We need to prove by our experience that the will of God is indeed what Paul tells us it is, that is, that it is good, pleasing, and perfect. We need to check it out. Moreover, it is by checking it out that we will begin to find out what it actually is. This is the exact opposite of our normal way of
The will of God that we are talking about is good, pleasing and perfect. In other words, it teaches about the nature of God’s will for us as well as the fact that God has one. 1. The will of God is good. In a general way the will of God for every Christian, regardless of who he or she is, is reveale
In this verse "will" is to be interpreted in its context, and the context indicates that the will of God that we are encouraged to follow is the general will of offering our bodies to God as living sacrifices, refusing to be conformed to the world's ways, and instead being transformed from within by
I find it significant that this is where Paul's statements about being transformed by the renewing of our minds, rather than being conformed to the patterns of this world, end. They end with proving the way of God to be the best way and the will of God to be perfect.Some time ago, the staff of The B
The doctrine of redemption—the fact that "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16)—infinitely intensifies man's value, because it teaches that even in his fallen condition in which he hates God and kill
If human beings are more important and more valuable than the humanists imagine, why is it that things are so bad? The answer is the Christian doctrine of sin, which tells us that although people are more valuable than secularists imagine, they are in worse trouble than the humanists can admit. We h
If we are to have renewed minds, we need to stop thinking about ourselves and other people as the world thinks of itself and others and instead begin operating within a biblical framework. But what does that mean? Well, when we turn to the Bible to see what it has to say about human beings, we find
In the last twenty years something terrible has happened to Americans in the way we relate to other people, and it is due to the twisted humanism we looked at yesterday. Christians have become conformed to the world in this area, and we must take a good hard look at this to be sure we don’t get swep
In our last study from Romans 12, I introduced the Christian doctrines of God and revelation as the biblical response to the world's way of thinking. The Christian doctrine of God is the Bible's answer to secularism, humanism, relativism and materialism. The only one I did not write about explicitly
Or I think of Paul. He had been on the side of Christ’s enemies. He was one who had a vested interest in unbelief. He didn’t want to lose his traditions. He didn’t want to have to change his life. He didn’t want to have to turn his back on all that he had achieved in Judaism. Thus, in his supposed z
But now I want you to look at something else. I want you to turn from thinking about those enemies of Christ, who are exemplified by the soldiers and the priests on that first Easter Sunday, and instead I want you to focus on Christ’s friends, those who learned of the resurrection and who met with J
Here's a case, which like so many others, shows us a man who proposes a theory to explain away the reality of the resurrection. And instead of being rebuffed or forgotten, as Schofield and his book should have been, he is rewarded. It's a case of rewards instead of punishments.Let me give another ex
The soldiers had left their post, and the tomb was empty. They must have been terrified, wondering what was going to happen to them. After the religious leaders met together, they did not seek to have the soldiers punished. Instead, the guards were told to lie about what had happened. They were to
Each year at Easter time, when I turn to these stories of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I find myself wondering what I'm going to find new to preach on. When you've been doing this as many years as I have now, you begin to have the feeling that you have preached just about everything you can, gi
How perverse are the sinful hearts of men. When Jesus was dying on the cross the leaders had taunted him, saying, "Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him" (Matt. 27:42). But now Jesus had done something even greater than that. He had been raised from death. Did they believe
We concluded yesterday by looking at what we should see when we look into Christ's empty grave. I had pointed out the first three of the five Spurgeon mentions. We'll continue that in today's lesson with the fourth point, the most important one. We must look into the tomb to see that Jesus is not in
The way these accounts fit together makes the narrative compelling, and it may not be overstating the case to say, as Matthew Arnold once did, that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is “the best attested fact in history.” People who have studied the evidence for the resurrection have found this to be
It is not difficult to put the details of the narratives together. Jesus had been crucified either on Friday (which the church has traditionally believed) or else on Thursday (which is less widely held but, in my judgment, seems to fit the evidence better).1 In any case, Jesus lay in the tomb until
The only resurrection that counts for anything is a resurrection of the body. The disciples knew Jesus' resurrection was real when they touched His body, and it was only because of their deeply grounded conviction that He was raised that they were willing to launch out from their obscure corner of t
In 1989, Westerners were astounded by the political changes in Eastern Europe. Country after country repudiated its seventy-two-year Communist heritage and replaced its leaders with democratically elected officials. We rejoiced in these changes, rightly. But, though the American media with its blind
If there is a God and if he has made us to have eternal fellowship with him, then we are going to look at failure, suffering, pain and even death differently. For the Christian these can never be the greatest of all tragedies. They are bad. Death is an enemy (1 Cor. 15:26). But they are overbalanced
To avoid being conformed to the world we must also understand the doctrine of revelation. The God who exists has revealed Himself. Do you remember how Francis Schaeffer put it in the title of one of his books? He called it, He Is There and He Is Not Silent.1 That is exactly the point. God is there,
Where do we start if we want not to conform to this world? There is a sense in which we could begin at any point, since truth is a whole and truth in any area will inevitably lead to truth in every other area. But if the dominant philosophy of our day is secularism (which means viewing all of life o
As believers we need to reject the world's thinking and begin to think as Christians. This is what the apostle Paul is writing about in our text from Romans 12:2: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This means that our thinking i
