Justified and Sanctified

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org We're here with you this morning, and we've got a lot, I think, that we're going to be covering in Romans chapter 12 today. Now we discovered at the beginning of this series that the book of Romans wasn't just like dropped out of the sky. Paul was writing Romans for a specific purpose, though he had never visited Rome before this point in time. Though he had never been with these Christians, he knew about them. He knew a lot of them by name, we found in Romans chapter 16. By the way, we started this whole series out at the end of the letter, kind of like if you've ever read a whodunit, checking out the end to see who did it. And then you start at the beginning and see all the clues along that fit with that end. That's kind of how we did it with Romans, understanding Paul had a certain purpose in this letter. There were eight-ish house churches that seemed to have all sorts of people from different backgrounds together. But what had happened in Roman society, and I would dare say reflects a lot of our societies, there was a lot of stratification, there was a lot of division, there were a lot of us, women going on back then, between slaves and frees, Gentiles and Jews, and between men and women. And Paul said not in the church, not among God's people, that all those things are mended and healed through the fact that God has justified us, made us righteous with him, declared us righteous with him, through the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that makes all the difference. And so God mends broken lives, broken people, a broken world, through Jesus. So we are going to read now the last of the four hinge passages. I mentioned this a few weeks ago. There are four big therefores in this gospel. This is the last one in Romans chapter 12, and each of them acts like a door hinge, and the whole letter kind of swings on that. And so we're going to swing, for the last time in this letter, towards the practical, the application of the gospel, of what it means that we are justified. And if we are justified therefore because of the mercies of God, that's how Paul talks about it. So let's read in Romans 12, we're going to read 1 through 8, and I dare say it's really hard to do justice to this passage, just like a lot of the letter. I think it was Martin Lloyd-Jones that preached on Romans about 50, 100 different sermons. It took him like three years to get through the whole thing, this preacher in Great Britain at one time. I don't think we have, I don't have the stamina to preach that long on one letter of the New Testament. We're doing 13 weeks. And so even with this passage, man, I can't do it all justice. It's something that you might want to let sink in, but let's read along now. Romans 12, 1 to 8, 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. For by grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body, we have many members and the members do not all have the same function. So we, though many are one body in Christ and individually members, one of another having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us. Let us use them. If prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness. So that's what we're going to look at today. And as I said, we can't quite do it all justice, but we're going to look at the payoff now to what it means that we have been justified, that we now get to live transformed lives, lives that are different. So what Paul does here, in a sense, someone has said, is a reduced Christianity in a nutshell to this is what your life is now all about. Kind of this is it in a condensed form. Paul is summing up the first 11 chapters of Romans with that, therefore, and this is what the Christian life is all. Simple but profound. And we're going to look at that. So we're going to be looking at this passage, three different areas, the core, the cause, and the character. That is the core or the nutshell of what it means to live in Christ, to be justified. The cause, like why behind it should we be living and what's the power behind it? The cause of our ability to live following Jesus. And finally, the character of those who follow Jesus. First of all, the core. And Paul uses this striking phrase at the beginni...