Retrain Your Brain

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 – ESV)

I want to focus on a principle that many might think they agree with, but that they need reinforcement on. You don’t need to know the religious language alone, and just knowing the verses without really knowing what they teach and how to apply them only means you grow in your own estimation, but not into Christlikeness. We need more than that; we need God’s revelation to cause a revolution in our hearts, our minds, and our actions. But there is a right way to do that and many wrong ways of doing that. These verses teach us something essential about living and developing in the Christian life, and that is what I want to talk about.

The “mercies of God” is a summary statement of all Paul had taught about in chapters 1-11. On the basis of this Paul is exhorting them to action. The Christian life Paul describes in chapters 12-16 is built on the truths from chapters 1-11. The mercy of God to us is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This all blew Paul’s mind and he says, therefore, let your mind be filled with God also. We are governed by sin or governed by God. We are to build our lives based on His mercy, we who have been forgiven are to become forgiving people. But before we can live lives of overflowing mercy toward each other we must be taught and developed in lives of worship toward God. Before we can give our lives away in service and glory to God we must give Him our lives in worship.

Now presenting your body as a living sacrifice entails worshipping God with your mind. Many bible versions render the phrase, “which is your spiritual worship”, as “which is your reasonable service”, or “your rational service”. This doesn’t mean, “it is the least you can do”, or simply “it is a fair, and logical thing to do”. The phrase here means, “worship rendered by the reason”. This comports with Ephesians 4:23 – “and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds”. The spirit of your mind means your mindset. It is worship using your reasoning, spiritually, further demonstrated by the next verse, which speaks of transformation being accomplished by the renewal of the mind. Reasonable service is a life of worship according to God's Word. Never is the Christian called upon to set his mind aside; rather he is to employ his mind, to exercise his mind to act based upon the truth that God has revealed.

“Present” is in the aorist tense, denoting a singular event. The inference in our text is that we are called to a specific commitment. That commitment leads to a lifestyle. We offer our minds in worship to God, which is the living sacrifice; our bodies are dead to sin, and our minds alive to God. We need a new train of thought, and we must first make that commitment to get on the right track, and then we must continually be trained to have it.

You may have been reading the Bible for many years, and might have even profited from it and grown closer to God because of it. However this passage teaches that one of the first steps of true discipleship is to make that once for all commitment to be in submission to God’s Word. This is the commitment that you are making that many people fail to make; they have failed to see what Paul is teaching us in this passage. This is the thing that will keep you from picking and choosing texts and verses and trying to work out your own discipleship plan cafeteria-style instead of letting the Word of God dictate to you. We must let the Bible retrain our brain on God’s terms not use the Bible as we wish. Then we will see the Word of God come alive in our study and in our circumstance. We will prove what the will of God is in our experience. This is how it is started.

“Living For Today With An Eye For Tomorrow”©