AJM : Holy Trinity 7 December 2003 am

Introduction

I’d like to start with a question. Why is a plant green?

No, don’t look at me like that, I’m not retraining as a biology teacher. But I do know that the reason a plant is green is because it contains chlorophyll. In every cell there’s this green stuff called chlorophyll which absorbs light and turns it into energy. Chlorophyll is what makes the life processes in a plant possible. It’s green because it’s alive.

But animals are alive too. Why aren’t mammals green? Well, it’s because they don’t have chlorophyll, they have haemoglobin. Haemoglobin is the stuff in our blood which absorbs oxygen and releases it in cells to make energy. It’s what makes the life processes in a mammal possible. Haemoglobin isn’t green, it’s red. So the colour of life in a plant is green. The colour of life in an animal is red.

Now I’d like you to imagine that there is another colour which carries life. Its presence marks another kind of life process, which this time is found not in plants or animals but only in human beings. We aren’t used to looking for this colour, but God is. I’d like you to imagine that when God looks at people, most of them look various shades of grey. But some don’t. Some of them glow with a beautiful golden yellow colour. It’s like this picture. Just as the life energy of a healthy plant is green, and the life energy of a healthy animal is red, so there is a life energy in a healthy human person. The life energy of a person who is truly alive is yellow. And that’s what this letter to the Romans is all about. It’s about how to be not a grey person but a yellow person. It’s about how to make sure that we are full of the kind of energy that makes us truly alive.

So before we go on, I’d like to ask another question. When God looks at you, what colour does he see you in? Are you yellow, or are you a shade of grey? And what kind of energy is it that we need to make us yellow? What is the life process involved?

Let’s pray…

A survey of Generation X

We live in a world that is changing fast. People have always talked about generation gaps. But it seems that nowadays the gaps are getting larger, with each generation having its own distinctive outlook on life. And so it has become fashionable to refer to the generations by different names. If you are aged between about 20 and 40 you belong to what is known as Generation X. And I’ve just read a fascinating survey published last year on Generation X. The object of the survey was to see if there were any differences in outlook and lifestyle between Christian and non-Christian Generation Xers. These were some of the results:

Non Christian	Generation X	Christian
£14 per month	Give to charity on average	£51 per month
17%	Involved in community service	46%
44%	Believe rich countries should help poor ones	66%
25%	Believe it wrong to tell lies	51%
84%	Believe marriage is for life	97%
68%	Think what you believe affects how you behave	90%
163 days a year	Read a newspaper on average	134 days a year
0%	Read the Bible daily or weekly	66%

It is immediately obvious that there are big differences. Christian and non-Christian Generation Xers have a different outlook and lifestyle. To sum it up, Christians are more altruistic than non-Christians. If you look at the top half of the table you see that Christians give more to charity, are more likely to be involved in community service, and place a higher priority on dealing with international poverty. They are less likely to tell lies and more likely to stay married. What explains the difference? Well, the bottom half of the table gives the answer. 90% of Christians say their behaviour is determined or influenced by what they think and believe, by what is in their mind. And what is in their mind is less likely to come from the world and more likely to come from the Bible. The reason for the difference is in Romans 12.2 – a Christian is someone who is being transformed by the renewal of their mind.

The renewal of the mind: verse 1-2

We’ve been reading Romans together for 11 weeks now. So far it’s all been rather abstract. Paul has explained the predicament we all share as human beings.

He summarised it in chapter 3 verse 23: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

He has outlined the solution to the predicament; chapter 6 verse 23: the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

He has explained how we receive that free gift, which is by believing in Jesus and accepting the help of the Holy Spirit: chapter 8 verse 2 : the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.

And he suggested that this isn’t automatic but depends in part on us: we must allow our minds to be renewed by the Holy Spirit: those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. (ch 8 vs 5-6)

So the question he returns to here is, what happens to us if we manage to allow our minds to be controlled by the Spirit? What are the practical and visible consequences which we shall see in the lives of those who adopt this solution?

Let’s begin at the beginning of the chapter.

Therefore I urge you, 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. 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.

I’d like to focus first on verse 2. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. The question is, what does he mean? It sounds quite straightforward: fill your mind with the right stuff, believe the right things, think the right way, and your problems will be over. But Paul knows it’s not quite as simple as that – he spent the whole of chapter 7 bewailing the fact that he himself has discovered that believing the right things and wanting to do the right things isn’t enough, because the power of death within him constantly pulls him the other way. It’s like a tug of war, we said when we looked at Romans 6. Here’s a reminder:

deathlife

How do we make sure we win this tug of war? In chapter 8 he told us how we do it. We don’t have the power to do it on our own. There’s a missing ingredient, and it’s called the Holy Spirit. The mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace, Paul said. The renewal of the mind comes about with the help of the Holy Spirit. There is a kind of life energy with which we can, if we choose, fill our minds, and this will help us to win the tug of war with the minimum of effort.

Now this flies in the face of our understanding of the mind and how it works, so we need to unpack it a bit.

Repent and believe

The simplest formula we have for becoming a Christian is this: repent and believe. We tend to assume that repentance is to do with saying sorry, with acknowledging our sins. That is, we think repentance is a moral step. But it isn’t. Repentance simply means, think again. Re-pent. The pent bit comes from the Latin verb for thinking. So repentance is to do with a change of mind. We must stop believing those things which are not true and begin to believe those things which are true. In particular, this means that we accept that Jesus is the son of God, and that there is no other way to God except through him.

Exchanging a lie for the truth

Now if you cast your minds back to Romans 1 you will remember that this is where it all went wrong. Let me remind you. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth… Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile… They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.

What we do when we repent is we reverse this process. We live in a world which has exchanged the truth for a lie. Our task is to reverse the process and exchange a lie for the truth.

What is truth?

So what is the truth that we must get into our minds for them to be renewed? ‘For this I was born,’ said Jesus to Pilate, ‘and for this I have come into the world – to bear witness to the truth’. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’, he had said to the disciples. Pilate was as confused as we can be today: ‘What is truth?’, he asked. He got no reply. But the disciples did. They got this: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’. Truth is communicated by the Holy Spirit. Truth is not about facts. Truth is a spiritual thing. We receive truth through the Holy Spirit, and it leads us to God. Truth is nothing less than the spiritual reality which informs the universe. Truth is God himself. So when we let truth into our minds we aren’t just acquiring information, embracing facts, or formulating beliefs. We are allowing God himself access to the very centre of our being. We are getting in touch with a spiritual force which doesn’t just help us to think straight: it is the force which created the universe and by which it is sustained. Truth is reality, and reality is God. To renew our minds means to fill them with the Spirit of God, with reality itself. We fill them not with facts but with energy, the energy of God, the energy which exploded matter to create the universe, the energy to which we owe our very lives. And that’s why when Paul uses the word ‘mind’ he doesn’t mean what we mean by it, which is the thinking part of us, separate from the feeling part of us. When Paul says ‘mind’ he means not just our heads, but the whole of our inner being. This spiritual truth we receive is meant to glow right in the middle of our being.

So let’s go back to the question we started with. Are you a grey person or are you a yellow person? Here’s the picture again. In plants and animals, green and red are the colours of life. Chlorophyll absorbs light and turns it into energy. Haemoglobin absorbs oxygen and turns it into energy. But let’s imagine a spiritual vision which looks not at the production of energy in leaves or in blood, but at the production of energy in human minds. The energy which gives life to the human mind is not light or oxygen but truth. It is produced not by the presence of chlorophyll or haemoglobin, but by the presence of the Holy Spirit. So the yellow person is the one whose soul is full of the glory of God, whose mind is renewed and transformed by the truth. The grey people are those whose minds are tinged with death, starved of the truth and cut off from the source of life. Without chlorophyll a plant will die. Without haemoglobin a body will die. Without truth a person will die. Green, red and yellow are the colours of life.

So how do we allow the Holy Spirit to pour truth into our minds? If you want a healthy plant you make sure it gets plenty of light. If you want a healthy body you make sure it gets plenty of oxygen. If you want a healthy mind, you need to make sure it gets plenty of truth. How do you get truth? Essentially through prayer and meditation on God’s word. Often I pray for people about the things that are troubling them. And often as we pray our words are filled with energy, an energy which transforms the person being prayed for. If I say to you, God loves you, you will say oh, yes, I know. You hear and believe the fact, but it doesn’t somehow seem to change anything. But it is my experience that when we pray for someone, often we will speak those words, perhaps through a verse of scripture which is given to us, perhaps through a picture, perhaps just through a sensation which comes to the person being prayed for. And they will begin to know the words not just as a fact but as a form of energy, something which floods into them and changes them. It is the same with meditation. Often we believe things about ourselves which are not true. We know they aren’t true. But still those things live inside us. But as we meditate on the truth contained in scripture, we find those old beliefs shrivelling and dying, and the truth itself growing within us. When we act on the truth, it glows within us even more brightly. For truth is not facts; it is a form of energy. Have you ever had the experience of reading a verse of scripture and just having it kind of leaping off the page at you? That is because it carries its own energy. Truth is living and powerful; the truth will set you free, Jesus said to John. The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, Paul wrote to the Hebrews. If you turn your mind to the truth available to you through prayer and meditation on God’s word, you will be transformed by the renewal of your mind. You will stop being a grey person and become a yellow person. You will change from a person who is just living to one who is truly alive.

How can we do this in practice? I think there are three main ways.

Method 1: Meditate on scripture

The first way is to meditate on scripture. Different ways work for different people, but here are some suggestions. They come from Neil Anderson’s book The Common made holy – developing a personal and intimate relationship with God. Chapter 10 is called ‘Making God’s life-changing truth personal’. These are some of its recommendations:

Personalise the truth (choose a helpful verse and insert your own name or the word ‘I’ into it). I’ve printed out some examples, but there’s a full colour version on Anderson’s website (www.freedominchrist.com) . So instead of just reading Romans 8.1, ‘there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’, you might find it helpful to repeat to yourself ‘I am free from condemnation’.

Visualise the truth (think of a picture to express it). I’ve taken Romans 12.2, ‘be transformed by the renewal of your mind’ and visualised it as grey and yellow people.

Think about the truth – meditate on the stories of the gospels. Learn a verse and let it live within you. In Tanzania we have included a memory verse as part of each lesson of the Rooted in Jesus course. The group leaders tell us that the illiterate people have benefited the most from this, because they are the ones who have taken the trouble to learn the verses most thoroughly; for the first time they have access to the word of God, and it is changing them. You can meditate on whole passages too. When you are preparing the passage of scripture which you will be looking at in cell group, don’t just look at it once. Pray through it every day for a week. You will get far more out of it as it settles within you and begins to live in your spirit.

Method 2: Pray

The second thing you can do is pray. Pray by yourself. Ask others to pray with you. Don’t just pray shopping list prayers, try and have a conversation with God. Make space for him to speak to you. It’s not you that needs to explain things to him, it’s him who needs to explain them to you. Form a prayer partnership or a prayer triplet. Pray in your cells. Think about coming for prayer ministry. When we pray, we do a weird and wonderful thing that makes sense only if we assume the existence of the Holy Spirit: prayer changes things. And prayer can change you. You don’t have to be an expert; as we saw when we looked at Romans 8: the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.

Method 3 : Act

Then there’s a third method. Respond to the truth. Take action. A psychiatrist called Paul Meier once did a survey on some seminary students, to see if he could find a relationship between a person’s psychological state and their spiritual life. The results showed that daily meditation on scripture with a personal application is the most effective way to obtain personal joy, peace, and emotional maturity. Maximum benefit is achieved when the meditation and the prayer are reinforced by practical action. Jesus told the story of the man who built his house on the sand and the man who built his house on the rock. The one who built his house on the rock was the one who survived the storms which life throws at us; the other man was completely overwhelmed by them. What was the difference between them? This is what Jesus said:

Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock… But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.

It’s not enough to know the truth. You have to act on it. The next part of Romans 12 explains how.

The right role - knowing your place in the body: vs 3-8

Romans 12, verses 3-8, is often taken as a kind of official list of gifts or roles which people can have in the church. But I think it’s really meant to illustrate what it might look like in practice to live as a Christian with a renewed mind. Such Christians see themselves through God’s eyes. They are free to live the way God wants them to live, and not the way the world tells us to live. Our world tells us that money and success are what counts; that’s the lie. The truth is that renewal and transformation come when you learn to see yourself as God sees you, and to submit your life to that understanding, to offer yourselves as a living sacrifice, as Paul puts it in verse 1. And so in verses 3 to 8 Paul gives some examples of what this might mean in practice. We are called to be part of a Christian community, and a Christian community works on the same principle as the human body itself – it has lots and lots of different parts. Find out what part you’ve been designed to be. Forget money and success, and ask yourself this: what has God equipped me to do? And then do it. Here are the examples. If God has made you a prophet, then get on with it. If he’s made you a servant, then serve. If you’re a teacher, teach; or an encourager, then encourage. If you feel God wants you to give money, then get out your chequebook. If you’re made as a leader, then have the courage to lead, and do it to the best of your ability. If you are good at showing mercy to others, then show it without wingeing – there’s little enough of it around.

If you do this, two things will result. The first is that you will discover the will of God, and you will discover that it is good, pleasing and perfect. You will find perhaps for the first time in your life that you are a round peg in a round hole. As you put your understanding of who you are in Christ into practice, you will fiind that you become stronger and stronger, because belief which is reinforced by action grows within you. You will find life and peace. You will become a yellow Christian.

The second thing that will result is that you will find that as you do what God means you to do, you will shine more and more brightly. People around you will begin to become yellow too. The Holy Spirit will breathe life into your words and actions, and you will find the Spirit of God himself working through you. If you are a teacher, you will find that when you explain things, lights are switched on in people’s minds. If you give money, you will find that God directs your giving and uses it to touch the lives of others in a way that goes far beyond the value of your cheque. If you are a prophet, you will find that God speaks words to and through you which carry the power to make things happen. If you encourage others, you will find not just that you are cheering them up, but that the Holy Spirit himself is poured into their hearts. I did a Bible study on the word ‘encouragement’ recently, and I discovered that the word for encouragement in Greek is the very same word as the word for Holy Spirit – it’s parakaleo, from which we get Paraclete, the word John uses in his gospel for the Holy Spirit. So when you minister in the way God intends for you, you will find that there’s a value added factor to what you offer. You become a vehicle which God will fill with power, and you will know you are a channel for the Holy Spirit himself.

The right behaviour – living a transformed life : vs 9-21

So a yellow Christian, one who is being transformed by the renewal of his mind, has the energy of the Holy Spirit at work within him. His decisions are determined by the truth which he receives into the centre of his being. It’s as if the truth glows in the middle of him, like the light of a candle in a dark room. And gradually as the light spreads out, it banishes darkness from the different parts of his life. He sees his role change. He begins to learn what God wants him to be and to experience God’s power as he submits to God’s will.

But then something else happens. Not just his thinking but also his feelings change. He begins to behave in a different way, a way that makes him look increasingly different from the grey Christians and those who have not found Christ at all. And this is what Paul describes in the last section of the chapter, verses 9 to 21. A yellow Christian doesn’t just have a different role. He behaves in a different way. Yellow Christians find that they are able to love one another and honour one another. They don’t give up, for the energy which keeps them going lives inside them. They find that they are able to be joyful, patient, prayerful. They give to the needy and show hospitality to others. They are free from the need to take revenge on those who harm them. They find they are pleased when things go right for others, and that they really care when they don’t. They are able to live in harmony together. They mix happily with the poor and the disadvantaged. They feel no compulsion to show off. They try and do good to everyone.

How do we do these things? Well, we know from chapters 7 and 8 that it isn’t by trying harder. We aren’t meant to grit our teeth and suppress our anger. We aren’t meant to smile at all times irrespective of how we are feeling. We aren’t meant to behave patiently while feeling irritable. The word for all that isn’t Christianity, it’s hypocrisy. We aren’t meant to be whitewashed tombs, as Jesus called the Pharisees, carefully making sure we look OK on the outside but a mess of death and disease on the inside. We are meant to do it by acknowledging our weakness, realising that we are subject to the power of sin and death, and persisting in the task of allowing the Holy Spirit to transform us by the renewal of our minds.

So let me end with a reminder. Be a yellow Christian. Be transformed by the renewal of your mind. This is how:

Meditate on the Word

Pray in the power of the Holy Spirit

Act in obedience to the Father

And if you are a member of Generation X, read the Jesus 1.0 software installation notes which you will find on the back of the meditation sheet.