The War Won by Surrender: A Sermon on Romans 12:1–2

By Jim Townsend

Jim Townsend teaches at Judson College and is a 1964 alumnus of Emmaus Bible College.

Introduction

For more than twenty years I was employed by a large Christian curriculum publishing firm called David C. Cook Publishing Company in Elgin, IL. This publisher was named for its founder, David C. Cook I. Mr. Cook was once the speaker for Christianity at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. He had been attending Wheaton College as a young man, expecting to enter pastoral ministry, when he got splinters in one eye, virtually (but temporarily) blinding him. This tragedy revamped the course of his life, eventually redirecting him to found a major Christian publishing company.

During his youth, David C. Cook I had prayed a one-line prayer frequently. His prayer was, “Oh, God, make all you can of my life.” And God did just that, using him to produce millions of pieces of Christian literature that have changed lives. D. L. Moody (a contemporary of Cook) had a similar experience, wanting to be the Christian wholly sold out to the Lord.

Someone has said that the Christian victory is the only battle won by surrender. That aphoristic axiom gets at the heart of Romans 12:1–2 where Paul pleads with his Roman readers to undergo a total transformation (physical and psychical) of their personhood. Present your very self to God in an all-out way: this is the urgent exhortation of the arch-apostle to all of us.

A Sacrifice To Be Performed, Rom. 12:1

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. [1]

The Logical Leverage Of The Sacrifice

An apostle in the spiritual sphere was something like a general or commanding officer in the military realm. As an apostle he could “command” (see 2 Thess. 3:6, 12, 14). In Philemon, Paul says he could “order” his reader (vs. 8), but rather he “appeals” to him (vs. 9). In Philemon 9 Paul used the exact Greek word found in Romans 12:1 (Παρακαλῶ parakalō, “urge”). Perhaps to stretch the point we might picture the writer here as Paul the beggar—rather than as helmeted commander-in-chief. To have someone, such as the president, get down on his knees to plead with you (when he obviously doesn’t have to do so) is impressive, to say the least.

Every lever needs a fulcrum—a place from which to pry. Grace is not a have-to mode of approach. Consequently, the touching manner of Paul’s appeal is exquisitely aligned with the tender mercies of God’s initiative toward us (“in view of God’s tender mercies”). J. B. Phillips has the wording here “with eyes wide open to the mercy of God.” These mercies (οἰκτιρμῶν, oiktirmōn) are linked backward by the hinge-word “therefore.” What is “therefore” there for? It ties in with what comes before in the preceding context. In Romans 11:30–32 “mercy” is used four times in three verses (although in each case “mercy” is some form of the eleos word-family rather than oiktirmos).

Although the word “mercy” itself is not used explicitly in Romans 11:33–36, certainly the overtures and overtones of God’s mercy are resonant within the “depths” of God’s untrackable, untraceable, unsearchable ways. Romans 11:33–36 is one of Paul’s many praise geysers that jet upward from the wealth of his writings (see, for example, 1 Tim. 1:17; 6:15–16; and 2 Tim. 4:18b). John Phillips penned that God “has, as it were, besieged us with his mercies, brought them up against us in countless numbers, built the bulwarks of his grace against our souls, poured a ceaseless cannonade of kindness in upon the [fortified] breaches of our hearts.” [2]

The ancient Archimedes reputedly said that if one could just find a fulcrum point outside of this world, then that person could theoretically move the whole globe! Paul’s fulcrum lies in the lesser leverage of his touching manner which rests upon the greater leverage of God’s tender mercies for Jews and Gentiles on equal footing (Rom. 3:29–30; 4:12; 9:24; 10:12; 11:25–26; Eph. 3:6). What a moving motivation!

The Painful Part In The Sacrifice

When we hear the expression “offer…sacrifices,” immediately this terminology should trigger inside the head of the biblically literate person (1) the aroma of outdoor barbeque, (2) the pageantry of colorfully robed Jewish priests, (3) the miming of substitution-for-sin acted out by an adult placing his hand upon the head of a sacrificial sheep—in other words, all the overtones of an Old Testament operation of sacrificial offerings. On one occasion no less than one hundred forty-two thousand animals were sacrificed by Solomon at the inaugural ceremony of the first Jerusalem temple (1 Kings 8:62–63). (This was obviously considerably prior to all “save the whales” and other animal rights advocates having entered the world-scene.) Every Old Testament lamb’s sacrificial death cried out on behalf of each sacrificer: “I should have died here, for I have sinned—and sin spells death!”

What is abnormal about Paul’s plea in Romans 12:1 is that he calls (oxymoronically) for “living” rather than dead sacrifices. Killing human beings in the Old Testament thought-world of Jews was abhorrent, but Paul’s New Testament paradigm calls for live offerings—human ones. Somehow contemporary Christians living in a convenience-living culture of the commuter-and-computer mind-set may balk at the notion of courting painful sacrifice. Tim Wilde, a student at Palm Beach Atlantic College, was involved in a short-term mission project in Toronto, Canada. He wrote that the entire trip was uncomfortable. They had to sleep each night on the hard floor, work when tired, and talk to homeless people when they didn’t feel like it. Tim was forced to step out of his comfort zone. He concluded: “Although it was uncomfortable, it was one of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve ever had.”

The great English poet-hymnwriter William Cowper [pronounced KOOH-puhr] wrote:

Habits are soon assumed, but when we strive
To strip them off, ‘tis being flayed alive.

The ancient Assyrians were terrorist thugs of the barbaric past who “flayed” people “alive”—that is, skinned their victims alive. Ouch! That hurts; that’s a “living” sacrifice. Many Christians who decide to give up smoking cigarettes, or go on diets, or give up computer games or some other addiction may think that the Holy Spirit will simply cushion their emotions to unpainful victory, but Paul wrote of “living sacrifices”—and those are painful. There’s no guarantee that God will take the “ouch” out of “sacrifices.” One Christian college student remarked that the trouble with a “living” sacrifice is that it keeps getting up and crawling off of the altar!

The Physical Part Of The Sacrifice

Intriguingly, Paul doesn’t launch into this summons to sacrifice by starting with the spiritual sphere. He begins with the body. He proceeds to the psychical (“your mind”) in verse 2 after he mentions the physical in verse 1 (“your bodies”). Christianity is incarnational (John 1:14; Col. 2:9), and our God is not anti-body (which was true of the early Gnostic [NAHS-tick] groups threatening local churches addressed in Colossians and 1 John). The incarnate God—Jesus—came (as Charles Wesley said in our Christmas carol) “veil’d in flesh.” One of the most awesome miracles—never alluded to directly by the New Testament—is that a teenage boy named Jesus survived adolescence (when hormones hit the hardest) without ever having lusted after a female figure! Yes, the New Testament—with four different authors—informs us of the Savior’s sinlessness (John 8:46; 2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 4:15; 1 Pet. 2:22; 1 John 3:5). Our Savior shared our very human corpuscles, sinews, glands, digestion, and excretion processes. To me Paul says, “Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments [or weapons] of wickedness” (Rom. 6:13).

During Oliver Cromwell’s era, soldiers went out to arrest members of the British parliament who were then in hiding. When the elderly Speaker of Parliament was captured and asked where parliamentary members were hiding, he replied, “I have no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no hands to move, no feet to walk and no mouth to speak, [except] as directed by Parliament.” [3] Christians are called to be walking Christarchies, being directed by their Sovereign Lord—and for Paul it begins in the body—in the material me.

The Spiritual Slant Of The Sacrifice

Paradoxically, “to offer your bodies” is not said to be physical, but it is labeled “your spiritual act of worship” (vs. 1). In fact, it is (1) sacrificial, (2) spiritual (NIV), and (3) sane (“your reasonable service,” KJV). How sad it is that Christians are prone to think that lawn-mowing, diaper-changing, clothes washing, televiewing, oil-changing a car, etc., are not “spiritual.” My cousin was a missionary for more than ten years in Germany. A local U.S. church once called to interview her and her missionary husband. At the moment when they called, she happened to be washing the family clothes. She could tell from the voice-tone response that the designated caller was disappointed, apparently expecting them to be out “winning souls” during one hundred percent of their waking hours—as if overseas missionaries didn’t have to engage in something as “unspiritual” as washing clothes.

Assuming that Jesus engaged in His adult career-term ministry for three years and adding to that figure perhaps twelve years of childhood growing-up, that time period would total fifteen years. If we figure that He carpentered for eighteen years (from age twelve until thirty), then almost half of the earthly life (or eighteen out of perhaps thirty-five years) of the incarnate God was spent in wood-working! That’s eighteen years of ordinary wood work versus three years of working extraordinary miracles! In other words, Jesus spent six times as long in His life planing lumber and smoothing down splinters as He did in the “spiritual” ministries of preaching, teaching, and healing. Yes, physical realities can be very “spiritual.”

Sometimes Christians give away their pseudo-spiritual viewpoint when they speak of their “quiet time” (Bible reading and prayer) as “time spent with the Lord.” Check the phrasing, for it implies that all other time is not “time spent with the Lord”—and for most of us that’s most of our lives. Do you need a revised version of what is “spiritual”? For Paul what is physical is equally what is “spiritual.” This body-stuff is (when properly understood) “holy and pleasing to God” (vs. 1).

Something Not To Be Conformed, Rom. 12:2

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world. But be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

J. B. Phillips’s paraphrase of this summons is a classic: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.” The rendering conveys the image of an invisible vise that is being screwed in upon our heads.

This text raises the question about what is “worldly” and how to determine when we have violated God’s standards on this issue. Obviously it will hardly do to say, “Don’t be like the (non-Christian) world.” Oh? You mean that I shouldn’t brush my teeth in the morning like the other people on this planet do? Do you mean that I shouldn’t buy my clothes in a non-Christian clothing store in a mall? Do you mean that I shouldn’t watch television? When put this way, it becomes obvious that Christians do (and have to do) many things which unbelievers also do.

Frequently in the past such “worldliness” has been compiled into a tailor-made grocery list of not-to-do items—such as the “filthy five” or “nasty nine” or “terrible ten” (which usually included at least smoking and drinking [alcohol]). As a fundamentalist of the past put it:

I don’t smoke and I don’t chew,
And I don’t go with girls who do.

The problem with such compilations is that some who don’t quite keep within the parameters of the off-limits list are genuine Christians and some who abstain from the agreed-upon list are not. For example, most Christians have admired Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, yet one of his biographers claimed that Lewis could smoke sixty cigarettes a day (!)—in addition to smoking his frequently-photographed pipe! [4] The same (that is, smoking) has been true for well-known Christian writer R. C. Sproul. Conversely, Satanist cult head Anton LaVey was known to have much preferred Bach to rock, and outlaw Jesse James never smoked or swore publicly, but that hardly Christianized him.

Furthermore, usually the parameters of worldliness seem to alter with each generation of Christians. I remember my Christian aunt and uncle among the Brethren Assemblies who would never have considered public dancing (even waltzing), yet they wouldn’t have missed Lawrence Welk’s Saturday night TV show in the 1950s and 60s for the world. Similarly, my aunt never went out to a movie theater (that I can remember), yet somehow the same movies—when seen on TV—were evidently okay. Hmm? Is that “conform[ing]…to the pattern of this world” or not?

Perhaps a central question to ask is: How did Christ relate to the world? He was like a thermostat (altering or challenging His environment) rather than like a thermometer (merely conforming or blending in with His environment). He did not keep away from notorious sinners (Mark 2:16) in order to “keep his testimony.” Jesus was no separatist (which is precisely what the name “Pharisee” means). The analogy He used (doctor-to-sick in Mark 2:17) would imply that the doctor can’t stay away from the contagious for fear lest he catch their infection.

Paul used the Greek verb suschēmatizesthe (“conform”) that is built upon the chassis of the noun schēma. The verb is only found elsewhere in the New Testament at 1 Peter 1:14. The corresponding noun is only found twice in the New Testament (in 1 Cor. 7:31 for the fleeting, passing “form” of this world and in Phil. 2:7 of Christ’s “human likeness” or outward appearance). Christians should be absorbed with what is substantive rather than with what is simply surface or superficial. They should be committed to what is essential and eternal rather than what is merely ephemeral (though, as we’ve seen, this doesn’t exclude our washing cars, housecleaning, playing with toddlers, etc.). The different scenes in the various acts of a stage play shift, and fleeting fashions (whether in dress, appearance or ideas) change, but our magnificent obsession must be what is “holy and pleasing to God” (Rom. 12:1). Thus, the apostle admonishes his auditors against arranging their thought-world by means of the contemporary conceptual configurations around them in this age. (The Jewish historian Josephus used the same root word schema for the “arrangement” of the temple forecourt in the configuration of a quadrilateral.) [5]

Someone To Be Transformed

But be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

The Process Of The Transformation

One day a fuzzy little upholstered worm called a caterpillar undergoes an overhaul. It is transformed into a madras-winged butterfly of beauty. We call the transformation a metamorphosis. The English name is a derivative of the Greek verb in Romans 12:2 which is translated “transformed” (metamorphousthe). This Greek verb is found only four times in the New Testament, and two of the parallel cases refer to our Lord’s transfiguration (Matthew 17:2; Mark 9:2)—when His glowing glory as God shone through the envelope of His human exterior. The uncompounded verb morphoō is found only in Galatians 4:14, and the foundational noun morphē occurs only three times in the New Testament (in Mark 16:12 and twice in Phil. 2:6–7 concerning our Lord’s essential nature). At Vatican II Pope John XXIII initiated aggiornamento, meaning updating or renewal. The apostle Paul called for a regular regimen of renewal—long before that challenge—in Romans 12:2.

Significantly the only other New Testament usage of the verb metamorphoō is found in 2 Corinthians 3:18 where Christians “are being transformed into his [Christ’s] likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” This transformation is an ongoing operation (“are being transformed”) through the catalyst agency of the Holy Spirit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Old Stone Face” is an excellent illustration of this transformation phenomenon. Hawthorne tells of a boulder-like projection outside of a New England town that was denominated “the Old Stone Face” due to its external face-like features. A legend persisted in the geographical area that some day a great personage would arrive in the area who would be the human likeness of the Old Stone Face. From time to time some famous individual (a politician, a recognized military leader, etc.) would arrive on the scene, and questions would irrupt as to whether this person might not be the long-awaited Old Stone Face. Meanwhile all during this time a local boy liked to go out and in simple reverie look long and longingly at the Old Stone Face. After many years of expectation, finally the local people realized that the young man who’d spent so much time looking at the Old Stone Face had gradually taken on the real likeness of the Stone Face itself. Even so, as we look longingly (and livingly) into the mirror of God’s Word, we will take on the likeness of our Lord, for we “are being [gradually] transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory” (2 Cor. 3:18).

The Purpose Of This Transformation

The bull’s-eye of this ongoing overhaul is “then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (12:2). Ah, God’s will! What a world of mystifying information is available on the subject of “God’s will.” The sermon hearer or pamphlet reader begins to feel that he or she is a mouse scampering through some gigantic labyrinth, or a person blindfolded who is trying to hit a dartboard. Rather than worry (which is a sin) about finding God’s will—His decreed or secret will—we ought to major on executing God’s declared or revealed will. We know that God’s will is our thoroughgoing sanctification (1 Thess. 5:23). We know that God’s will includes our out-and-out presentation of ourselves to Him for total transformation into Christlikeness (Rom. 12:1–2). We know that “it is God’s will” to “avoid sexual immorality” (1 Thess. 4:3). What could be plainer than these three preceding verses? So, rather than worry about whether we should buy a red or a green blouse or be a carpenter or computer whiz, the more important issue is: Are we progressively being sculpted into increasing likeness to our Lord in all compartments of our lives?

Doing what God wants (His will) involves an evaluative process (“testing” or “proving”) and an end product (“attesting” or “approving”). The same Greek verb is found in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (“Test everything”) All of life’s stream involves panning and weighing, and the discovered metal of our decisions must be weighed in the assayer’s office of God’s Word so as to discover if we have in our grasp true gold or pyrite (fool’s gold).

So, how’s the battle going—the battle which is won by self-surrender? William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, is said to have said that his life-secret was this: God had had all there was of him to have. Robert Boyd Munger depicted this so well in his pamphlet “My Heart, Christ’s Home.” In the booklet Christ invades respectively the various rooms of our life-house. Does the Lord control your kitchen and dining room for example? (Should my gourmet grocery-list shopping take more thought of the starving in our world? Should my expanding waistline be subjected more to the discipline of a disciple?) What about my house’s living room? (Could I be inviting my non-Christian neighbors into it more regularly so that I may form friendships in order that I may emit more light to our world and flavor it with more salt?) Does Christ have all of you there is to have? Are you a walking Christarchy?

Notes

1. Quotations of Scripture are from the New International Version unless otherwise noted.
2. John Phillips, Exploring Romans (Chicago: Moody Press, 1971), 181.
3. R. G. Lee, Bought by the Blood (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1957), 114.
4. A. N. Wilson, The Chicago Tribune (February 25, 1990), Section 14, 5.
5. J. Schneider in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, eds. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971) 7: 956.