Be transformed by the renewing of your mind…(Rom. 12:2).
God is in the business of changing lives. Jesus didn’t just die to make forgiveness possible. He died to make transformation possible. One of my mentors once commented that God loves you just like you are. But he loves you too much to leave you just like you are! This passage in Romans is one of the classic texts that has to do with that transformation. It also contains the third key phrase that belongs with “present yourselves” and “stop conforming”. That phrase is “be transformed”. The Greek word that appears here is “metamorphoo”. We get our
English word “metamorphosis” from this word. Like a caterpillar coming out of its cocoon as a butterfly, we are to be changed from what we were before Christ into the men and women God created us to be.
The way Paul writes this phrase is not obvious in our English translations. The verb in Greek is in the present tense that speaks of ongoing, continual action. The phrase could be translated more literally as “be continually being transformed”. This is a life-long process. And it seems like it goes way too slow! I’m coming up on my forty-fifth anniversary of the day I bowed my knee to Jesus and surrendered to him. One would think that forty-five years would have produced more transformation than what has been done, but I acknowledge that he didn’t have much in the way of raw material when he started working on me.
Another nuance that is hard to see in our English translations is the grammatical voice of the verb. Unlike Paul’s exhortation to “present ourselves” and to “stop conforming” this phrase is expressed with a passive voice. It means that this is an action I cannot do myself. I am not the subject of this phrase, I am the object. I need something done to me that I can’t do. But God can. He is the one who transforms. He only asks me to allow him to do it. I can resist transformation and I will never change. Or I can surrender to transformation and allow him to work on me.
The text is also quite clear how transformation takes place. I am transformed by the renewing of my mind. In my last post I dug into the process involved in getting “conformed”. “Being conformed to the world” is the result of the effect faulty thinking has had on our lives. Whether from poor parenting, cultural conditioning, bad educational input, or false religious indoctrination, our mind comes to Christ in desperate need of reprogramming. Recognizing this need is the first step toward transformation. The craziest people I know are convinced that their thinking is perfectly normal and accurate. There is a great line in my redo of George McDonald’s “Lilith” (see “Lilith Redeemed” on Amazon) where Mr. Raven says to Robert McDonald “My dear Mr. McDonald. That is the job of the universe—to make such a fool of you that you know yourself to be one; and so to begin to become wise!” (See what your missing by not reading my book!)
So how do we get our minds renewed. God has provided the perfect resources and the perfect process (even if I do think it is too slow). He has given us the gift of himself in the person of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has inspired the writers of the Bible to create a set of documents that have transformative power when energized and used by the Holy Spirit. Those documents are contained in a book we call “The Book”, better known as The Bible.
Since we live in a time of the greatest biblical illiteracy in our country’s history, it would seem to follow that this could be the reason so few believers in Jesus are transformed to the degree that the change is noticeable enough to get people interested in what has happened to them. Sorry to sound judgmental, but you can go back and re-read my comments on “present yourselves” and see the connection. Without presenting yourself, and attempting to stop conforming, it is nearly impossible to know how critical a regular, consistent time camped out in God’s Word, with the Holy Spirit’s engagement, is required for transformation. Even Christians who have not taken these two verses in Romans seriously don’t often know that they are in radical need of radical transformation that can only be produced by the Word and the Spirit.
So take some time to go back and read again all three of the pieces I’ve written on these verses. And ask yourself which of the three phrases are missing in your life and where you need to spend some time and energy. If you are like me, you might find that you need more work on all three processes. Let me close these musings with the following promise, given by Paul, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, as he wrote to the men and women of the church in Philippi: “Being convinced of this…that he who began a good work in you will carry it on till the day of Christ Jesus”. What a great truth to lean into when you think you are just as nuts as you used to be! So “present yourselves”, and “stop conforming”, and “be being transformed”. It is the life Jesus died to make possible for all of us.