Romans 12:3 “For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.”

If there is a sin that sits at the heart and center of all that sin is; if there is a sin that is the source of all others, it is the sin Paul identifies here: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought.” Pride, arrogance: look at the dangerous things that follow from this attitude. When we think too highly of ourselves we aren’t properly concerned with what God says. We find ourselves believing, embracing, and doing the wrong things because we think we know more than he does.

How many Bible stories aren’t basically God telling his people, “Don’t touch this. You’ll get burned.” And in their pride his people decide, “Nah. It’s okay. I’ll be alright.” And they get burned. Adam and Eve. Moses and Pharaoh and the 10 plagues. David and Bathsheba. Israel’s whole history of dabbling in idolatry.

When we think too highly of ourselves, we aren’t properly concerned with our neighbor. Is there anyone you less want to be around than a person who thinks he’s better than you? What’s a prideful person good for? They are only in to serving themselves. They don’t take advice. How is any of this compatible with the life Paul urges on us, one that looks at God’s mercy and responds accordingly?

So he urges us instead: “…rather think of yourself with sober judgment.” Thinking about ourselves in a sober way involves remembering three things. First, we are people that God has made, and he made us with real gifts and talents. Each of us has wonderful abilities, sometimes very unique ones. It is not sinfully arrogant to acknowledge that. It’s sober thinking.

Second, we are all a moral mess. None of us have anything to be proud of when it comes to keeping God’s commands and loving our neighbor. We aren’t worse than anyone else, but we certainly aren’t better, either. Honesty requires us to admit this.

And third, in view of God’s mercy, we are children he has redeemed and forgiven. We ought to repent of our sin. We don’t need to wallow in never-ending self-loathing and despair over it. The sooner we embrace this truth, the sooner our lives will line up with the faith God has given us.

Exchanging pride for a more realistic self-regard isn’t a loss to our value or dignity. It roots our identity in God’s grace and sets us free from the constant need to prove something. He has already made you far more than anything you would have imagined for yourself.

Romans 12:2 “Do not conform any longer 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.”

Paul asks us to be Christian nonconformists. That is trickier than we might realize. The world has many patterns and standards to which we might conform. Some are obvious, some more subtle. The world has a pattern of speech that gives full vent to its anger and lets the obscenities fly. I get angry and passionate about things, too. But my Lord tells me, “Do not let any unwholesome speech come out of your mouths.” “Do not repay insult with insult.” Even, “If you are insulted, you are blessed.” The world has a pattern for romantic relationships that suggests as long as two people consent, and they are using protection, things like marriage or gender don’t matter. Do what feels good. But my Lord has given me a pattern in which the marriage bed is to be kept pure, and it is for this reason that God made them male and female.

A little less obvious, the world has a pattern we might call, “More for me.” The house is never big enough. The car is never new enough. The closet is never full enough. The trips have never taken me far enough. The kids have not participated in enough. But my Lord’s pattern is, “If we have food and clothing, we will be content with this.” And, “Have something to share with those in need.”

Even more subtle, the world has a pattern that convinces me, “The smarter, the better.” The greater a person’s intelligence, the more they know, the greater their worth. My Lord even tells me that he gives knowledge and wisdom as a gift. But he also warns that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. And his truths often remain hidden to the wise and learned while little children are able to understand them perfectly.

We could keep building the list, laying out the competing patterns. This conformity is hard to resist. The world bullies, tempts, lures, deceives, eases, and scares until it has shaped us just the way it wants.

To remain nonconforming Paul says we need to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Notice this is less about being educated. It is not enough to be given a to-do list. It is more about being changed, becoming different people, getting a mind that thinks and works a different way. If we were talking about a diet, I don’t just need a list of foods I shouldn’t eat. I need change of tastes that finds those foods repulsive. To remain nonconforming to this world I need my Lord to give me a new heart and a new mind that no longer wants the pattern the world offers.

That, again, is where “in view of God’s mercy” comes in. God’s love changes me. My wife has told me she loves me. She has showed me she loves me. And over time that has made me quite a different person. It has shaped my habits. I used to leave the Sunday paper scattered over the living room on Sunday afternoon. She let me know early on she found this annoying. It didn’t change right away. Today I gather it up and put it away when I’m done (most of the time), not just because it’s a thing I’m supposed to do. It’s a thing I want to do, for her.

God’s mercy does something similar for us. When Jesus’ love at the cross is in view; when we see him dying for our sins; when we hear him forgiving our sins; when he trades us his righteousness for our selfishness; when he makes eternal life and heaven our own; when he presents it all to us as his gift and gives it all away for free; then the Christian life isn’t just a list of demands I’m supposed to do. It’s a life I want to do, for him. With his mercy in view, his love transforms us so that our lives no longer conform to the world in which we live.

Romans 12:1 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship.”

For the better part of three chapters, Paul’s letter to the Romans digs deeply into the utter lostness of humankind. No one, from open sinners to deeply religious moralists, escapes his diagnosis–utterly lost.

Then comes the surprising grace of God. He gives his not guilty verdict as a gift. He sacrificed his own Son to satisfy the demands of justice. All sin is forgiven. All people are welcome. He is continuing the grace and forgiveness he showed to Abraham and David. It gives meaning to our suffering, freedom from the control of sin, power to our struggle with it, optimism and confidence in God’s love no matter how dark the days become. Our Lord chose to save us and make us his own purely out of his own mercy and compassion, and everyone he has chosen will be saved.

Can you look at all this, Paul concludes after 11 chapters, can you believe all this and not be changed? Isn’t this a call, even more, the inspiration to live our lives differently?

No reasonable Christian would deny that God deserves our worship in response to all the grace and mercy he has shown us. But what does that worship look like? An hour or two of songs and prayers on Sunday morning? Prayers before we eat or go to bed and a daily devotional?

How about every waking and sleeping moment for the rest of your life? You’ve probably never seen an animal sacrifice. I haven’t. But you know what they were about. The lamb or goat or calf was presented to the priest. He slit its throat. The animal bled to death. The hide was removed. The carcass was dressed. The priests slung the body up on the altar. Sometimes they burned the whole thing to ashes. Sometimes some of the meat was used to feed the priests and the worshipers. But for the sacrificial victim this was never temporary, or partial. It was permanent and required their entire lives.

The God of the Bible is a God who calls for human sacrifice, Paul reveals–but not for human deaths. “Living sacrifices,” he calls us. It’s still permanent. It’s still the whole life. But he wants the whole body for unending service, not a death that serves no one. What does this look like?

It does not mean that you all need to enroll in the seminary and become pastors, teachers and missionaries. If you have gifts and interests for that sort of thing, that is wonderful. Serve God that way. But church work is not necessary to offer your body as a living sacrifice.

Martin Luther once commented, “The Christian cobbler isn’t a Christian cobbler because he sews little crosses on the shoes he makes. He serves as a Christian cobbler by making good shoes.” Each pair is a service to God because he gives his neighbor the best he can make.

The Christian student isn’t a living sacrifice to God because he tries to use every class discussion as an opportunity to slip in some reference to Jesus and the gospel. No, he is a living sacrifice when he respects the teacher, and does his work faithfully, and gets the best grades he can because school is preparing him to do things that contribute to society.

The Christian doctor doesn’t make himself a living sacrifice by praying with every patient at every exam, or becoming a medical missionary, though both may be a fine thing to do. He is a living sacrifice when he takes every exam and every surgery seriously and does the best he can to keep his patients in good health.

The Christian who is sleeping isn’t a living sacrifice because every dream is about a Bible story. No, he is a living sacrifice because sleep is one way he takes care of the body God has given him, and it makes him strong and alert for whatever God has given him to do during his waking hours. You get the idea. Sacrificial living isn’t necessarily about pain. In some cases it could be. It is a picture of an entire life lived in view of God’s mercy.

1 John 3:2 “Dear friends, now we are the children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

There are question marks about our future. But they are not because we suffer any uncertainty that we will have one, or that it will be wonderful. There are those who have no such confidence. In some faiths, people live with no certainty of the life to come. In Islam, even the imams say that no one can be certain. A clever Christian once spoke to a Muslim friend about this. “You have life insurance for your family?” he asked his friend. “Yes, I do,” his friend replied. “You pay all your premiums?” “Of course I do.” You are sure that if you die the insurance company is going to pay?” “I have no reason to doubt it.” “So here you are, putting all this time and effort into your religion, and you aren’t sure if it will ‘pay’ in the end. It sounds to me like your insurance company is more reliable than your god!”

We are already the children of God, now. Heavenly perfection is the next thing waiting for us. But what does “perfection” look like? I have never seen it. We tend to redefine it. Do you know what it means in baseball that a pitcher pitches a perfect game? It means that after nine innings, a complete game, not one member of the other team reached first base safely. In the history of the sport, 140 years, there have been 23 “perfect games” pitched. But it doesn’t mean the pitcher pitched all strikes. It doesn’t mean that no batter ever made contact with the ball. That level of perfection has never been reached.

What would perfect behavior look like, coming from a perfect heart? It’s easy to identify some things as sins. We can easily exclude the big and obvious ones, as the Bible itself often does in describing heaven. But what would it look like to live completely untainted by any selfish thought, any loveless moment?

What would it look like to enjoy perfect health? Of course there would be no sickness, pain, or injury. But what would it be like to have a body perfectly nourished, perfectly rested, perfectly exercised, perfectly breathing, digesting, circulating, thinking? I believe that God doesn’t give us more details about the life to come because there is nothing to which to compare it in all our experience. It would be like trying to explain calculus and trigonometry to an earthworm.

But he gives us this hint: “…we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” Now we are called the children of God. And if that is what God calls us, then that is what we are.

But a day is coming when we will be completely transformed. We won’t be God. But we shall be so like him that it is the best way to try to describe our future. There is nothing on earth to compare our future existence. There is one thing in heaven to which to compare it, and that is God himself. He is the picture of the perfection he promises will be ours.

1 John 3:1“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God! And that is what we are!”

I’m over 50 years old now. Do I still want to be called a child? Doesn’t that suggest naive, immature, even incompetent? Maybe you are familiar with children’s author Mercer Mayer. He created the character “Little Critter.” One of my favorite books is titled “All by Myself.” From the moment he gets out of bed and gets dressed, to the time that he puts on his pajamas and brushes his teeth, Little Critter brags about all the things he can do “all by myself.”

Isn’t that how we think, even when we are children? I want to be big. I want to be grown-up. I want out from underneath my parents’ shadow. Don’t call me those cutesy pet names. A car commercial depicts a middle-school girl telling her dad, “You don’t have to drop me off in front of school. You can drop me off right here.” “What’s the matter? Don’t want to be seen with your dad in front of your friends?” Some days, that’s how it is with our Father. Instead of smart, sophisticated, respectable men or women of the world we are the “children of God.” Yuck.

But your Father loves you too much to let that change things. He is fully committed to this relationship. He will patiently call us to repentance 10,000 times if that is what it takes. He did not sacrifice his Son for nothing, and the blood of Jesus in the water of your baptism is less like the bath or shower you take once at the start of your day. It is more like you and I are fish, and we swim around in the grace and forgiveness coming from the cross every moment of every day for the rest of our lives. As the children of God, it is the air we breathe, the environment in which we live. See your Father’s lavish love?

Being called by the Father, “My child,” is better than being smart, or respected, or talented, or self-sufficient. It means you are treasured. Sometimes people, even Christians, have gotten the idea that the key word in this relationship is obedience. And certainly it serves children to learn to be obedient. But not because they were brought into this family to provide cheap labor.

Your Father only wants to keep you from harm. The key word here still is love, because you are his child.  He fully intends to protect you, feed you, clothe you, and do whatever else is necessary to take care of you. He claimed you and redeemed you because he wants to enjoy you as his very own.

There is a passage in the last chapter of Isaiah that pictures God like a mom bouncing her precious baby on her knee, maybe singing some silly song or playing patti-cake or some other childhood game, it doesn’t matter. It is about the affection and the joy of being together. You are that child, and you can see your Father’s lavish love in what you are.

1 John 3:1“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God! And that is what we are!”

 I am the child of John and Mary Elin. My wife is the child of Glen and Mary. My children are the children of…well, you know. Our parents loved us. Of that I am certain. Ordinarily a parent’s love means you would do almost anything for your children. I once heard a missionary couple talk about their work in Indonesia. They once risked their lives and more to get their children out of the country when radical Islamists were attacking Christians and fire-bombing churches. “You will do almost anything to save your children,” they said. But that my children should be called my children? That doesn’t seem like an extraordinary statement of love. That seems like an ordinary fact.

That we are called the children of God is an example of his lavish love. We don’t deserve it. We weren’t born to him in a physical way. I know that there is a sense in which all people are God’s children because he is the Maker of all things. But John doesn’t have in mind so much our source as he does our relationship. We are no longer born into that relationship with him.

Remember Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus about the need to be born again? It’s more like God claims us and calls us his children by adoption. And we weren’t likely candidates for such a privilege.

When human parents adopt, from time to time one hears that the parents have given the child back. It turns out that the child had some congenital disease or condition they weren’t counting on. Or maybe the little one was born to drug addicts, and it becomes clear that there are going to be some behavioral issues. Mr. and Mrs. Potential Parents of the Year had dreams of the perfect little person in their perfect little family. That dream turns into a nightmare of far more expense, or far more work and heartache, than they counted on. So terrible as it might seem, they give the baby back.

Do you suppose that we have given our heavenly Father any less reason to cancel the adoption? You know the cost. He paid the life of the only natural-born Son in the family. Jesus paid with his blood so that we could be called the children of God.

You know the issues with behavior in the family, because you and I are one of them. We are rebels from the start. We know that our Father is watching us all the time. Still, we choose to disregard his rules.

At my wife’s restaurant they have multiple cameras trained on the employees at all times. Still, they choose to break the rules, or pick at each other, or stand around doing nothing. Of course someone has to take the time to watch the video for them to get caught.

Our Father never takes his eyes off of us. He sees the garbage on the computer screen. He hears the curses we mutter under our breath. He is a witness to our lies and hypocrisies. Whatever it is you do, he knows. And he knows that he will be fighting our behavioral issues until the day we die. There is no brilliant child-psychologist who is going to counsel us out of our sin. It’s not as though we grow up and move out of the house someday to give him some relief.

Despite all this, he claims us for all eternity. We are his children, little as we deserve to have such a distinction.

Romans 3:28 “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith, apart from observing the law.”

Paul wants it to be clear that we can’t purchase God’s pardon. There are no backroom deals we can make with the Judge. He is not going to find us not guilty on certain counts in exchange for a little cash or some favors we can do.

Nor are we simply out on parole or probation. God has no spiritual probation officers to whom we have to report to see how we are behaving, otherwise we end up back in hell’s prison. “Apart from observing the law” means that our behavior does not get considered.

An professor of mine once put it up on the board like a mathematical equation:

Faith-Works=Faith Alone.

Justification is a gift to be received. Christmas is a couple months away. How many people will you be sending a check to pay for the gift you receive from them? Justification by faith means we don’t pay God for his gift, either. Good works are not required.

This does not mean we are against good works. We aren’t saying we do no good works. They just don’t factor into God’s decision to forgive our sins and consider us righteous. Our new found freedom may actually move us all the more to do the right thing out of appreciation, not obligation. It’s true a person may work hard when there is a big reward for his work. But when he is on vacation and free to do as he pleases, he may work harder still.

In his introduction to the book of Romans, Martin Luther described the power of faith to inspire good works this way: “Faith, however, is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God (John 1:13); it kills the old Adam and makes altogether different men, in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and it brings with it the Holy Ghost. O, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith; and so it is impossible for it not to do good works incessantly. It does not ask whether there are good works to do, but before the question rises; it has already done them, and is always at the doing of them.”

A little later he writes: “Hence a man is ready and glad, without compulsion, to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything, in love and praise of God, who has shown him this grace; and thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire.”

Which is not to say that God requires good works before he justifies us. No, he inspires good works when he justifies us. But we are still justified by faith, with no works required.

When I was a little boy, I liked to tinker in my dad’s workshop. I once tried to build some miniature furniture to use with my G.I. Joe. It turned out horrible. It wasn’t even usable. When my dad saw what I was doing, he made some little pieces for me, and they turned out very nice. I contributed nothing, but I was happy to receive his work.

If we try to tinker with salvation in our heavenly Father’s workshop, it will turn out horrible. It won’t work at all. It is better to receive the work he has already done, and be justified by faith.

Romans 3:27-28a “Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith…”

When it comes to the practice of religion, most people are inclined to rate themselves way above average. Paul tells us, “No. We all stink.” Here is the problem. First, people tend to see religion mostly as a matter of morals. Over 20 years ago a reporter walked into my office looking to dig up some dirt on a semi-famous member of the congregation. Somehow the conversation turned to whether religion has value at all. The reporter said something like, “Well, I suppose it’s okay for morals and such.” The confusion didn’t start with her. The idea that religion is mostly about good behavior is at least as old as the Apostle Paul.

The other problem is that people water down God’s holy standards in order to make his demand for good behavior manageable. We often settle for “pretty good” ourselves. We then project this same willingness on God. But it doesn’t work that way with him. He is a holy God, and we are talking about matters of life or death, eternal blessing or eternal loss.

Let’s say that Boeing came out with a new airplane, and you were going to be a passenger in one for the first time. You happen to run into an engineer, and ask him if the plane flies. “Pretty close,” he says. “We got almost all of the engineering right.” Are you still going to get onboard?

Even if religion were mostly about morals, boasting would be excluded. “Pretty good” or “almost perfect” will get you killed. And honestly, we are “not good at all” and “not nearly perfect” by the standard of God’s holiness. Then Paul tells us that there is an even more compelling reason that boasting must be excluded from our relationship with God. “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith…”

Boasting is excluded because we are justified by faith. Understand what faith is. It is not the one little work that God demands of us, as though believing God was doing something. Faith is receiving, not doing. Picture the beggar with his hand out. Whether that hand is a big paw, or dainty, delicate thing; whether it has a powerful squeeze or is weak and crippled, the Lord can still come along and slap that multi-trillion dollar check for his grace into it. It’s not about the tiny, little faith (which is only trusting someone else to get the job done). It’s about the great big God who is giving faith his great big favors.

Faith receives God’s justification. The Lord regards us as righteous, holy, perfect people not because we have actually lived that way, obviously. He is willing to justify us, he will stand up and defend us as this kind of people because Jesus was righteous, holy, and perfect for us. Because he already served the sentence for our sins, because his blood and his death expunge the record of our crimes, even the ones to come, God passes the “not guilty” sentence on you and me. Faith simply trusts that God’s promise is true. He doesn’t consider us righteous because we lack sins. He considers us righteous because in love he chooses not to look at them.

If this is how we are justified, if this is how we escape our criminal record, then boasting would be more than a little silly, wouldn’t it. I am old enough to remember the Watergate scandal. About a month after President Nixon resigned, President Ford pardoned him for all his crimes. I don’t want to get into whether that was a good idea or not. But if President Nixon had then begun boasting about what a good person he was, what a fine record of public service he had, because all criminal record had been removed, that would be more than a little inappropriate, wouldn’t it?

In the same way, it would be inappropriate for us to boast about our relationship to God because we have been justified by faith. It excludes all boasting.

2 John 1:4-6 “It has given me great joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us. And now, dear lady, I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning. I ask that we love one another. And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.”

 John finds great joy because he finds “your children walking in the truth.” And he concludes that the Father’s command “is that you walk in love.” And in between he urges that “we walk in obedience to his commands.” Let’s tie these all together and take our direction.

 Love, you may already know, is the great summary of everything God commands. He wants our words and actions to benefit the people around us. Everything he does serves and benefits us.

His love is contagious. It is like a good infection. Once you catch it, love starts to take over inside. It rearranges our hearts and our minds, and God’s love starts producing love in our lives as well.

But sometimes we don’t understand what our neighbor really needs. And my neighbor may want something that isn’t good for him at all. So God gives his revealed truth as a guide. We can march right through the ten commandments, and with each one our world would tell us that love is something else if our Lord did not make his will clear.

You see, sometimes love involves pain, or self-denial, or sacrifice. Sometimes love involves calling others to pain, or self-denial, or sacrifice. In the movie Hearts in Atlantis, three childhood friends, two boys and a girl, become friends with an elderly man named Ted. He has mysterious powers. Near the movie’s end the girl has been beaten up by a neighborhood bully who dislocates her shoulder. One of her friends carries her to Ted, who recognizes the dislocation and determines to set it back in place. But while correcting the dislocation will reduce her pain in the long run, the procedure itself will be even more painful. So he talks up her courage, and gives her something to bite on while he pops the bone back in place.

Spiritually, sometimes love calls us to inflict pain to relieve it. We can’t just go on feelings. We need to be guided by God’s truth. When we keep love and truth together, together they direct our lives.