Our teaching scripture this morning comes from the book of
Romans, chapter 12, verses one through three.
I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, on the
basis of God's mercy, to present your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable
act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age,
but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that
you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and
acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me, I
say to everyone among you, do not think of yourself more
highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober
judgement, each according to the measure of faith that God has
assigned. God bless the reading of the
Word. How are you guys doing this
morning? Good.
Somebody's doing good. I love that.
Three really quick stories to set the scene.
The first story you may have caught in the news is about the
Phillies. Karen, did you anyone ever?
Do you guys see this in the news?
So a few weeks ago, there's a story making its rounds on the
socials with video footage of a woman at a Philadelphia Phillies
game who escalated a situation when she and another fan both
went for a home run ball bouncing around in the stands.
And what seemed to sort of unfold is an otherwise normal
baseball reality where fans sort of scramble for the home run
ball that's hitting the stands. But the Philly is Karen, as the
Internet had named her. Unfortunately, her her real name
is not Karen. That's like a meme kind of
thing. So somehow thought that she had
been swindled out of the ball because she touched it first.
And not wanting to further escalate the situation further,
the man who had just handed the ball to his son released the
ball into the hands of the woman and tried to sort of move on.
But of course, the cameraman kind of lingered on the scene
and the Internet did its thing and it made the news all over
the world. Turns out it was this kids 10th
birthday and she basically stole the ball.
This middle-aged woman kind of lost the plot, right?
And, you know, these are not the kinds of things that tend to
really linger with me. But I found myself thinking
about this woman for days. Like, I sort of wondered what it
was like for her to bring the ball home, to watch herself on
the news, to go on her evening after dinner, walk in the
suburbs, to watch her neighbors sort of, like, point out to her
in that sort of embarrassing way, knowing that, you know, she
had just blown up the Internet. And I found myself wondering if
she had the kind of friends around her who might try to care
for her a little bit, like, hey, girl, get a little bit of sleep
or, you know, maybe some therapy, you know, like, you
just blew your life up in some ways on the Internet.
And I and I imagine that she was probably having a moment
watching sort of her worst behavior on the television or in
her Twitter feed, watching the very worst of her behavior on
display for the world and wondering what it might be like
for her, you know, after a couple glasses of wine to sort
of sit with the fact that she had behaved in such a way.
I mean, it was a 10 year old kids birthday, right?
Did anybody see this? Is this just like showing up for
me? OK, we got a couple people.
I promise I don't have this much time on my hands.
I usually don't like dive super, super deep into the realities
that are happening on on the news feeds.
But for some reason this one kind of caught my eye.
So that's the first story. Second story is the workaholic
father. When I was in my mid 20s, maybe,
you know, 5 or 6 years into marriage, two kids running
around in diapers, I was trying to make an early career shift,
you know, early 2000's, the coffee industry was booming and
I decided to, you know, put up my apron and take my philosophy
degree elsewhere. Thank you very much.
It was my first job outside of college and ministry.
And I remember that it was a Friday evening and I was sitting
in this little red chair that we had in the living room and my
first born child was playing on the floor, giggling and dancing
and laughing. And here I was, like, cranking
out a couple of more emails right before dinner.
And there was this moment where, you know, she is just full and
boisterous. And she looks up at me and she
just like, with just the most honest sincerity, says to me,
you know, of course, vying for my attention as I was sitting
there in my laptop. She just looks at me.
And then she comes and she puts her hand on my knee.
And with genuine confusion, she says to me, Daddy, why aren't
you playing with me? And you know, it was one of
those moments. And you know, I'm not just
talking to the parents. Almost all of us have these
moments in our lives where we know that whatever is unfolding
right here in this moment is really important.
It touched something really deep in me.
It was it was one of those moments that I know did
something to me because in my mind's eye and my imagination, I
can take myself back to that moment with almost photographic
memory. Daddy, why aren't you playing
with me? This, this question, spoken out
of the mouth of your first born in the early years of parenting,
felt like it had been shot with an arrow of truth seeking right
into my heart. And my reply to her was I, I
don't know why I'm not playing with you.
And I closed the computer and I got down on the floor and I
began to play. But man, the damage had been
done. I I felt so exposed because I
actually didn't have a good answer to why I wasn't playing
with her. And more importantly, why was it
that I had been working so compulsively for like a long
time? Since as long as I could like,
since I was like 8, like I could just, I could just feel that
sort of sense of like I've got a problem that I need to deal
with. So the first story is a public
story. You can go and you can Google
that on the Internet and you can fall down that rabbit hole.
The second story about the workaholic father, that's
personal. That's part of my story.
It's part of what God has been healing in me for the past 20
years. And I just want to say to you
that without a life with God, I am sure that I would have become
one of those fathers who gave themselves to work and climbed
some corporate ladder and lived with the regret of not spending
enough time with his children. I would have become that.
And men, I just am so grateful that I did not become that.
Thankfully, God and His grace has healed and continues to heal
so much in me related to my relationship with work.
And let me promise you, it's not quite done yet.
There are still things that I am working out.
I'm looking at a couple of my friends that know this about me.
I'm still working out this relationship that I have with
work and I'm aware that it will last until the day that I die,
that God is going to be healing me over and over and over.
So the third story is 1. I wonder if you might have.
It's a universal story. And by that what I mean is that
I bet that every single one of us has some moment in your life
where you look at the way that you've been thinking or the way
that you've been behaving. And after a little bit of time,
you take a step back and you say to yourself, what was I
thinking? Anybody ever had this moment
where you just, you know, you just you just wonder like what,
what in the heck was going on? Like, you dig your heels a
little too hard in conversation with your spouse or your
roommate and the whole evening blows up.
Any, anyone have this ever happened?
OK, a handful of us and you wake up the next morning and you're
like, what got into me? What was I thinking?
Or someone needs the last cookie out of the bag and puts the bag
back into the pantry, guessing what I'm talking about, right?
And you go in for the cookie that you think is in the bag,
but the bag is empty. And you grab the bag and you
want a cookie. And you have this sort of
irrational level of irritation that rises up in you.
But of course you don't let it out because that would be
ridiculous. Or maybe you do let it out and
it is ridiculous and you wake up the next morning and you're just
like, man, why was I so engrossed in getting that
cookie? And why am I so upset about it
being an empty bag in the pantry, for example, by the way?
But you asked yourself this question.
What was I thinking? So this question and this story
is the story of the human condition.
It's a story that the apostle Paul talks about in this really
long letter to the churches in Rome.
And there's this section of that story that Parker touched on a
few weeks ago where Paul is really honest with his readers.
And he essentially says, look, friends, there are all kinds of
things that I wish I didn't do and yet I find myself doing
those things and there are a whole another set of things that
I really want to do and yet I can't get myself to do.
And I just don't really understand myself.
And then he gets to this section in the letter, which is our
teaching text for this morning. And I and I think could help
shed some light on the three stories that I shared, the
public story, the personal story, and the one that I think
has probably surfaced in your mind as we've been talking.
The apostle Paul says this to the churches in Rome.
He says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters,
by the mercy of God, to present your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual
worship. Do not be conformed to this
world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that
you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and
acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me, I
say to everyone among you, not to think of yourselves more
highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober
judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has
assigned. Lots going on there.
But this morning I want to zoom in on Paul's appeal to our
transformation and the kind of sober judgement, sobriety, that
the apostle Paul is inviting us to consider with our life.
Are you? Are you guys with me?
OK, SO3 parts the pattern, the passions and the transformation.
And first up is the the pattern. He says do not be conformed to
this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
For much of the letter up to this point.
So we're about halfway through the letter, and for much of the
letter up to this point, Paul has been building a framework to
try to set out in front of the churches in Rome how he has come
to understand the life and the death and the resurrection of
Jesus. And he's doing so in light of
the fact that the story of the Scriptures has thus far
primarily been a story of one group of people, one nation, the
Jewish people, descendants of the patriarch figure Abraham,
that we read about in the Scriptures.
It's a story about their relationship with God.
And yet what's becoming clear to the apostle Paul as time goes
on, as he thinks about the teachings of Jesus, as he
watches the Holy Spirit expand the church, which we read about
in the book of Acts. What Paul has a keen insight to
is it's really clear that what God was doing with this one
person that we read about in the Scriptures or this one nation,
he's actually intent to expand that throughout all peoples,
crossing the barriers of race and gender and nationality and
socio economic status. It's meant to go to everyone.
And so Paul is crafting his letter in the book of Romans in
a way that can appeal to everyone.
And he's thinking to himself, what could I possibly talk about
that everyone could relate to? And believe it or not, he he
begins with some version of this universal experience that we all
have. Like, what was I thinking?
What's going on inside of me? Why did I behave in that way?
And now his way of, of putting it to the Romans is much more
complex than this, of course. But what he's appealing to you
is this universal experience that we all have, that there are
so many times that we behave in ways that we ourselves come to
realize are just. It's not that great.
Somebody should have said, Amen. I thought, where's Erica when
you need her, right. This is how CS Lewis articulated
this in his classic Mere Christianity, He says.
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make.
First, the human beings all over the earth have this curious idea
that they ought to behave in a certain way and cannot really
get rid of that idea. Secondly, that they do not in
fact behave in that way. They know the law of nature.
They break it. These two facts are the
foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and about the
universe that we live in. Essentially, Lewis is giving
sort of a summary of the apostle Paul, which is this universal
experience that there are things that I say and things that I do
and the things that I wish that I could do or stop doing.
And I find myself pretty confused at times when I step
back and I get some perspective and I watch the way that I have
been thinking or behaving and I'm just like, what is going on?
So, friends, whether we are failing to be the person that we
want to be in public and getting cancelled on the Internet, or
whether we're failing in private and missing out on the kind of
life that we know that we really want.
What Paul is saying is that there is some really good news
you guys ready for, like the good news.
OK, There is a way of orienting to the life and the death and
the resurrection of Jesus, of being empowered and indwelt by
the Spirit of God, and of being renewed from the inside out such
that the shape of your life begins to be transformed.
That's the good news, that you can experience transformation in
all of the places that you don't understand about your life.
He appeals to us and he says do not be conformed to this world.
Other translations say do not be conformed to the pattern of this
world, which brings out the sort of fuller sense of the original
Greek here which has baked into this word, this idea of a
blueprint or a schematic diagram.
Paul says that there's a there's kind of a pattern to the way
that the world works, the way that the humans functions.
There's the schema that everyone is following that we can all
relate to. The pattern is that we all find
ourselves behaving in ways that we wish that we didn't.
And the way that Jesus says this is by asking people to imagine
this really broad Rd. Imagine like a four lane highway
wide road, and almost everybody that you can imagine is walking
down this four lane highway Rd. But Jesus says this way leads to
destruction. And then there's this other
really narrow path and a few people choose to walk this path,
which is the way of Jesus. And this leads to life.
Paul is appealing to us in this letter of the Romans to get on
the narrow pathway. Be transformed by the renewing
of your mind, he says. But friends, listen, here's
here's some more good news. His appeal is not just some
version of try harder to be good.
It's something more like this. Allow yourselves to receive from
God the gift of being transformed.
Allow yourself to receive from God the gift of being
transformed. So the way that Paul wrote this,
he's able to say it this way, it would have caused his his
readers to both understand that I am going to participate in
this transforming work of God and I am going to passively
allow myself to be transformed. So for you grammar nerds out
there, Paul puts this particular word that is translated be
transformed in what he is called the middle passive tense.
Which means that Paul is not appealing to his readers to take
on the work of transforming themselves, but rather he says
position yourself, which is an active role to receive the
transformation, which is a passive role.
Has anybody ever gotten a massage?
Isn't it the most amazing thing that you can possibly some of
you are like, Nope, no one comes back from getting a massage
thinking that they've just knocked it out of the park with
that massage. Like, man, I just did a really
good job massaging my back. First of all, it's impossible to
do that. But if you've ever gotten a
massage, you know the feeling. You get up off the massage
table, you look at the person who's just spent an hour working
out the last six months of stress from your shoulders and
the hips, and all you can think about is when is the next time
that I get to do this? No one is ever thinking of
themselves as the one who accomplished the result.
But you did book the appointment and you did show up and you did
lay down on that table and you did tell them exactly where to
apply the pressure. Are you guys getting with me
here? Allow yourself to receive from
God the gift of being transformed.
So how does how does this happen?
You might be wondering? Well, Paul says it happens
through the renewal of our mind and this brings us to Part 2,
which is the passions. The passions the one of the
earliest pastor of theologians to begin to think about the
question of how do we participate with God and
allowing ourselves to be transformed was a man named
Evagrius. Now Evagrius was from the region
of of Pontus, and he was appointed A Deacon by.
One of the early fathers named Gregory of Nauseansis.
I love how they just said where they're from, like, like John of
Clintonville. We should just start, you know,
that's you trademark. Yeah.
So. So Gregory of Nauseansis
appoints Vagrius a Deacon. Gregory himself was one of those
guys who labored in the theological work that surrounded
the the Nicene Creed. So I'm just trying to give you
some contextual kind of parameters for like what is
actually happening. Vagarius was basically at the
center of the life of the church as anyone could have been.
His growing reputation as a brilliant preacher and rising
theologian was in full swing when he encountered a full on
crisis with his own interior life.
He be he became aware of his own passionate infatuation with a
married woman in Constantinople this close to having an affair.
So his career as a pastor was like rising up and to the right,
but emotionally on the inside, he was falling apart.
So imagine like a present day pastor with a freshly signed
book contract in hand, riding the wave of popularity.
And rather than ignore the only noticeable to him, unsettledness
in his own soul, he did what we wish every person in ministry,
leadership facing these kind of temptations would do.
He immediately left the ministry.
He fled the city, and he found the help that he needed.
This is who we're talking about. And through his own relational
network, he reached out to a woman who was known to be an
elder in the church, a leader in the church at the time, and her
name was Melania. The elder Melania had divested
all of her wealth and established several Christian
communities in the region of Palestine.
And so a vaguerus went to go spend time with Melania.
And Melania basically spends some time with a vaguerus and
says, look, buddy, you've got more work that you need to do on
the inside of you than you have realized.
I want to encourage you to pay attention to what's happening
there. And so she encouraged him to
move towards paying attention to all of that stuff.
And a vaguerus gave himself to that work.
I mean, he essentially became one of the earliest
practitioners of what we would today called psychology, the
study or the science of the soul.
Imagine friends living in a world where none of the
frameworks or the theories of psychology that we have were
around. Just just let yourself think
about that for a second. You're a human being in the
ancient world, which means that there are all sorts of things
that are going on inside of you, and there's really no one there
to talk to about it. Fears, anxieties, sexual
fantasies, overwhelming bouts of anger, unhealthy attachments to
food or how much was in the cupboard or the overindulgence
of wine on a regular basis. Imagine that there's no one
around to talk to about those kinds of things that are
circulating inside of you. You know, like the simple
observation that, you know, maybe you're kind of obsessed
with how much food is in the cupboard because when you were
five, there was a famine. And now you can't stop checking
about how much storage you have and how long it's going to last.
So this kind of thought would never have come to anyone's mind
in the ancient world. They're they're, they're their
best guess for why you were angry or sort of a little
listless or moving around in the world like so angry that the
cookie got stolen. Their best guess was because you
had too much blood. And so they would just like tap
a vein, drain some blood and hope for the best.
That was sort of like your mental health regime back in the
ancient world. So there were no theories of
attachment. There's no young in psychology.
There's no one talking about the ego.
None of that stuff was sort of in the for no one knew why we
had so much chaos going on inside of us.
Does this make sense? This is the landscape of the
soul in the 4th century. I'm just trying to paint the
picture for you. So a vagrius.
He began to meet with the spiritual director.
He formed a group of spiritual friends in his community, and he
began to take notes about the kind of afflictive thoughts that
entered his mind. And he interviewed his friends
around him, and he asked them to share their own observations
about the kinds of thoughts and outsized desires that his
friends were navigating in their own souls.
He was trying to get to the heart of those what was I
thinking moments and he began to write about it and he began to
build upon this idea of what the ancient Greeks called the
passions. Now hang with me here guys.
The passions are desires and attitudes and the sometimes
obsessive emotions and thoughts that are artwork inside of us.
So if you imagine that there's like a little place inside of
you that is full of energy and desire and resistance, and God
has made this place in you for life and vitality and goodness
and love and courage to flow out, imagine there's like a
little factory of desire at work inside of you.
You got it. It's like churning.
It's designed to be a factory of all of the thoughts and the
feelings that push out into the world.
But because of sin, a lot of that energy is dissipated and
fragmented and disordered. And this disorder or this
fragmentation of that little desire factory results in
outsized emotional responses when we don't get what we want,
like the baseball or not being able to resist the stuff that we
don't really want. It causes us to place like a
really high value on something that we necessarily shouldn't
place a high value on, Like the workaholic father that's trying
to find his worth in his accomplishments.
You guys with me, these passions, all those fragmented,
flared up versions of our desires, or the sometimes
obsessive thoughts and emotions that are just like you guys,
anybody with me? You guys, OK, we all know we
have these, right? Or those intrusive thought
patterns and the place from which they originate, says
Vagrius. And the whole swell of
theologians after him is what the ancient world called the
mind. It's like the combination of the
mind and the heart. It's in the Greek, it was, it
would have been called this, the noose.
It's the same word that the apostle Paul uses when he says
be transformed by the renewing of your mind, by the renewing of
that little factory of desire inside of you.
Participate with God in allowing yourself to be transformed by
the renewing of your mind. Friends, there is a deep place
inside of us where our desires are born, and they come out as
thoughts and emotions and urges and thinking and feeling and
exerting one's will into the world is really good, by the
way. So we're not trying to shut the
factory down. Can you hear that?
We're not trying to get you to feel less or desire less, but
what the apostle Paul says is that this factory in the
thoughts and the feelings and the urges that come from there
is in need of transformation by the love of God.
It's broken so that we can actually see what it is that God
desires for our life. That's the result.
The passions are the categories and the groupings of these
desires and thoughts and emotions in us that can become
disordered and fragmented. And basically ever since the 4th
century when Evagrius made his list, the entirety of the
theological tradition and more recently the psychological
tradition in the modern age has basically said it kind of checks
out. This guy made a pretty good
list. You guys want to see a vaguis
list? You ready for it?
OK, here we go. Gluttony, lust, greed,
despondency, anger, acedia, Vainglory, and pride.
And over the next eight months, not 8 months, good gosh, you're
like, I'm out. Over the next 8 weeks, which is
still a fair bit of time, we're going to take a deeper look at
each of these 8 passions of the soul.
And I know what you're thinking. That looks like a little bit of
a heavy list. Are we really going to talk
about gluttony and lust and pride?
And we are. But here's what I want to say to
you. If you have been around at all
for any amount of time over the last couple of years, there
hasn't been more than a couple of Sundays where you haven't
heard someone from the stage talk about how much God loves
you and is for you, about God's kindness and generosity and
extravagant love. And over the next 8 weeks, as we
dig into the interior workings of the way that these eight
complex array of thoughts and emotions can work in us, we're
going to continue to be reminding one another of the
extravagant love of God for you. So we began our teaching liturgy
just after the silence by reading the following words
together in our time. You are infinitely loved by God,
and God's infinite love is in the process of healing
everything in you that clings to false things.
The invitation of God is to allow God to be the divine
physician, and the medicine of God is God's own love poured out
into your heart through the Holy Spirit.
I just want you to take note of a couple of words.
Healing Physician in medicine, these, these lists of eight
passions in the 6th century, they, they took on a slightly
different turn and they eventually filtered down in the
Western theological tradition, particularly in the Catholic
stream as the seven deadly sins. And it's true there's some sin
involved in all of this, just like give you the punchline.
But the earlier tradition talks about this mix of afflictive
thoughts and disordered emotions as a wound, which I have found
really helpful. It can help us keep in view that
the reality of sin has been dealt with on the cross.
And there is a finality that finality to that.
There's no condemnation for any of this in your life.
And so if you're looking at that list and you're just like, I
don't know that I'm going to come, what I want to say to you
is that whatever sin has been a part of your life or will
continue to be, it is already dealt with.
But sin leaves behind a wound, and that wound has a way of
seeping and hurting, and most of us will reach for just about
anything to try to relieve the pain and seal it up or distract
ourselves from feeling it. These passions are our desires
and our thoughts and our emotions that have become
distorted based upon the wounds that the sin has left behind.
And all of this gets expressed in very culturally bound ways,
right? So Paul appeals to us, in view
of God's mercy, to offer our bodies to God and worship and to
break free from the patterns of this world by allowing our mind
to be transformed by the love of God.
And he's writing in a context where the weekend event was the
Colosseum. We're like the anger that people
were carrying could get stirred up by watching some people get
slaughtered on a Friday night. He's writing in the context
where older men would use their wealth and power to employ
teenage boys as sexual partners or a prostitution was quite
common as a as an outlet for one's lust.
In an our cultural context, all of these things get expressed
through things like food addiction and numbing out with
alcohol and drugs or pornography or online gambling or those
hours of scrolling. The time that we wish that we
could get back, but we get sucked in over and over again
because we're trying to self medicate the emotions and the
desires that are fragmented inside of us and leaking out all
of these different ways. But the self medicating with
food and drink or getting caught up in pornography or clinging
really tightly to that paycheck or that inheritance that's
coming your ways. These are all symptoms, friends,
of a deeper issue that sin has left behind.
A wound with trauma and grief that we've ignored and all of
the kinds of stuff. Does this make sense?
And there is a healing on offer and there is a physician that
you can trust, and the medicine is God's love being poured out
into you through the Holy Spirit.
And this brings us to the transformation.
And we'll close with this. I know that some of us are
looking at this list and there's already maybe some resistance
that surfaces. Anybody feeling a little
resistance when you look at that list?
Thank you for your honesty. You know that there are things
on this list at work in your life.
And I know that there are things on this list that are work in
me. But here's the question that I
want to ask you is when is the last time that you imagined what
it might be like to be free, like to be healed of it?
Paul says. For by the grace given to me, I
say to everyone among you, to not think of your soul
yourselves more highly than you ought to think, but to think
with sober judgement, each according to the measure of
faith that God has assigned. What might it look like for you
and I over the next 8 weeks to be willing to simply take a
really honest look about what is true about our life in the
context of loving community? In a context where we believe
that the only thing that can possibly change you and rescue
you is the love of God so that you may discern what is the will
of God? I got to tell you, I think in
all of my years of being a pastor, I think the question
that I most receive from people is I just don't know what God
wants. What is God's will?
What does God want me to do? What's on offer is this reality
that the passions, they distort our vision about ourselves and
about others and about the world in which we live.
Which means that all of those thoughts and those desires and
those urges that we've grabbed onto have a way of bending us
away from the desires of God for our life.
But as we're transformed, our vision gets healed and we come
to see and discern what the will of God is.
So that's what's at stake, guys. It's like we asked the question,
God, what do you want from my life?
What he wants is what is good and acceptable and perfect.
And yet we just can't see it because we're so bound up.
The factory is like an OverDrive in the wrong direction, so I
want to close just with an invitation.
What would it be for you as you sit with all of this, to just
offer yourselves to God as a living, alive sacrifice, To say,
God, do with me what you want to do with me.
I want to invite the worship team to come, the prayer
ministry team begin to make their way around the edges.
We always want to make room for prayer.
I want to invite you to stand as we begin making our way to
worship. And I have a version of the
liturgy that we began with in first person that I want to lead
us in reading together. So if you're able to stand, go
ahead and stand as we head towards worship.
It's OK if you also want to sit together.
I want to invite us to read this out loud.
I am infinitely loved by God, and God's infinite love is in
the process of healing everything in me that clings to
false things. The invitation of God to me is
to allow God to be the divine physician.
The medicine of God is God's own love, poured out into my heart
through the Holy Spirit. Friends, if there's any way in
which you just desire to give yourself to God this morning as
a response to what you are hearing and what's absolutely
happening in your heart, we would love to pray for you.
Whatever way you would like to respond, we would be present
too. So let's worship together.