Living With a View of God’s Mercy

The Summit of Our Salvation

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

April 27, 2025

Living With a View of God’s Mercy

We’re going back to our series in the book of Romans called The Summit of Our Salvation. We’re going to be reading from chapter 12.

12 Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. ² Do not conform 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.PRAY

Last year Janice and I were gifted by her sister and brother in law a week vacation at a resort in Cancun. Our suite had a nice view but Bill and Celia’s suite had a panoramic view of the beach and ocean and sunrise. So many mornings we would get up early enough to watch the sun rise over the ocean. It was a breathtaking view.

Paul says it in verse 1: in view of God’s mercy. In the chapters leading up to this Paul has outlined God’s extravagant mercy to us through Jesus Christ.

• Justified: made righteous with the righteousness of God as a gift by faith
• Peace with God
• Forgiveness of our sins
• Wrath has been removed replaced by unshakable love
• Adopted as sons and daughters
• Confidence that God is working all things together for our good and is for us
• No more condemnation

And so much more. Every morning the Christian awakes to a breathtaking view of God’s mercies to us. Paul now says, in view of God’s mercy. With God’s mercy in view, do this: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. Really simply this means live a life devoted to God. Love God, serve God, obey God, be dedicated to God. Not to be loved by God but because you’re loved by God. With God’s mercy in view. That’s what we should be seeing. Looking at. We should be facing in the direction of mercy.

Paul says in view of God’s mercy - in view of what Christ has done, do these things. Romans 12 is full of what we should do, but it all must be motivated by what Christ has done. We are to do these things while keeping all that Christ has done in view.

Muslims all around the world pray five times a day facing in the direction of Mecca. Recently it was discovered that because a mosque in Turkey was built facing the wrong direction the Muslim worshippers have been praying in the wrong direction for nearly 40 years. I did some math and that means that anyone who worshipped there all 40 years prayed facing the wrong direction 73,000 times.

Our worship of God is to be done facing God’s mercy. If our worship of God is facing legalism, then we are living on the performance treadmill of “am I doing enough to please God?” Legalism builds our confidence on what we do rather than what Christ has done. We will either be proud of our performance (I am more spiritual than 99% of other people) or we will be condemned (I’m not doing enough or good enough). The Bible tells us our efforts fall far short of God’s holy standards so legalism could never save us.

If our worship is facingin the direction of fear: fear of losing our salvation, fear of punishment, than we will be obeying God more from a negative fear of punishment motivation than a positive, grateful-for-grace motivation. Tim Keller writes this about fear being our primary motivation for obedience:

Our motivation will lose its power over time. Fear as an emotion is very draining. It moves you to great feats at first, but eventually it is exhausting. People who live in great fear experience a numbing effect after a while. Slowly, one becomes too tired to care, indifferent to what happens.

Fear might supply a burst of energy – that’s actually why God gave us fear. So when our lives are in danger we have a jolt of adrenaline to help us react quickly to the situation. But in the long run fear is draining. Fear drains us of joy, drains us of gratitude, drains us of grace. We will be exhausted and eventually give up if our worship is facing fear. We need to change direction: we worship in view of God’s mercy.

Living sacrifice means we live a life dedicated to God. All in for Jesus. Worship is actually a funny word cause I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable with the idea of worshipping God. It feels disconnected from “real life”. We enjoy singing a few worship songs on Sunday morning (though some of you are like, “can we be done with the singing already?”) but then we get on with real life – going to work, paying the bills, attending our kid’s soccer games, working on our marriage, going to school – and doing whatever else in our backyard that needs doing. Worship isn’t a big part of that. It’s not a big part of my life.

Sin is really just worship-gone-wrong. Think about it – what drives you in life? What’s at the center of everyone’s life? What do we love, care about, live for? That’s worship. It’s what we value most. Worth-ship. Sin has moved worship away from the One who alone deserves worship – you shall worship no other gods – and focused it on things like having money, being popular, being left alone to do what I want, having control. Worship can be aimed at something or someone outside of us: science, technology, politics, famous people, personal heroes, sports, and so on. Or it can be aimed at ourselves: my education, my success, my status, my opinions, my, my, my. Me, me, me. Mine, mine, mine.

Paul says, offer your bodies – some say members – as a living sacrifice to God. Make every day an act of worship. Live your life, do what you do, just do it for the glory of God. It doesn’t necessarily change what we do, but it definitely changes why we do it!

• We might make money – but we don’t live for making money. We are generous because money isn’t our center, glorifying God is!
• People might approve of us, and that’s a good feeling – but we don’t rise and fall on people’s approval
• We have fun, but fun isn’t what we live for.
• We love our kids and lay our lives down for them, but they aren’t the center of our lives. Our big why as parents becomes raising them to know Jesus.
• We want to get ahead in life – want to succeed, achieve, do something meaningful with our lives. But we don’t define those things by worldly metrics. The only thing in this world that lasts is people – everything else is going to burn up. So we define getting ahead, succeeding, and doing meaningful things by the metric of helping others.

Verse 2 tells us how to do this:

² Do not conform 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. Rom. 12:2

With God’s mercy in view, living life as an act of worship is not only doing something, it’s not doing something. It takes a do and a don’t. First the don’t’: Don’t be conformed to the patterns of the world. To be conformed means to pressed to look like something. The world has a mold it wants us to fit. But we need to be careful not to fall into the Pharisee’s trap of defining worldliness by externals.

Who is this woman washing Jesus’ feet? She’s nothing but a worldly prostitute. Jesus may allow her to touch him but I sure won’t. Why is Jesus eating with a room full of sinners and tax collectors? Church people can become judgmental and self-righteous if we’re focused on externals. I’m holy because I look a certain way, I dress a certain way, I do certain things, don’t do certain things.

But worldliness goes deeper than externals. It’s easy to think we’re holy and have so much junk going on inside. Junk like pride. Junk like the lust of the eyes and the flesh. That’s where John locates worldliness – on the inside. Don’t be conformed to the world’s mold.

That brings us to the do:…but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

The only way not to be conformed is to be transformed, and the only way to be transformed is by the renewing of our mind. How do we renew our mind? Sometimes – and I’ve been guilty of this – we reduce renewing of our mind to “reading our Bible”. Maybe you’ve heard sermons on how you need to renew your mind by reading your Bible. Certainly reading our Bibles is a vital part of renewing our minds, but it takes more than reading our Bibles to renew our minds. There are tons of people who read their Bibles and are mean, selfish, rude, dishonest, abusive, or proud. They might be able to quote their Bibles all day long but they look nothing like Jesus, their minds aren’t renewed, they aren’t transformed.

We need the Bible to renew our minds and be transformed, but we need more than the Bible.

The word “transformed” is the Greek word metamorphoo from which we get the word metamorphosis. It’s found in four places in the New Testament. It’s used to describe when Jesus was transfigured. And in 2 Cor. 3.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. ¹⁸ And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. 2 Cor. 3:17-18

This is how we are transformed! This is how our minds are renewed. It happens as, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we behold the glory of God! The “do” here isn’t something we do to ourselves, it’s something that’s done to us by the Holy Spirit as we behold Jesus. We become like Jesus (we are being transformed into the same image) as we behold him.

Remember that phase when Christians were saying “what would Jesus do?” It’s not a bad question, the problem is if we try to answer it by what we feel Jesus would do. The only way we can even get close to what Jesus would do is to behold Jesus in his word, to meditate on who Jesus is, what he did, what he taught, and to ask the Holy Spirit to take all that and transform us inwardly so we’re becoming more like Jesus everyday.

I find this part of verse 18 very encouraging: beholding the glory of the Lord, (we) are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

“From one degree of glory to another…” We don’t get transformed all at once. It’s a slow, incremental process. One degree of glory to another. We are a work in progress. But the Bible promises the One who started the work will be faithful to complete it unto the day of Christ Jesus. And what happens on that day? The ultimate beholding of Jesus! John writes that when Christ appears we will be like him for we shall see him as he is.

So we don’t conform but we do “be conformed” by renewing our minds, and we renew our minds by, yes reading the Bible – won’t get there without knowing your Bible! – but also by beholding Jesus and asking the Holy Spirit to take the truths this book contains and light up our minds and hearts with them!

You know what they did with sacrifices? Put them on an altar and set them on fire! We are to be living sacrifices – live our lives burning with the power and glory of Christ by the fire of the Holy Spirit. On fire for Jesus in a good way. Help us love, help us pray with faith, help us read and teach your truth, help us be faithful, help us forgive, help us be pure.

With God’s mercy in view – that’s the big picture. That’s the direction we’re facing. That’s the view we see every morning when we open the drapes and every evening when we lay our heads on our pillows.