Insight for Living

Chuck Swindoll: Do you ever feel spiritually stuck, like you’re not making any progress? What if the difference between spiritual stagnation and breakthrough isn’t more Bible knowledge, but the courage to act on what you already know?

Well, today, on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll delivers a jarring wakeup call, exposing how believers often mistake emotional inspiration for genuine transformation. In this study, Chuck strips away comfortable Christianity to reveal an uncomfortable truth. God doesn’t want your feelings. He wants your body on the altar as a living sacrifice. Teaching from Romans 12, Chuck titled today’s message, “A Compelling Commitment.”

To prepare us for service as God’s people, we are given this compelling statement of commitment, and I want you to look at it, I would request that you look at it as if for the first time.

The first verse is about consecration. I’ll define it in a moment. The second verse is about transformation. The first verse is about our bodies. The second verse is about our minds.

The first verse looks around, looks around and about us. The second verse looks within us. And I will say to you that if this is a time in which you are willing to give yourself to these two verses in a way like you’ve never done, your life will never be the same.

If you’re here and you’re without Christ, don’t try to present your body as a living sacrifice. You’ll keep crawling off the altar. If you’re here without Christ, don’t think that you can somehow do a mind renewal number on yourself. This is for believers. This is truth for the Christian. Is it ever?

And it begins with consecration. Let me define that word. Consecration is a radical, a radical separation from a secular worldview to a godly purpose and mindset. It’s a radical separation from the secular worldview to a godly purpose and mindset.

Now, in light of the mercies that God has shown to us and given to us, I plead with you in return, says the apostle, to present your bodies, a living and holy sacrifice.

Present your bodies. Please observe, it is the body that’s being presented. This is not some ethereal, internal series of thoughts. This is literally the parts of the body that would be drawn to the secular lifestyle. The secular world appeals to the body.

I appeal to you, says the apostle, that you, on the based on the mercies of God, that you make a sacrifice of your body. Let’s start with our eyes and our ears. If we’re going to crawl up on an altar and give God our lives as living sacrifices, let’s take a look at what we look at. Let’s examine what we listen to.

Let’s go to our tongues and our vocal cords. There’s nothing evil about either. Lips, tongue and vocal cords are the reason many a life is blessed. But lips and tongue and vocal cords can become the avenue or the instruments of gossip and slander and exaggeration and lies and coarse words.

How about our hands and feet? What we touch? Paul is answering that, saying the body is the eye gate, the ear gate, the voice. It’s the use of the hands and the and the muscles and the and the movement of life. But it all begins in the mind, doesn’t it? No decision is made by the hands. It begins in the mind.

So, we turn from consecration, this radical break with the secular world. We now turn to transformation. Let me define that. Transformation is a deliberate determination to think biblically and act accordingly.

Transformation is a deliberate determination to think biblically and to act accordingly. You know what I love about the Stonebriar congregation? Let me just give you a little sidebar here. At our office, when we change a subject, we go ding. So, for a moment, ding, we’re going to sidebar right here. I love it that you think.

I love it that you don’t tolerate entertainment. That you’re not here to be amused. You don’t come to watch a show. You come because you’re serious about stuff like this. I love that about you. I commend you for it.

Just as you’re serious about how you want to raise your children, you’re serious about your worship. Don’t ever get silly with worship. Don’t ever get lighthearted. There’s a great place for humor and you know me well enough to know I love the laughter of the Christian life, but there’s no place for silliness.

There’s no silliness in Romans 12:1 and 2. Present your bodies, get up on that altar. Now, in order to make that happen, something’s got to stop. Verse 2, you got to stop being conformed to the value system of the world. Remember this is a deliberate determination to think biblically, to think biblically and act accordingly.

Starts in the mind. Our age, called here the age, do not be conformed to this age. Aion is the Greek word translated here, unfortunately, world. We could call it the world system. It is all the stuff that makes up our culture. All the stuff that has gone into the culture where we now find ourselves. The world’s culture and the biblical truths are incompatible.

Let me name a few subjects. The purpose of life. Ask a secularist, ask a devoted believer, you’ll get two different answers. The goal and meaning of life. How to determine greatness. How to respond to evil, or how to handle wrong, or wrongdoing.

What about ambition and success? The secularist has one mentality, Christ offers the absolute opposite. How about honesty? Financial matters. Sexual matters, the whole realm of personal and private intimacy. Religion, attitudes, the whole issue related to failure, which God often sees as a steppingstone to growth.

The world works hard to keep us away from any thought of failure. I mean, that’s that’s for losers. No. I think I’ve learned the most in my life through failures, not successes. I’ve grown the most when the bottom has dropped out, not when I was near the mountain peak. So have you. It’s a difference in mentality.

And so, I’m to stop being conformed to this age, stop aping the world’s system, stop copying the mannerisms and the mentality and the speech and the responses and the habits of your culture. Stop doing that.

I challenge you to do that just this week coming up. Just try it for a day. Don’t use this age as a pattern to shape your life. If you want a little help, I suggest you buy Oz Guinness’s book titled “The Call,” The Call. In his chapter, excellent chapter, “An Audience of One,” he writes this.

It’s easy to buck a crowd, not too hard to march to a different drummer, but it’s truly difficult, perhaps impossible to march only to your own drummer. Most of us, whether we’re aware of it or not, do things with an eye to the approval of some audience or other. The question is not whether we have an audience, but which audience we have.

Christ-centered heroism does not need to be noticed or publicized. The greatest deeds are done before an audience of one, and that’s enough. Those who are seen and sung by an audience of one can afford to be careless about lesser audiences. I love that statement.

When you please the audience of one, you couldn’t care less about the audience of many. When asked why he was not stung by a vicious attack from a fellow member of Parliament, Winston Churchill replied, “If I respected him, I would care about his opinion, but I don’t, so I don’t.”

Truth be told, many of you have wasted many an hour this past week worrying about what somebody else thinks or says. Waste of time. That means your focus is off. It means your mind hasn’t been transformed. You’re more concerned about impressing or pleasing or feel-good stuff.

Guinness continues, “The modern world is light years from the Puritan world. We have moved from the inner directed, I-N-N-E-R, from the inner directed world of the Puritans in which calling acted as an inner compass to the other directed world of modern society in which our contemporaries are our real guides and a roving radar ranges to pick up their cues.” Is that well worded?

We see this in teenagers listening to their peers. Women following the beguiling images of womanhood in magazines and designer fashions. Politicians aping polls and slavishly following focus group findings. And get this, and pastors anxiously following the latest profiles of seekers and generations.

One large church pastor told me, “I’m haunted when I look into the eyes of my congregation and realize they are always only two weeks away from leaving for another church.” God help him. Imagine the misery of that man, concerned about who’s leaving.

Why? Because he wants to please them. I’ll guarantee you, some of them are leaving because they’re starving. They’re not fed the truth to live by and when necessary, to stand alone with. Ladies and gentlemen, the era in which we live and the ones to come will require that kind of standing alone.

You’ll get sucked into the vortex of our age if you do not perfect that discipline. Teach your children how to do it. How to think for themselves. How to act correctly with courtesy, good manners, graciousness. Just like the scriptures teach. And urge them not to be that concerned when the kids call them strange or weird. And I know it’s tough. Nobody enjoys that.

When you get older, you kind of get energized by it, but when you’re young, you don’t you don’t like it. You don’t. So, help them seriously. Help them with it. They don’t want to be a freak. So, help them know how to be a a young woman of God, uh before a watching world, it doesn’t quite know what to do with you when you’re like that.

Teach your girls how to keep boys’ hands off of their bodies. Teach them the value of dignity and privacy and how not to watch the things that will weaken their moral fiber. Teach them the joys and the benefits of virginity. Teach them that. Model that by what you watch and what you say.

This is a transformed mind we’re talking about. This is a different lifestyle. The world doesn’t even know it’s missing it until it sees it. And at that point, its mouth drops open in amazement. Just amazement.

Our postmodern era has removed the lines between right and wrong and blurred it so that it’s wrong only if you feel it’s wrong. Hey, everything that pleases me, I feel is right. But much of it’s wrong. It’s not about pleasing me.

I don’t answer to a God who will ask me, “Well, how’d you feel about your life? Did you like it? Did you did you feel good?” No, as a matter of fact, Lord, a lot of it was sacrificial. A lot of it I did because I know you wanted me to do it, but I didn’t feel like doing it. But I did it out of obedience. And I did it with a good attitude, Lord. Not nearly as much as I should have, but Lord, I learned in my later years, it’s not about pleasing me. That’s what He’s about here.

And even if you don’t know a soul that’s doing this, you be the one. You you be the one. You be the parent that does this. How do I do it? By the renewing of your mind. It’s one of those cooperative commands. We discern, listen how it’s done. We discern what is happening. Get this, we filter it through what we’re learning from the scriptures, which is the standard for life and practice. We filter what we are witnessing through what we have learned from the scriptures and we see it, we discern it, and then we choose, we make our decisions based on scriptural guidelines.

And then we determine to obey whatever it is we’re taught from the word of God. And that results in what? One will. Not yours. It results in proving the will of God is good, acceptable, in fact, bringing you to maturity. A well-formed maturity.

Now it’s time for an evaluation. Okay? Let me define that. I’m into definitions today. So, let me define evaluation as if you didn’t know. That’s an unguarded appraisal of my own spiritual condition. A vulnerable appraisal of how I’m doing. And you can answer for yourself. I have no idea how you’re doing.

I’m so busy working with God on the stuff in my life, the logs in my eyes, that the specs in yours are between you and him. So, you’ve got to do your own appraisal. How you doing? Let’s go back to the word of the called the body. My body. Good question. Am I allowing the culture to dominate or weaken any area?

That’s the question. Am I allowing the culture to dominate or weaken any area of my life? Wherever you find the answer yes, stop it. Stop doing it. Determine today, put the stake down, put a date on it, write it in the margin of your Bible. Stop it. Put it in your journal.

Either that, or it’ll be another feel-good sermon that you’ll want somebody else to listen to. But if you really take this to heart, you’ll stop it. You’ll stop doing it. You’ll stop the gossip. You’ll stop the slander. You’ll stop the negative habits. You’ll stop the lust. You’ll stop it.

You’ll quit it. You’ll go online and find a way to be accountable to another brother or sister, and you won’t go there anymore. You’ll take steps to stop you from doing what you know is weakening and dominating a part of your life.

Now, the mind. Question. Have I permitted this age to dull or shape my thinking? If I have, here’s the question to ask. What am I afraid of? Why have I gotten soft? When I know better than that? Why have I let myself get soft? Why do I let that man put his hands on my body and we’re not married?

Why do I permit this thing called living in when I know that’s not right before God? Why do I do that? What am I afraid of by taking a stand on this? Take the stand. Why do I seek the applause? Why do I always have to have people liking me? What am I afraid of?

What do you care if they like you or not? You’re not going to answer for them, or they for you. You say, “Well, man, I take this so far, I’ll lose my job.” You may. You may.

You got a boss that wants you to do wrong? What are you doing doing wrong? Quit that job. Confront the wrong. Get out of that. I talked about applause a moment ago. Some of you will remember this name, most of you won’t have a clue. Screen goddess, Marlene Dietrich? Five of us know who Marlene Dietrich was.

She was sort of the sex symbol of the late thirties and the forties and into the early fifties. Marlene Dietrich even issued recordings of her cabaret ovations. Get this. Two sides of nothing but applause. Good for you. That’s a good laugh.

Her biographer tells us that Marlene frequently gathered friends to listen and insisted on playing both sides to Judy Garland and Noel Coward. “That was Rio,” she would say. And then solemnly, “That was in Cologne. And this was Chicago.”

Yeah. I want to go, where do you vomit? Can you imagine being at a home where a gal plays two sides of a CD where everybody’s applauding? Get a life. I like it what Guinness says. The Puritans lived as if they swallowed gyroscopes. We modern Christians live as if we swallowed Gallup polls.

And do you remember what Martin Luther King Jr. said? And they killed him too. In his letter from a Birmingham jail, “In those days, the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion, it was a thermostat that transformed the moors of society.”

You got an audience of one. And guess what, if you don’t live for him while you’re alive, you’re still going to face him when you die. He’s not going to ask for a recording of the applause. He’s not going to check out how popular were, how many bucks you made, or where you lived or what car you drove. He’s going to check out your life. He’s going to check out your life.

And it’s going to be one exacting moment. When I was in the Marine Corps, one of the enduring memories was what was called the junk on the bunk test. Now, some of you are looking at me like, where in the world was that? Well, in the corps you put all your stuff.