Turning Point

Guest (Male): Welcome to Turning Point. Considering how far the world has fallen, no wonder God's word cautions believers not to be conformed to it. Today Dr. David Jeremiah examines the next part of that biblical command: be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Do you need some help with that? Then listen as David shares his special message, "When Changing Your Mind Could Save Your Life."

Dr. David Jeremiah: Today we’re going to look at a very familiar passage of scripture, Romans 12:1 and 2. Perhaps some new thoughts about that will encourage you to enter into the transformation process that Paul talks about as he writes to the Romans. We'll get to this message in just a moment, but I want to hasten to tell you we're into the last two days to make available our resource for the month of March.

That resource is a book called Understanding Biblical Prophecy. It's a 30-day interactive workbook and it will help you find clarity and hope in God's unwavering prophetic plan. In a world that's filled with uncertainty, the timeless truths of biblical prophecy offer profound comfort and divine perspective. Yet sometimes people don’t understand that the prophecies of the Bible are available to them.

We want you to know that and we've put this book together to help you discover it. We'd love for you to have your copy of it, and we'll send it to you when you send a gift of any size to help us during these last two days of March. We're so grateful for your support. We can’t get along without it. We can’t make it if you don’t help us. So thank you in advance for your gift and for your generosity. This book will be a blessing to you. Be sure to ask for it when you send your gift today.

We are getting ready to just meditate for two days on Romans 12:1 and 2. You know, sometimes the familiarity of a passage of scripture can rob us of its dynamic truth, and that's often true, I think, of these two verses. So I hope you will listen to these verses as if you've never read them before and ask God to use the truth that Paul wrote to the Romans to do for you what he prayed it would do for them. We're going to study it right now. Here’s Part 1 of "When Changing Your Mind Could Save Your Life."

Everywhere I go, people ask me this question: "Dr. Jeremiah, I'm a follower of Jesus Christ. How am I supposed to make this work in this paradigm in which we're living? How am I supposed to live for Jesus Christ when everything around me seems to be disintegrating, and even sometimes my own church doesn’t seem to stand up for the things that I've always believed?"

And I have been forced to answer that question because I've raised the issues. I was reminded when that question kept surfacing of a passage of scripture that I heard preached since I was a young person, a passage that was written to another generation of people who were living in a very similar time. Paul wrote these words to his Roman Christians who were living in the Roman Empire when the Roman Empire was extremely hostile toward Christianity.

After teaching in his letter the doctrines of the faith and explaining the place of Israel in God's plan, he began the second half of his book with these familiar words from Romans 12: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God."

If I could have asked the Lord to send me an answer to the question "What must I do in the midst of this confusing time?", there could be no clearer answer than these two verses. For here in Romans 12, we are given some marching orders, some instructions, if you will. First of all, we are told that we must make a radical decision.

The writer Paul says that we're to present our bodies to God. And he doesn’t just say it in a normal way. He begins by helping us understand that this is a crucial decision. He says, "I beseech you therefore, brethren." In other words, I beg you. One author has said, "I put my arm around you and I urge you to make this radical decision to present yourselves to God."

And this is one of Paul's favorite expressions when he wants to make something come through as vitally important. What he is saying is this: as you look back over your lives as Christians and the mercy and the kindness that God has shown to you, it is time for you now to step forward and be counted for your faith. I urge you to make a radical decision.

The secular world, according to J.I. Packer, never understands the Christian motivation. Faced with the question of what makes Christians tick, unbelievers maintain that Christianity is just the practice of self-serving purposes. They can’t comprehend that we might love our God so much that we are willing to put ourselves in His hands.

But that's what Paul has asked us to do. We can stand around and argue about all the things that are going wrong in our world and in our nation, but really before we can worry about all of that, maybe we need to take a good look at ourselves. The Bible says that if we're going to make it through this confusing time, we have to start with a radical decision on our own interest, in our own part.

I remember years ago listening to the radio and hearing Dr. James Kennedy preaching. And he was talking about what motivation ought to be in the hearts of believers. I remember this little phrase. He said every believer, when they come to Christ, ought to live the rest of their life as a "P.S. I love you" to God. I wonder if we’ve lost a little bit of that urgency of our faith and if we have decided that maybe somehow we can make it through these confusing times by not being too radical about our faith—kind of Sunday Christians or, as someone has recently said, "Secret Service Christians." Do you know any of those?

This word "present" is a word which means to bring your offering to the Lord. And it's a picture of Old Testament sacrifices where they would bring their sacrificial offering in their hands and present it to God. Paul uses that and he says, "I want you to take yourselves and I want you to present yourselves to God." When he speaks of our bodies, he's not talking about just skin and bones. He's talking about the totality of who we are.

He's talking about coming to the Lord and saying, "I don’t know what's going on out there in this world. I don’t know how I'm going to get through it, but Lord, the only way I'm going to get through it is if I am totally in Your control and at Your command. So I present my body totally to You for You to take control of my life."

There was a time as we were all growing up in our church groups, going to youth groups, that we would go to camp. Usually at the end of the camp, they would bring you around a fire. And you'd stand around a fire—very emotional time. And they'd give you a little piece of wood and they'd say, "If you're willing to give your life completely to Jesus Christ, give a little testimony and throw your little piece of wood on the fire."

I remember doing that. I remember every year I would say, "This is going to be the year I'm really going to serve the Lord with all my heart." But the next year I was back at that fire again, trying to figure out what went wrong the year before. But you know, there's something very special about that picture, isn't there? The willingness on the part of God's people to be totally committed to the cause.

That's not something I'm sure you haven’t heard before, but halfway Christianity is not going to cut it in this culture in which we live. It’s just not going to make it. Romans 6 says it this way: "Present yourselves to God as alive from the dead, and your members—your arms, your legs, your mind, your hearing—as instruments of righteousness to God."

In other words, what Paul is saying to us first of all from this passage of scripture, if we're going to function, if we're going to be faithful in this culture, you have to present everything there is about you to everything you know about Him. If you're wondering if you’ve really ever done that, if you're wondering, I promise you you haven’t. Because if you’ve done it, you know it.

If you’ve done it because it is such an important decision, you know that you’ve done it. It’s crucial, it’s comprehensive, but notice, this decision is also very costly. This is not for wimps. This is not a walk in the park, my friends. This is not easy believism. Notice what he says: "a living sacrifice."

You say, "Well, Dr. Jeremiah, that's a misnomer. That's a disconnect. That's an oxymoron. Sacrifices don’t live, they die." In the Old Testament, sacrifices were dead animals, but in the New Testament, sacrifices are living believers. And God says just as that animal was totally consumed because of its worship to the Lord, we are to be consumed by our commitment to Jesus Christ.

And I am passionate about this because I realize we're in a very, very vulnerable place as a nation and in our churches. If we continue down the road of just trying to be Christian enough so that we can get counted on the roll, we are going to be victimized by the culture in which we live. It's a crucial decision. It's a comprehensive one. It's a costly one.

And the Bible says it's a creative decision. It says we're to do this so that we can serve the Lord. How many of you know that once you say yes to the Lord for everything He may want you to do, He finds something for you to do? Amen. I had a young man come up to me and he said, "You know, Pastor, I hear you talk a lot about the will of God, and I want to know the will of God. But how do I know the will of God?"

And you know, we want to make the will of God some mysterious thing that maybe we have to go to an ashram or something and meditate for months to find the will of God. You know what? The will of God is the word of God. And if you're looking for the will of God for your life, here's where you start: find the will of God for tomorrow. And your tomorrows will turn into more tomorrows until pretty soon the will of God will be a part of your everyday experience.

My father used to tell me when we would talk about this as I was growing up, he would say, "David, get the car moving. It's a lot easier to steer a moving car than it is one that's dead stopped." And he was right. So let me ask you this question: what are you doing for the Lord? What are you doing right now? You say, "Well, I'm waiting for God to show me His will." No, you will never find it that way. Do the will that He has called you to do right now. It may be a simple thing. It may be something you think is insignificant. But if you will do what God tells you to do today, He will open up the entire vista of your tomorrows, and you will be in the will of God.

And then the Bible tells us that this is also a very credible decision. I love the way the scripture just unfolds this. It says when you come to the Lord and you present yourself to Him like this, it says this is logical. This is credible. It’s your reasonable service. And you know, the word "reasonable" in the language of the New Testament is almost exactly the word "logical." That's the word.

It’s logical to present your body to the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s logical to make this radical decision because the only way you're going to be able to get through the morass of our culture with your faith intact is to decide once and for all that Jesus Christ is to be the center of your life. And you're going to embrace Him with all that you have—nothing held back, nothing left on the floor that you wished you'd grabbed hold of on your way to Him. And you walk into that situation totally convinced that this is your life.

One author that I read when I was studying said true worship does not consist of elaborate and impressive prayers, intricate liturgy, stained glass windows, lighted candles, flowing robes, incense, and classical music. It does not require talent, skill, or leadership ability. Many of these things can be a part of your outward worship, but they are acceptable to God only in the heart and mind of the worshiper who has focused their attention on Him.

The only spiritual service that honors and pleases God is the loving, thoughtful, heartfelt devotion of His children who give themselves totally to Him with no reservations. So the first thing that we learn if we're going to make our way through this culture is we must make a radical decision. And I want to just stop here for a moment and ask you: have you made that radical decision?

Have you said to the Lord, "Lord, everything I am and everything I hope ever to be, I give it to you"? What I'm trying to help you understand is this: if you want to have one foot on one side of the fence and one foot on the other side of the fence, you want to be a Christian over here but live in the culture over here, you are in for a very discouraging and defeating experience. It is not possible to do that.

So, here’s the first thing: make a radical decision. Here’s the second thing from Romans 12: make a rational determination. Notice what it says in verse 2: "And do not be conformed to this world." Let me explain to you what that means. There are two words in this text. One is "conformed" and the other is "transformed." Everyone is either being conformed or transformed.

"Conformed" means that you are allowing the world to pressure you into being like they are. It says, "Do not be conformed to this world." Do not allow the world to pressure you into being like them. You say, "Well, how does that happen?" Well, let me give you some examples. One of the great tools, as you may well understand, is the television. The television is one of the enemy's great tools to desensitize us to what's happening in the world.

I remember as a young man growing up—and this will date me, so don’t take this too seriously—but I remember when television kind of started. That’s bad, isn't it? Probably shouldn’t admit that. And my father, who was a Baptist preacher, he wasn’t sure we should have one of those things in the house. I mean, there was all kinds of sermons being preached about how it was being operated by the prince of the power of the air, you know, Satan was in television.

And so my father finally, after a long time when we were going to the neighbor's house to watch TV, he figured he'd better get one at home. And so we got one of those with the little round screen, remember those? And my father would sit there and we'd watch television together. Every time a commercial came on for anything he thought was wrong—if a cigarette commercial came on or a beer commercial—he'd jump up and turn it off. And then he'd turn it back on after it was over.

We didn’t even have remote controls then. I was the remote control some of the time. I had to get up and do it. He’d say, "David, turn that off." And I'd turn it off. We laugh at that now because it seems rather crazy and extreme. But isn't it interesting, men and women, what we tolerate today that we would never have tolerated in another time in our life? How does that happen?

That happens because we allow the world around us to squeeze us into its mold. Kenneth Wuest, who is a wonderful teacher of the Greek language, puts that phrase this way: "Stop assuming an outward expression which is patterned after this world, an expression which does not come from who you are in your inner being." If we are not careful, in order that we might fit in and that we might not look odd to those around us, and so that we will be accepted by our peers, we allow ourselves a lot of latitude in what it really means to be a deeply committed Christian.

The Bible says in order for us to get through this situation that we're in, we have to determine in our minds that we are not going to let the world push us into their way of doing things. That's where this battle is fought. And I just want to say to all of you parents who have young kids: if you are not monitoring what is happening in your family through the television and now through the internet, you are just setting the enemy free to pressure your children into doing the things that the world wants them to do.

So, first of all, we have to make a radical decision, don’t we? We have to determine that we're going to put our lives in the hands of God with no reservations. Then we have to make this determination: first of all, that we won’t be conformed, but that we will be transformed. Let me tell you the difference between conformed and transformed. "Conformed" is from the outside in, and "transformed" is from the inside out.

If you want to keep from being conformed to the world, you have to take care of the inner space of your life. And he tells us how to do that. The rest of this verse says that the Christian is to be transformed. And the Greek word is metamorphosis. The Lord wants to do a metamorphosis in your life. The only way to prevent the outward shape of our life from being fashioned like the world is to take care that the inward spirit of our being is transformed regularly, routinely.

And the Bible tells us it's by the renewing of our minds. Notice this is in the present tense. And the writer is saying: don’t be being conformed, but be being transformed. Let this be the process you go through. And the only way to do this, he tells us, is through this process of renewing our minds. So here we are ready for this third thought. This all begins with a radical decision. This radical decision is I'm presenting my body to the Lord.

It continues with a rational determination: I will not be conformed, I will be transformed. And that's all good theology and it's good to know, but now we get down to where the rubber meets the road and how this affects you and me and what this means to us. We come thirdly to this rigorous discipline. How many of you know that discipline is a word that's falling out of our vocabulary? Nobody likes that word.

But notice what it says: "by the renewing of your mind." You are transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now if you look up the word "renewal" either in the English dictionary or you follow it through to its meaning in the text of the language of the New Testament, you will discover that the word renewal means renovation. That's what it means. We may not understand renewal, but we do understand renovation.

How many of you have ever renovated a house? When you renovate a house, what do you do? You take out all the old stuff and you replace it with some new stuff, right? Usually you buy the new stuff before you get rid of the old stuff, and you have the new stuff ready so that on this particular day when everything's done and the paint's on and the carpet's there, you take out all the old stuff and you get rid of it and you bring in the new stuff. You renovate your house.

And this is what happens when we have our minds renewed. We take all the stuff that previously occupied our minds and we replace it with that which is in line with God's plan for our lives. When we fill our minds with the word of God, that contains the mind of God and it helps us discover His will for our lives. You may wonder why I've given my life to doing what I do.

Somebody asked me the other day, "What do you do, Jeremiah?" I said, "Well, I study the word, I preach the word, I record the word, I televise the word, I write books about the word, we make CDs about the word, we put the word on the internet, we've got a word app. My whole life is about the word of God." You know why? It is the only thing that God has given us that can help us get through the wilderness to the promised land. Amen.

I am bullheaded about the word. I don’t take much time to do anything else; I just teach the word of God. There is no blessing in the words of David Jeremiah, but there is a blessing that is attached to the word of God. God says He will not allow His word to return unto Him void. So I concentrate on the word of God. And it's amazing when you do that over a long period of time that you can look back over your shoulder and see what God has done in your own life and in the lives of people that have been touched by the word of God.

Now, here's what happens. Here's how the renewal process works. First of all, there are two agents involved. There's the Holy Spirit and the word of God. The Holy Spirit, we are told, is a renewing agent. Titus 3:5 says, "not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit."

Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot become a Christian without the Holy Spirit and the word of God. It's impossible. You may not have known that was happening, but everyone who's a Christian is a Christian because of two things: the word of God and the Holy Spirit. And get this: you cannot be renewed in your mind without the Holy Spirit and the word of God. In fact, in the New Testament, you keep running into this theme. Ephesians 4:23 says, "renewed in the spirit of our minds." The word of God is taken in by listening to the word of God. And when we do that, the word of God gets into our system and it begins to renew us.

When you listen to this message, there's a pretty noticeable echo because I preached this message in a big arena in Florida. But the message is so real and it rings true even the echo rings true in our hearts as we listen to it. We'll have the end of this tomorrow as we finish out the month of March together.

Friends, I'm so grateful for your faithfulness in supporting this ministry. I don’t know how we could ever have done what we've done to stretch the word of God out across the world into so many countries and here in this nation in every county. In every place, there's hardly a place where you cannot listen to this on the radio, on networks and local stations, the internet. So thank you for being a part of helping us spread the word of God—the unchanging word of God to a very changing world. We're so grateful. And I hope you'll join us as we enter into the next series of messages after Easter. And thank you again for being a part of what we're doing. See you next time right here on Turning Point.

Guest (Male): For more information on today's special message from Dr. Jeremiah, please visit our website, where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly Turning Points magazine and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org/radio. That's davidjeremiah.org/radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993.

Ask for your copy of David's new book, Understanding Biblical Prophecy, a 30-day Bible study. It's a powerful resource and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James Versions, available in a variety of handsome cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, davidjeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow for more of Dr. Jeremiah's special message, right here on Turning Point.