Have any of you ever ridden in a car with someone and they are driving and they are looking at you while they are driving the car? How does that make you feel? It drives me nuts. Look at the road! Don’t look at me. I know you are talking to me. I’m paying attention. Don’t look at me. Look at where you are going.
Why does this bother us? Because what we look at or what we focus on is the direction our life is moving. Most of us struggle to walk and chew gum at the same time, so to ask someone to maintain eye contact while also drive a vehicle down the highway at 70 miles an hour seems like too much to ask.
In other words, we can only focus on one thing at a time. Whatever we focus on has our attention. To say this another way, our lives are heading in the direction we are moving.
We are at the end of our series on Identity and today’s topic is probably the penultimate topic – transformation. One of the biggest questions I’ve been wrestling with since we started this series is this…
“What if my identity is rooted in something other than Christ? How do I change my identity to fit what God says about me?”
Or to put it more simply, how am I transformed to be more like Jesus? In other words, I love what you have been saying Pastor about me being a child of God, having an inheritance in Christ, that God loves me and so on, but I don’t really see myself that way and I can’t seem to change. How do I change? How do I transform my life from the way it is now, to the way God wants it to be? How can I see lasting change in my life.
This I think is the ultimate question from this series and I want to address it today. How do we change? Let’s read together from Romans 12. I want pick up where we left off last week.
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies 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 renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:1–2
So last week we really focused in on the beginning of verse 2. Paul says do not be conformed to this world. And if you remember, I talked about various ways the world is trying to conform us to its mold. It’s trying to press us into its design and we are to fight against it. Now I talked about sin a lot and several of you came up to me afterwards and said it was the worst sermon I ever preached because I stepped on your toes a bit.
So, how many of you went home and changed something about your life? I had a few people come up to me Sunday evening and tell me they were so convicted about what I said on diet that they made a smarter choice at lunch than what they usually do (btw, the sermon was not on diets, that was an analogy), but several people said that. Now, if you did go home and perhaps you were more diligent that afternoon about what what you invited into your home, maybe you laid off social media or tv for the day. How many of you kept that up all week? Probably not as many.
Continue reading “Identity – Transformed”
Brian Boswell 