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. 

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. 

It’s like resolutions at New Years, you may start off exercising hard for the first week of January, but by February you can’t remember what road to turn on to get to the gym. In other words, there is no lasting change. You might change a habit for a short time, but it doesn’t last. Why? 

We will get there. Paul here in our passage, says don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed. 

So this leads me to my first point. Transformation is possible! Some of us live our lives thinking terrible thoughts that lead us nowhere, like this...

“I will always be this way.” 

“I’ll never change.” 

“I’m stuck” 

In other words, the lie we believe is this, I have been this way for so long and its so entrenched in who I am that I will never change. I will always be this way, it’s in my blood. I was born this way. I can’t change. 

If that is you, I’ve got good news! You can change. It is possible to change. You do not have to be what you’ve always been. You don’t have to do what you’ve always done. No matter how powerless you may feel, you can change with the help of Jesus. 

Transformation. This is the greek word "metamorphoo", which means to change or transfigure. In fact this word is the same word used to describe Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matt 17:2 “And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.” He changed before their very eyes. That’s the power behind what Paul is saying here. You can change. 

Now the question, we have to answer today is this. How do we change? How is it done? Luckily, Paul answers that question for us. He says be transformed by the renewing of your mind. 

Now when I hear that, I go what? How does one renew your mind. So let’s take this apart a little bit. Renewing your mind. Renewing - to make new again. How would we make our mind new again. What do we do there? What does that look like? 

The Bible has a large overarching narrative to it which is creation and recreation. In other words, one of the main storylines of the Bible centers around this idea of recreation. In the beginning, God creates the heaven and the earth, Genesis 1:1. And in Revelation 21, God has recreated them, there is a new heaven and a new earth. So the Bible starts with creation and ends with recreation and that theme follows throughout the book. 

God forms us in Genesis, we deform ourselves with sin and we are reformed into the image of Christ. So this is a constant theme. And here’s the tricky part, when it says we get a new heart and a new mind in Christ, or a new heaven and a new earth doesn’t mean completely new like we think of it. If I say I’m giving you a new car, we think a car that’s never been driven, has no miles on it. But the Bible doesn’t think of it those terms usually. God doesn’t literally rip your heart out of your chest and give you a different heart. He recreates the heart within you. It’s a metaphor, not a literal heart transplant. 

So in this passage when it says we need to renew our minds to see true transformation in our lives. It’s not talking literally getting a new brain. It’s giving us an analogy and metaphor to use to understand what God wants us to do and it starts with how we define mind. 

Now, we cannot define mind as brain. That’s not the same thing. To the greeks, the mind was more encompassing than just your brain. Your mind was your thoughts and your will. In other words, it might be described by us as the soul of who you are. Big identity statement there. We might agree with the French philosopher Discartes when he says I think therefore I am. 

The idea here is that our thoughts, the way we think, how we think of ourselves, the thoughts that we carry with us...our thoughts define us. Now for some of us that may be a scary thought because we’ve had some scary thoughts. So this idea of a new mind or renewing our minds starts to sound appealing. How do we change? By renewing our mind. 

But how do we do that? Let’s get practical. Paul, in this passage, does not give us a step by step how to do it here. He does however give us a clue in verse three of this passage. He connects the renewing of our minds with how we think about ourselves. In the church in Rome, one of the issues they were having was pride, so Paul addresses it this way:

So Paul says, in order to stop being prideful, you need to think of yourself properly. Don’t be arrogant, but think we sober judgment. Now, many of us, may actually have the opposite problem. We don’t think of ourselves highly at all. We might think we are losers or that we always mess things up or that we can’t get anything right. So we have the opposite problem, but the solution is still the same - we need to think of ourselves properly. 

Let’s make it simple. Every day your brain is being bombarded with all types of thoughts, but they truly come down to two types - Lies and Truth. That’s it. Your thoughts can really only be categorized in one of two ways - lies or truth. Is it a lie or is it truth? Which is it? Every thought that comes into your brain is either one or the other. 

Chambers is right. Our greatest effort in life is one that no one else will see, but everyone will see the fruit of it. If you believe the lie, other’s can tell. If you believe the truth, others can tell. Why? Because we act out what we believe. Our actions are determined by our thoughts. So what we think matters and we need to examine, analyze, discern, decipher every thought. 

To put it another way, Paul says it like this:

In other words, our battle is a battle inside of our own heads. And the war being waged in our culture today bears this out. The world recognizes that the battle ground is located between your two ears, that is why the enemy wants to control media. News, books, movies, comics, games, all of the areas that affect our minds - the enemy wants to control all of them, because if he controls them, he can control you. He is waging war on your mind and one of your main tasks in this war is to take EVERY thought captive. Every thought Paul says. Do not let one slip through without discerning it. It’s that important.

So I want to give you three practical steps to help you on this. 

In order for you to renew your mind, you must first capture your thoughts. 

You can’t renew your mind if you don’t take control over it. We take control over it by capturing thoughts. The problem is not that the we thought the thought, it’s that we didn’t capture it. We grab that thought out of the air and we take it captive. 

We take the thought captive to make it obey Christ. There’s a purpose in this. It’s to get our thoughts to obey Christ. Paul says we need to detain that thought, put it in jail. Capture it. 

Why are we holding on to it? That leads us to the second thing. The second step you have to do is to discern your thoughts. 

Once you’ve captured them, you have to discern or judge them. We need to look at each thought and we have to determine whether this is a lie or a truth, whether it is a good thought or a bad one, one that leads to life or one that leads to death. 

Paul says that we should test and discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Now, we tend to think of God’s will as something esoteric. God’s specific will for my life. Now, that’s wrong thinking when it comes to this passage. God’s will, in Paul’s mind, is something general for all people. Here’s what he means:

1st Thess. 4:3a

So every thought that comes into our brain, we need to discern those thoughts. We need to determine whether they are lies or the truth. The Bible helps us in this. It declares the truth of God to us. This makes the lies easier to spot in a lot of ways, the lies are the things that go against God’s word. 

We can also trust that God’s Holy Spirit will help us discern the lies from the truth. If we go to the Holy Spirit and ask him to reveal to us the truth, He will be faithful to do that. Some lies are harder to spot, they look like truth or they are wrapped in a veneer of truth, but deep down they are lies. Those are harder, but the Holy Spirit offers true discernment in these things. 

The final step after capturing your thoughts and discerning your thoughts is to direct your thoughts. We need to focus our thoughts in a specific area. Our thoughts do not need to rule over us, we need to rule over them. 

This is in the context of Romans. Paul here is saying that what we set our minds on, our mindset, what we focus on or where we direct our thoughts matters. If you direct them toward the flesh, you will reap a harvest of death. If you direct, focus your thoughts on the things of the Spirit, you will receive life. 

Whatever we set our mind on is the direction we are moving. If we focus on the flesh, that’s the direction we are heading. Just like driving a car, we need to be focused on the road, when it comes to our thought life, we need to be focused on the truth and not the lies and deceptions going on around us. Same idea, we don’t win the culture back by only calling out all the lies, anyone can do that, we have to be the ones who are promoting the truth. 

In our own lives we have to focus our thoughts on the truth found in Jesus Christ. There is no other option. Listen to Paul again, he was an expert on this evidently because he wrote about it so often. 

In other words, think about God and his work, his promises, the joy he brings, the love he has for you. Any other thought you have (any lie), detain it. Discern the truth and direct your thoughts towards the truth.