By Pastor Greg
Once upon a time there was a shepherd tending his sheep at the edge of a country road. Suddenly a brand new Cadillac Escalade screeches to a halt next to him. The driver, a young man dressed in a fancy suit gets out and asks the shepherd, "If I can guess how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?" The shepherd looks at the young man, then looks at the sprawling field of sheep and says, "Okay." So the young man connects his notebook and wireless modem, enters a NASA site, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database filled with algorithms, and then prints a report on his high tech mini printer. When finished he turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1,586 sheep here." The shepherd answers, "That's correct! You can have your sheep." So the young man takes one of the animals and puts it in the back of his vehicle. However, the shepherd looks at him and asks, "If I guess your profession, will you pay me back in kind?" The young man answers, "Sure." So the shepherd says, "You’re a consultant." "That’s exactly right! How did you know?" asks the young man. "Oh, that’s simple," answers the shepherd. "First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew. And third, you don't understand anything about my business . . . and I'd really like to have my dog back."
There is something the shepherd says in this story that really stands out to me, and that is the phrase, “Pay me back in kind”. Often we see the words “payback” in a negative way. The Bible teaches us to “Love our enemies”, “Never repay evil for evil, or “Pray for those who persecute you”. But what if we looked at this from a positive viewpoint. What about those who love us. What about those who are kind and merciful toward us. How should we repay them? How should we payback those who have done so much for us? Should we not “Pay them back in kind”?
I suspect many of us would agree that this is true. But what of God. How should we repay Him for all the blessings He has given us? How should we repay the greatest gift of love—the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross? What can we give back to God for His gift of Salvation? Is there anything we can give Him for all that He has done for us? Now, although we might be tempted to say there is not, the Bible says that there certainly is.
There is a huge gap between knowing God and living as a godly person; a gap many Christians never seem to cross. Content to merely know, many never transition into the kind of Christian who puts their faith into practice. James has said “For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead” (James 2:26). Without action, all the faith in the world is useless (compare James 2:20). Paul talks about this as well in Romans 12 (read Romans 12:1-8).
It is good that we have accepted the fact that we are sinners in need of a Savior. And it is commendable that we have accepted the Man God sent to save. We have believed in our heart and confessed with our mouth that Jesus is Lord. And because of our conviction and confession, God accepts us as His child. We are reborn. Knowing this Paul says “and so” (or “therefore”), indicating that there should be a proper response to all we have learned. And he says that this knowledge should not just remain in our mind. We are to respond to this knowledge. And the proper response to this new birth is transformation; a transformation of the mind, heart, body, and soul.
Romans Chapter 12 talks about living in a way that honors the Lord. It does not talk about living in a way that earns God’s love or earns salvation. Paul has already dismissed the idea of a works-based salvation. But he does stress that as a believer the appropriate response to what God has done is to become His transformed servant; to give all of ourselves back to God.
Paul says that we are to give Him our bodies. They become a living sacrifice. And this is not just merely what we do to our bodies, but what we do with them. A genuine believer recognizes that God is worshiped not just by singing His praises but also in what we do. We submit to His standard of physical holiness, not to earn salvation, but to honor His name. Paul also says that we are to give God our minds. We are to transform the way we think, not just about God or about ourselves, but about other people. We are to see others as God sees them. We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us so that that world might regard us as God’s children (Matthew 5:44-45). If the world controls your thinking, you are a conformer; if God controls your thinking, you are a transformer. And finally Paul says we are to give Him our heart, or perhaps better described as “who we are as a person”. We each have different skills and passions. We all have unique talents. And Paul says that we are to take these and offer them back to God so they might be used to strengthen His Kingdom.
If our conversion has been genuine, there should be a noticeable difference in the way we live, in what we do, and how we serve the Lord. But as I said at the beginning, this is a transition that is quite rare nowadays. Far too often we will meet Christians who have only ever given God their soul. There is faith, but there is no transformation. And I sometimes wonder about the person who withholds so much of themselves from God. It just doesn’t seem to make sense to me. God gets so much and no more. And we are left to wonder if they do truly love God. I wonder if God will eventually cut them off because they bear no fruit (compare John 15:2). I wonder if these are the people who cry out “Lord, Lord”, but will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven (compare Matthew 7:21)? I don’t know for sure, but if this were me I would certainly take God’s warning seriously and start getting busy becoming a transformed Christian.
If your conversion has truly been genuine, you will want to give something back to God, thanking Him for all that He has done for you. Knowing that there is no condemnation from God, that nothing can separate you from God’s love, and that He has adopted you into His family even though you were an outsider, you are naturally going to feel affection for God. You will wonder how you can ever repay such blessings. Those who seem content to merely know the path might say that His is a gift you can never repay, so simply receive it with thanks. But those who have walked the path (those like Paul) will tell you that there is something you can do; something God does desire from you in response to these rich blessings. And that is to allow yourself to be transformed; to give Him not just your heart, but your mind, your talents, your gifts, and your bodies. What does God desire from those He has redeemed? He desires that we begin demonstrating our love for Him by giving back to Him in kind; that we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, giving Him our heart, body, soul, and mind.
What this kind of life looks like is discussed in the rest of this chapter. We will explore this next week.
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