Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
Socrates’ character Plato claimed that life is enriched not so much by good answers as it is by good questions. As a seminarian I was given such a question by Dr. Gerhard Forde when he asked in a lecture: “Now that you don’t have to do anything for salvation, what are you going to do?” The answer I found is in Paul’s letter to the Romans.
It was Paul who first raised the question when he argued that “a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (Romans 3:28). “Are we to sin, because we are not under the law but under grace?” (Romans 6:15). Paul’s answer is found most explicitly in Romans 12-15, where Paul gives specific directives concerning Christian behavior.
Selections from these chapters are the second lesson reading for the last week of August and the first three weeks in September. With that in mind, I’ve chosen to comment on Romans 12:2 in this month’s newsletter article.
“Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
This verse is put in the passive voice: not “transform your life” but “be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” What could that mean?
Paul has just completed his probe into the greatest mystery of all, the issue of election. Those who strove with might and main to attain righteousness were cut off; yet those who did not strive were welcomed. “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!…For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Romans 11:33, 36)
Transformation is God’s business: “be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God.” God will have his way with us in the end.
This means a whole lot of things. Paul has a long list in the verses that follow: Let love be genuine; bless those who persecute you; live in harmony; repay no one evil for evil; feed your enemy; overcome evil with good; be subject to the higher powers-any one of which is enough to occupy a lifetime.
For now I am going to focus on just one, the one which heads the whole list: “By the grace given to me,” Paul says, “I bid everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought, but to think with sober judgment” (Romans 12:3).
Interesting that should come first. One of the great problems of the modern age in which we live is the high inflation rate. We blather easily about progress and change and growth and so on, until the whole enterprise, like gigantic balloon that rises only by virtue of its own hot air, eventually goes too high and comes crashing to earth. I suppose that is precisely the transformation, to be stripped of our illusions, to gain some clarity about who we are and what we are up to.
For what do we have in the end but the shocking realization that we are saved by grace alone? What do we have other than that promise, as Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 3, that we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another. Believe it that you may taste what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
I hope your summer went well, and you are prepared to move into this fall season.
Pastor Dan