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bigmike

Start Living a Life Transformed by God
“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” (Romans 12:2).
Any writer or actor knows that to portray a character and do it well means you’ve got to get to know that person, how he or she thinks, what drives him. You’ve got to get beneath the skin and really reinvent yourself as that person. You need to know his passions, his loves, his idiosyncrasies. You reinvent yourself in that individual’s character.
Knowing something of his background helps you better understand the thirteen letters that came from the heart of a tentmaker turned evangelist. We call him “The Apostle Paul.” Making tents, of course, was an avocation which he had learned as a rabbi before his conversion to Christ.
Paul understood the pressures of his day to conform, to go along with the crowd. He also knew the hostilities and the dangers involved in being different. That’s why what he wrote to Roman Christians long ago is so relevant today. Every teenager who feels the pressure to be like everybody else, every businessman who thinks that to succeed he’s got to bend the truth, every person who has grown up in the world of Islam who even thinks of converting to Jesus Christ, knows the great risk he or she is taking by being different.
To those facing this struggle Paul wrote, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Two Greek words stand in contrast, in opposition to each other—both symbolize the struggle facing us today. “Don’t conform,” Paul says, “be transformed.” Now, this word was used only twice in the New Testament, here and in 1 Peter 1:14, where Peter said we are not to be conformed to the evil desires we had when we were living in ignorance. The word means “to form, or to mold something.” Another translation puts it, “Don’t let the world force you into its mold.” It implies pressure, the kind that a drill sergeant would use to whip recruits into shape.
There’s always a price to pay when you dare to be different, to stand for truth, to say, “I can’t do that; it’s wrong.” That’s when you feel the cold icy stares or the sharp words of rebuke from business associates who are more interested in making money than doing the moral thing.
“Don’t conform,” Paul says, “but be transformed…” The Greek word he used is the same one that gives us the English word metamorphosis. It was the word the disciples used when Jesus was transfigured before their eyes and shone as the sun. The word was used of a workman who took raw materials such as marble and chipped away, turning the marble into a beautiful statue. It was also used of someone whose life was radically changed in terms of conduct, attitudes, goals, and purposes.
That’s the struggle facing us today—conform to the world system, or let God’s Holy Spirit keep chipping away at the rough edges bringing us into conformity with God’s will and purpose for living. Interestingly enough, the Greek word that explains how you can be transformed, which we translate “by the renewing of your mind,” is never found outside of Christian literature. You see, God has a monopoly on transforming lives as drunks sober up, as cheats and womanizers turn their backs on their adultery and renew their commitments in marriage, as crooks go straight and good people find the strength to stand against the culture and the moral bankruptcy of our day.
Read Romans 12. It’s there for you to discover.
Resource reading: Acts 26.

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