of all your understanding as well. The corruption of the heart leads to a corruption of the mind because the two operate so closely together. The mind is ignorant because the heart is blind being cut off from God’s light, and the mind becomes darkened and blind as well.

How can you revive or make new again something that had been corrupt from the beginning? Your blind, dead mind has been brought to life because you have now come into contact with the life of God. The renewing of the mind may be for some one of many doctrinal positions that we hold, but the reality is, the renewing of your mind is your mind coming into contact with the life of God. The renewing of your mind, the act of making new, is a continual state of repentance, a continual changing of our minds, of our thinking, to mirror’s God’s thinking.

This is taking a mind that had always been blind and making it see, taking a mind that was always dark has and now flooding it with the light of God. That is a renewing, making new of the mind. Your mind has been brought from a state of death to a state of life because it has come in contact with God. What was once death-thinking because before you were living a life that led to an eternal separation from God, now, you’ve been exposed to life-thinking, because you’re living the Lord’s resurrection life that is now shaped by God’s thinking, God’s wisdom, God’s emotional vitality and maturity.

This is about conforming all of your thinking to God’s thinking because His ways are the ways of joy, peace, love, and grace, which is the best way to live your life. Before you got saved, no matter what you did, you were always perpetuating the course of this world because you were living to fulfill of the lusts of the flesh and of the mind being alienated from the life of God.

But now… God’s life and His light and His love has utterly flooded your inner being, and now it is a matter of rewiring your thought process to mirror God’s, to allow His way of thinking to become your way of thinking, of shaping your emotional life to mirror God’s, to allow His peace, His joy, His love, His grace to become the foundation to your emotional life, and it is a matter of molding your interactions with others to mirror the righteous, holy, character of God.

Paul says in 2 Cor. 3:18, “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” This glass that we’re beholding is the Word of God as defined in James 1:23. So by the grace of God we are able to see through the glass, through the Word of God, the glory of His majesty in the face of the exalted Son of God seated at His right hand. When we read the Word of God and we behold the glory of Christ Jesus, the glory of not only what He accomplished at Calvary but also the glory of all the He is, that process changes you from the inside out to become like His image. From glory-to-glory, as Paul said, His glory transferred to us. The more you focus on Christ, the more you grow, and the more you’re changed into His glory by the Spirit.

I suspect the mind needs a definition. The word translated mind properly denotes intellect, as distinguished from the will and affections. Some would say that the renewing of the mind inevitably results in also the renewing of the soul and the heart.

You might remember Paul, in Eph. 4:23, would say And be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Because of this, William R. Newell would talk about a renewal of the soul in his Romans commentary, because it would seem that your inner spiritual self operates in collaboration with your mind, which also operates closely with your heart. The renewal of the mind is a renewal of your whole inner self, a renewal of mind, heart, and soul.

Newell would write, “There remains then to be the object of this ‘renewing,’ the soul, which includes the mind, with its thoughts; the imagination,—so untamed naturally, the sensibilities or ‘feelings’; the ‘tastes,’ or natural preferences,—all which, since the fall of Adam, are naturally under the influence and power of the sinful flesh, and must be operated upon by the Holy Spirit, after one’s regeneration.”

He would also point out that, “Man, we remember, ‘became a living soul,’ after his body had been formed, and there had been communicated to him a spirit, by God’s direct in-breathing (Gen. 2:7)… The soul-life, however, put him in touch with creation.”

You might remember 2 Cor. 7:1 Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. How do we cleanse ourselves from the filthiness of the spirit? Do our souls get dirty? Before we were saved, our souls were not dirty in a literal sense, but they were dirty in God’s eyes, unclean being in a state of unrighteousness. When Paul talks about the filthiness of the spirit, I think he means “the real you”, your soul, how your soul operated, the inclination of your soul to sin like when you were in bondage to the sin of the flesh. Your soul enjoyed fulfilling the lusts of the flesh before you got saved and Paul is saying to put off the ways that your soul was inclined to operate when it was in bondage to the flesh. Your soul simply needed to put off the old ways of an old man now dead and put on Christ. And how do you do that? Through the renewing of the spirit of the mind (Eph. 4:23), through the study of the Word by which the Spirit rewires, renews, the thinking and inclinations of mind and soul.

I’ll close with another quote from Pastor Jordan: “By the renewing of your mind. Now with regard to that word renewing: you know what you do when you renew something, don’t you? You go in and you replace all of the old, inferior, worthless material with what? With brand new stuff. Well, if you are going to renew—replace the old, inferior, worthless stuff—renew your mind, what is he talking about? He is talking about taking all that old way of thinking that is worthless, inferior, and useless in the service of God, and replacing it. He is talking about replacing all those things of the world, the value system, all those standards of norms and judgment systems that you gain from the world—from all those years that you spent as an unsaved person, and from all those years that you spent as a believer who didn’t have that sound knowledge in your mind. He says, renew your mind. You know how to be transformed. It is by the renewing of your mind. It is a new way of thinking: you put out the old way, and you put in the new way. You are putting out human viewpoint; and what are you putting in? Sound doctrine, divine viewpoint.”