The concept of intentional living. Today we're looking at our scripture. Today will be Romans chapter 12, just the first couple verses. We're going to talk today about being Transformed. Romans, chapter 12, the first couple verses.

And last week we saw. We. We were in Hebrews chapter 12. So not to be confused, but they both start with the word therefore. And we talked about anytime where you see the word therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for?

Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice, alive, holy and pleasing to God, which is your reasonable service. Do not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may test and approve what is the will of God, what is his good and well pleasing and perfect will. Let's pray. God, we thank you for your word. We thank you this morning that we can open it up, study it.

But Lord, may it study us. May your word dig into our lives and show us how it is that we can live for you in an intentional way, that we can grow spiritually, we can grow in Christ, draw closer to you and be the person that you have created us to be. Lord, speak through me. We. We pray that people would hear your words and not whatever stumbles I make through it.

But, Lord, that they would hear a message from you that's applicable to their life today. In Christ's name, we pray. Amen. This is one of those therefores that takes a lot of background. And if you're familiar with the book of Romans at all, you might be turning, like, pages and pages just going backwards, trying to figure out the start of what he was considering for this particular therefore.

In other words, the Apostle Paul is the guy that's writing the book of Romans. He's writing it to the church at large in the city of Rome, which is. Don't think of it as one local congregation, but probably several gatherings, home groups or churches that are maybe meeting in buildings. However it was, he's reaching out to a lot of them and he's writing to them. And so this letter would have been circulated amongst them.

And as Paul is writing to them, he says a lot of things in this letter. It takes a lot of study, a lot of time that you can kind of dig into it. But one of the things that he's been talking about, and I'll share just in the briefest of background stories, the church in Rome was made up of both Jewish and Gentile believers. But then there was a five year Period where the emperor had said, I'm tired of Jews living here. They're causing problems.

No more Jews in Rome. And he kicked them all out. Like he says, you guys have to leave. So he kicked the Jews out of Rome for five years. So for five years now, this church is made up of just Gentiles, people who aren't ethnically Jewish and don't have a faith or an adherence to the law of Moses.

In other words, they don't go back to like the Old Testament saying, well, we have to live by these things. They just knew the story of Jesus Christ, salvation by grace and faith, and they lived according to that, that doctrine or that, the gospel. Well then after that five year moratorium or whatever period was up, a lot of the Jews moved back to Rome. And so as they moved back to Rome, they attempt to kind of reassimilate into the church fellowship that they had been part of. And of course, things are a bit different.

If you've ever been a part of a church for a while, maybe you moved or maybe you just kind of, you know, dropped off for a while due to an illness or some other thing going on in your life or something going on in that church. And then you come back and you realize some of the people you knew were gone. The, the friends that you had aren't there anymore. And there's a whole new group of people and maybe a new minister. And you think this is a different church.

Like it, it looks the same, it, it smells the same. You know, every church has its own unique like, aroma. You know, it's, it's really interesting. But every church has its own, you know, like the, the, the furnishings in it, the, just the situation. It somehow, it has its own smell.

And you're like, it smells the same. But I don't recognize half these people or some of my friends are gone. And you think this is a little bit different. But then you find out that what's being taught or what's being preached is not at all what you had grown accustomed to when you were there. And that's what they were finding out.

As these Jews had come back in and joined with the Gentiles, they said, wait a minute, you mean you guys aren't really reading the Old Testament scriptures? You're not teaching the law of Moses. You're, you're, you're, you're eating whatever you want. Like that was food, sacrifice to idols. You know, of course the Corinthian church deals with that at large.

We're, we're going through the study of Corinthians in our Wednesday Bible study at 11:00am It's a shameless plug. It's a little commercial in the middle of the sermon. But anyway, they, you know, the Jewish believers are saying, all this stuff that you're doing is so loose. It's so frustrating, free. We're not used to that kind of thing.

We don't agree with that living. And so Paul was writing to them, which is interesting because as of the time where he wrote this letter, he hadn't visited them before. He's writing from an outside point of view, but kind of saying, I'm an apostle and I'm going to tell you some things that you're arguing about that you're doing wrong. Because he had friends that, that he had met along the way that had moved back there, and they're reporting to him what's going on in their churches, and he's giving them wisdom and guidance. And so as he had talked about, about this for a few chapters about the issues with following the law or not following the law of Moses and all these things, he.

He kind of makes that discussion and he says, you know, listen, there was some good things that happened with the law because the law shows us that we're sinners, and the law shows us that we're in need of a Savior. It shows us that we've all fallen short of God's glory. And so in light of that, in light of the mercy that God has given us, both Jew and Gentile, in light of that mercy, in light of that salvation, Therefore, in chapter 12, in light of that salvation, therefore I tell you to, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Now we're talking about intentional living here this morning. This, this couple weeks, we're in the middle of three weeks, just a short series on intentional living.

Last week we talked about how having intentional faith, and this week we're talking about intentional living in the sense of your spiritual walk, like how you can intentionally be spiritually formed. You have an intentional growth in your spiritual life. And as we look at that, we recognize that you don't ever grow as a believer in Christ by accident. In other words, nobody just woke up 10 years later, 15 years later, after they were saved and baptized and said, hey, I'm. I'm more like Jesus than I ever thought I would be.

It takes intentionality. You have to decide. I want to be the person. Christ called me to be the person. He died so that I could be formed in his image.

And I want to be that way. I want to be that person. I want the Holy Spirit to indwell in my life. And it takes intentional steps and devotion on our part to get there. You don't just get there by accident.

You don't just get there by traveling more miles down the road. And then all of a sudden, somehow you've been shaped by the image of Christ or the life of Christ. You have to be intentional about that, and you have to decide that that's what you want to do. And so as we look at this step of intentional living, what we recognize or what we realize is that the idea of intelligence, intentional spiritual walk, takes some steps on our part. And these verses talk about that.

It says, you have to offer your body as a living sacrifice. Now this ties in a lot to both Jewish and Gentile culture of the day. They were all familiar with offerings and sacrifices of some sort. Whether they had a background in the Jewish religion or a background in like Greek and Roman worship. They were all used to going to a temple of some kind, bringing a sacrifice, bringing an offering.

If that sacrifice or offering was an animal, it had to be slaughtered and killed and prepared and dressed and offered up and roasted on an altar and offered up to the God of that temple or religion. So to the Jews who had been used to doing that under the law of Moses. Now Paul is speaking to them, saying, your body is the sacrifice, but because Jesus died on the cross, you don't have to die. Your sacrifice is that of a living sacrifice. This made sense to the Gentiles as well.

They don't have to participate in some ritual to make the gods happy that they were worshiping. They don't have to participate in some ritual of an offering and a sacrifice and all the things that went with it, just so that a God would provide for them. Because you see, they understand that God has provided salvation and life for us through his son, Jesus Christ, that he was the once for all perfect offering, the perfect lamb, the perfect sacrifice. And he died so that we don't have to. So now, in view of that mercy, in light of that mercy, he says, give your bodies as a living sacrifice.

Now, the sacrifices that were offered on the altar had to be perfect. So he's saying, if you're going to give up yourself as a sacrifice to God, you need to live a perfect life. I think it was last week, it might have been two weeks ago, we talked about this idea of what it means to be perfect. Though you see, those sacrifices did have to be perfect. Not only did they have to be set aside for this specific purpose.

But they also had to be free of blemishes, free of brokenness, or free of damage of any kind. They couldn't be an injured or sickly animal. They had to be perfect in that sense. But there's also this understanding that when we read the word perfect in our scriptures, in our New Testament specifically, what they're saying is that you need to be with your life set on this mark. You need to be aimed and focused on this mark, and you need to be pointed directly at it.

And that as you do that, as you live your life hitting, you know, aimed towards that, what you do is at the end of your life, you hit the thing for which you have aimed. And that is perfection, is hitting the mark to which you have aimed. And so it also denotes an idea of completeness, in other words, a complete way of living the things of God in this life. And so as we look at what a living sacrifice is, we do need to be perfect, but we need to be perfect in the sense of we're aiming for this and this is the way our life is orientated or headed towards.

That was fun. I don't know if you saw that. I just spilled a bunch of coffee all over my notes. And that's great. I don't know if God's saying, hey, this is garbage, you know, Like, I'm not sure.

Maybe I was just being clumsy. But anyway, so it totally missed the scriptures, too. Just my notes, you know? So it just makes me think, like, okay, God, what. What did I do wrong?

You?

I used to have this old guy. He was an old retired pastor, and he'd sit kind of in the back row and he'd cross his arms and he'd look like this. Sometimes he'd do this, and I'd stop and I'd think, did I say something wrong? Like, did I. Am I a heretic?

You know, did I get something totally off on this? I don't think I messed it up. Anyway, when those things happen to pastors, like, oh, man, was God saving me from saying something like, totally, like, full of heresy and lies, you know, I don't know. Anyway, so Amy's back there saying, just get off your notes. You don't need them.

Probably. And she's probably right. Just missed my mark. Nice. Not perfect, am I?

So let's see, where was I? Though I do need to get back on track. Oh, yeah, living sacrifices. So living sacrifices, they're always trying to crawl off the altar like a dead sacrifice. Is there and it has no choice but to stay there.

But a living sacrifice is always like, this isn't comfortable. I don't want to be here. Can't I just go about living my life? Why do I have to be offered up in this way? A living sacrifice is always trying to crawl off the altar.

In other words, we're always trying to. To get out of doing the things that we're supposed to do. Because, you see, holiness does take some work on our part, and it does take. It involves some kind of pain. See, surgery is not without pain.

And if you've been through some type of surgery, especially where something needed to be removed, you. You feel that, or, well, you were probably knocked out unconscious if the anesthesiologist did their job right. But after you wake back up, and especially when those pain meds they put you on every four hours or so wear off and you're like, I need the next dose. I'm starting to feel how much this hurts. They cut something out of me.

It hurts to be made holy, to be pruned. Jesus talked about a lot of different things. He talked about being a vine dresser. He's the vine, and all the true branches are rooted in Him. But sometimes those things need to be pruned.

If you've ever watched somebody taking care of a grapevine, if you don't prune them annually, they don't produce, they don't put out fruit. They go in and they trim the orange trees in the groves. And any type of fruit producing tree or vine must be pruned and trimmed by an expert vine dresser or pruner or otherwise. It will not continue to produce. In the same way as we offer ourselves up as this living sacrifice, God continues to prune us, to perfect us, to make us more like Christ.

And so, as we submit our lives to him in this way, it means our yes is always on the altar. It means we always are offering up a yes to God. In other words, when he says, this is what I want you to do, we say, yes. Elaine, what's the old song we sing? The chorus?

Yes, Lord, yes to your will and to your way. I'll say, yes, Lord, yes. I'll trust you and obey. So we call this entire sanctification being entirely set apart for God for his purposes. We might call it holiness living.

We call it a lot of different things, but. But what it boils down to is we are continually offering up a yes to God. When he convicts us of sin, we say, yes, you're right. That is an area in My life where there's sin. And if we don't admit our sin and confess our sin, then we're not growing.

If we don't admit when the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin and say, yes, Lord, you're right, that is an area of sin in my life. I confess that now. Cleanse me. Make me holy. Make me pure.

We will never grow. So when we look at these things, we look at the Scripture and it talks about giving up our bodies because of Christ's sacrifice, because of his mercy. We look at ourselves as a living sacrifice. We're alive and holy and pleasing to God, says, this is our reasonable service. But then it says, don't be conformed by the ways of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

We're going to spend a few minutes here, and I want to talk about these two words, conformed and transformed. It's fairly simple, but when you think about it, a. Let's say a liquid always takes the shape of the container it's in. You know, liquid doesn't have its own shape. It's liquid.

It just does that. Gas is the same way, but it doesn't take a shape. It just fills whatever container it's in. But a liquid takes the shape of the container that it's in. And so when you.

When you pour liquid into something, it takes that shape. It is formed by that shape. But if we're talking about ourselves, apparently we are being shaped by the things of this world. We are being shaped by the way the world lives. And so the way the world lives is what is giving us our shape many times.

And it says, not to be conformed by that, but transformed to be. To have our shape changed or transformed in a certain way by the renewing of our mind. Now, I want to give you a little bit of a nerd alert here. This is something that's not from the scripture. This is something from the realms of science.

And I spent a lot of time reading this, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about it, because I think you probably don't want to hear that much. But there's this thing called neuroplasticity. Everybody like, excited about that. Now, a couple of you have maybe heard some guys on, like a podcast or something read a little bit about this. If you're not interested in it, you should be.

Neuroplasticity is something that basically means. And I'm by far not an expert in this, but it basically means your brain is able to reshape not the shape of itself, but it's able to reshape the paths and the connections between different neurons. The neurons have these little gaps and things fire between them, and they make these connections, and they. These connections will harden over time. It's like.

Well, we went over to the. There's this new park over here behind Culver's and Wawa. It's. We were over there actually last night. A couple.

Couple of folks in the back. Hey, they visited. They bumped into us over there. We had a great time. But we.

We were. We were over there, and we were there yesterday, we were there Friday. And we're walking around and Amy and I were walking through it, and we noticed that there was this. This place where you needed to get from this sidewalk to over to here. And they.

They didn't put a sidewalk there. And I said, I guarantee you, just mark my words, there's going to be a footpath through this grass right here, because everybody's going to start cutting through there. It was just. It didn't feel like it was laid out very well. And so what.

What's going to happen is people are going to start cutting a path through there, and eventually, if the city's paying attention to it, they'll pour a sidewalk there. Perhaps that was their plan in the. In, you know, in the long run. I don't know. I've heard about a college campus, and for all I know, this is just a legend.

That's not actually true. But there was a college campus where they built it and didn't put in any sidewalks because they said, let's just let the kids make their own paths. And wherever there's a footpath, we'll put a sidewalk there a couple months, because we'll know where everybody's naturally going to be trying to walk. Makes sense. Except I don't think they would actually be allowed to open it because, you know, government says that's not safe or something.

And so I think that was just a legend of some kind or a long time ago, maybe, I don't know. But I'm thinking about that. That sidewalk through the grass, and eventually it'll connect from not just this shortcut, but it'll actually put a sidewalk in there that connects one sidewalk to another. Okay. That's a real basic way to explain what your brain might do when you start doing a new thing.

Your brain will make these new connections that are going on there. It'll make those connections, and then it'll actually harden one of the connections and it becomes not just a Shortcut. But it becomes an actual process through which your brain thinks through a process. Now, we might call that forming a new habit. If you didn't pick up on it.

That's what we were actually talking about. Anybody want to take a guess at how long it takes to form a new habit? Shout out, what do we hear? 21 days. We've heard that one, haven't we?

I bet you don't know where that idea comes from. I heard six weeks, too. 21 days actually came from a neuro or not a neurosurgeon. A face. What do you call it?

Like somebody that does a facial reconstruction. You know, plastic surgeon. Thank you. A plastic surgeon, I think, in the 50s or 60s. And he was.

He. He was doing this study because he was curious how long it took patients that had facial reconstruction or plastic surgery of some kind, how long it took them to get used to seeing their own face in the mirror after their surgery. And he found that it took, on average, 21 days. So he wrote about it, and then all kinds of people just said, hey, it takes 21 days to form a new habit. That's literally where it comes from.

Scientifically, it's not quite an accurate study. It turns out it might take between six months and a year to form new habits of some kind. And you're thinking, pastor, I came here to hear preaching. We are. Trust me, we are.

You see, because here it says, to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. I promise you. I don't believe that the apostle Paul understood neuroplasticity, which, by the way, goes down the older we get. In other words, the ability for our brain to. Have you ever heard the saying, you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

You can't teach an old dog new tricks. That comes from here. Like, the older you get, the harder it actually becomes. Not impossible. The harder it becomes for your brain to do this.

There's also actually. And I forget the word for it, but there's a type of plasticity that's not neuroplasticity. It'd be whatever it's called anyway. It's where your brain can actually reshape itself after a trauma event, like an accident or something like that. And it can actually start using other parts of itself and restructure those to make up for that damaged portion of the brain where it's unable to do that.

But neuroplasticity is that thing when we're learning something new or exploring new areas or new things that it begins to do. It's a new habit. Now you see, our brain has the patterns it has so many times because of the world in which we live. Like I said, a liquid water or what have you takes the shape of the container it's in and we live in the world. Now the scriptures tell us to live in the world, to be part of it, to be in it, but not part of it, in the sense of living the way the people of the world live, the people who don't know Christ.

And when we live in the world, it has certain patterns. Have you ever noticed the patterns of anger and bitterness that some people tend to have? I know some of us still deal with that, right? I mean, if we're being honest, some of the things I'm going to mention in over the next few minutes, they hit each of us in a certain way. Some of us are still dealing with that.

Some of us haven't dealt with it yet. Some of us know that that's an issue in our lives. But we haven't actually confessed that it's a sin. And therefore we haven't allowed spirit of God to make us holy in that area. There's going to be things that, that I'm going to mention that you're going to, if you're being honest, you'll say, yeah, that's me, yes I'm dealing with that, or yes, that's, that's who I am and I need the spirit of God to cleanse me of that.

And for sure I won't be talking about every single thing because we'd be here a long time. But there's people that deal with anger and hatred and bitterness or maybe I should say don't deal with it. It's part of who they are and they've just accepted that. But the world is what shapes us that way. You just turn on the news and you see that there's a lot of angry and bitter people out there.

They're angry about something that they think they're losing, something that they think that's not coming their way, something that they think they were mistreated on or their ancestors were mistreated on or who, what have you, any number of things. Some of that bitterness and that anger is deep seated and goes a long way back. Some of it's just manufactured because, well, it keeps them turning on the news every day and they keep getting that feed that injection into their arm of just a little bit more drama, a little bit more anger in the world that they can just, that feeds them and that anger and that bitterness that. That hatred that boils out of that is the way the world is shaping them to be. It's not the way Christ has shaped them to be.

There's people that deal. Sadly enough, we see this contrary to what Scripture calls us to do. We see this in many churches. We see gossip and even slander. I can't tell you how many times I've heard stories of pastors that I'm friends with or that I know who talk about themselves being the main target or victim of this.

I talked about a minute ago about the guy that would sit in the back and just. He wanted everything to see me fail. Why? There was no reason for that. I hadn't done anything to him.

I hadn't tried to harm him or hurt him in any way. Unfortunately, that man had been in my shoes. He had been a pastor over the years, and yet he chose to live the last few years of his life in anger and bitterness. Not just towards me. It was towards several predecessors before me at that church.

It was like his own personal mission to make sure that every pastor, that church failed. And guess what? I'm not going to say it worked. But I'll tell you right now that that church no longer stands like the building is no longer there. They decided to close it, sell it, and turn it into the people, turn it into, like, condominiums or apartments.

Now, why. Why do we hang on to these things? Why do we let the world shape us in these ways of slandering others or gossiping about others or spreading lies and rumors about people? Many of you maybe have dealt with that. But what scares me the most to think about is the people that aren't here in the congregation anymore, whether this one or in another one.

People that have quit church, maybe even quit God because of what somebody said about them. That was not true. That was a lie that was harmful to them, even if it was the truth about the way the person used to live. But they say that was my past. But thank God, this is me today.

He saved me. He has redeemed me. He has restored me. Amen. And yet there's people that are shaped by gossip and slander.

There's people that are shaped by lust and pornography.

Choosing my words carefully because of some in the audience right now. Okay, this is. This is something that has harmed more men, women and children than you can imagine. It's something that draws people into slavery and things that we think should never have happened. And yet it's rampant in this country and in many others around the world.

There's a whole tourism industry that's sexual tourism for people that'll go to other countries like Cambodia and Thailand to seek out adventures that they can't find anywhere else but are so freely affordable there. And yet here in this country, in fact, one of the things that happens is every city in which a Super bowl happens, there's a spike in human sex trafficking and exploitation. Folks, we've got problems on our hands that are beyond anything this world should be seen in what we call this nice, pleasant modern era. There's children that go missing that are. That are trafficked across our border and.

And they're trafficked across the border and then they're sold. And it's done in the secrets, it's done in the shadows. And yet these kids, the things that happen to them are horrifying. And yet I know people here in this county, people that are raising children that have redeemed them from those situations and are fostering them and caring for them. The stories of what has happened to these children at very young ages is something that should never be.

Never happen in our world. And yet it's going on. And we think, well, I'm not dealing with that. And yet even in this room, even with the people we see around us, there are people that are or have been struggling in some way, or maybe not even struggling with just embracing pornography, pornographic images, pornographic films that are doing things that. That not only would be, let's say, displeasing towards God, but that are absolutely inhuman to force others to participate in for their own pleasure and enjoyment.

Do you understand what I'm saying? The things of this world, the things that this world tells us, oh, it's just okay. Because those people willingly did it. A, many of them didn't willingly do it and they were forced into it in some way, shape or form, and B, is disgusting. Cut it out.

Jesus says, whatever your eye or your arm causes you to do, to sin, you need to get rid of that body part. In other words, be drastic enough to get rid of sin and addiction and pornography. Whatever it takes to get rid of that in your life. Do whatever it takes for it to be gone. We don't talk about this enough in the church because it's, well, unpleasant.

Well, we don't want to think that it's really going on. We don't want people looking around, you know, like, hey, is it you? You know, statistically it's someone. Statistically it's several of you. But you see, the Bible talks about the fact that there were.

There were these different sins that people had. He says, but some of you did things such as these, but you were bought, but you were washed, but you were cleansed. So you see, the thing is, there's hope for those that are found even in some of the most taboo or disgusting that we might think disgusting sins. There is hope for those that are caught up in that life and in those things because Christ has bought us with his blood. He has washed us and he has made us holy and righteous.

Amen. The world is shaped by greed and selfishness.

It is. It rules the world. It makes the world go round. In our country today, right now, probably one of the biggest news stories, at least in some circles, is that there's people going around at this department of government efficiency and they're supposed to be going into all these government agencies, finding where corruption and abuse has happened and rooting it out and stopping the payments to all these things. And there's actually some people that are saying that that shouldn't even be happening, like they're just fine with it because it's a billionaire that's running that program.

And how could a billionaire have your best interests at heart? A, I don't believe that he does have my best interests at heart. B, I don't care because I think what is happening needs to happen. There's things that are going on with that money, whereas being what it's being used for is actually harmful to people. It's enslaving people, is trapping people in life, life changes and body changes that they'll never get away from.

And it's also being used by people just simply to make them wealthy and to launder the money back into their own pockets. And that to me is immoral. And they use my tax dollars to do it and I'm done with that. And so I'm glad. I don't care if it's a billionaire or a trillionaire that's at the head of it.

I'm glad that we're going to be in, in any place that we can, stopping the payment of u. S. Citizen tax dollars that is actually going towards harming other people. And so no matter what it is, though, we see greed and selfishness at the head of all of this. People are greedy and selfish and they want to take what's theirs and use it for their own worldly pleasures and gain.

Scriptures teach us that we ought to take what God has blessed us with. Recognize that it's not my money at all, that I'm just a steward of it, and that I am Just taking what God has placed in my hands. I'm stewarding it or using it, managing it in the most just, equitable way possible, and turning it back over to God. He lets me use some of that to pay my bills and feed my family. Isn't that great?

But some of it, he asks for it back. I'm not giving a tithe to God. I'm simply returning to him that which already belonged to him. You see, I look at the money that our family has that comes in, and I say, thank you, Lord. This is not my money.

This is your money. May I do with it things that are pleasing to you. I don't always do that very well. We all fall short in that area. But the difference between that and greed is saying, this is mine.

I want to hold as much of it in as I can because this belongs to me. I worked hard for it. Maybe I worked hard at my job or maybe I worked hard in years past. This is my retirement, and this is all mine, and I don't want anybody to have it. I got to hang on to it as much as I can.

You don't have to drive flashy cars and have big houses to be greedy and selfish. You see, I was just listening to a message. I honestly can't remember if it was last night or this morning because I, like, didn't sleep. I slept for a few hours, then I was awake. And so I just started listening to different sermons.

And some of you will say, like, sermons will put me to sleep pretty well. Fair point. So I kept falling asleep, and then I'd wake back up and I'd listen to more of it, you know, and, like, rewind it and get back there. But I think it was Amy. Was it Josh Howerton?

So it was last night. So listen to this guy, Josh Howerton. Every week from. He's over in Texas, and he was talking about a. Well, this is when he lived in Tennessee.

And he was saying he had this church planter, a guy that was riding with him and wanted to learn some things from him. And they're driving past, like, one of these really wealthy neighborhoods, and there's this real big house on a hill. It's just one of those, he says, that makes you go, wow, just a great house. And this church planter riding with him says, boy, look at that house. And he's like, yeah.

And he said, that guy needs a lesson, needs to hear a sermon on greed. And the pastor said, hang on a second. That guy actually goes to my church. And you don't Know anything about him, he said, and he starts listing all the things that this guy has selflessly given, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to for the ministry of the church, missionaries, sending pastors up to conferences, doing all these things, helping a family go overseas, like paying their airfare and all these things to adopt needy children and things like that that they were trying to do. Like, he's like, you don't know just how much this guy does.

Having that house does not make him greedy. You. Because greed is a condition of the heart, not a condition of the bank account. Amen. And so, you know, greed doesn't necessarily manifest itself in large numbers of dollar signs.

It manifests itself in our heart and how we control our pocketbook. And do we view that as our money or God's? Because if. If you ever think that I'm going to be here saying, like, hey, you need to give this much to the church. If I ever do that, you.

You can go ahead and ask for my resignation. Because I've missed the point of the gospel. See, the point of the gospel is God has blessed you to be a blessing to others. He said, this is mine. I'm letting you hold on to it for a while.

Now, are you going to manage it wisely in a way that honors me, or are you going to hold it in stingily and selfishly? In fact, he told a story about a guy that was a farmer, and this farmer had a bumper crop. Now, in the Jewish way of life and understanding, if you have a bumper crop, that's because God has blessed you to be a blessing to others. But instead, what this guy did was he said, huh? He had a whole conversation with himself, which would have been a red flag for anybody with an Eastern mindset, because you don't have a conversation with yourself.

When you need wisdom, you have a conversation with older, more wiser people than you are. And so instead he had. He said, self. And himself said, yes. And he said, what should I do with this?

And he said, well, your barns won't hold all this crop. What now? Tear them down and build bigger ones? That's stupid. Just build more barns.

You don't need to tear them down. Like, I'm sorry, I'm a guy. I'd like more garages, not less. You know, I'm saying, anyway, so build more garages. You know, build more barns.

That's what I'm thinking. But either way, he built more barns. And he says, now guess what? You can store up this crop and retire. It's the only time retirement is ever talked about in the Bible.

He didn't use the word retire, but he said, you can sit back and take it easy. He says, I can retire now. I got enough wealth to coast on through the rest of life. And Jesus said God meets him that night and says, you fool, tonight your very life will be demanded of you. Now he didn't say, I'm putting you to death.

He says, I'm going to demand an accounting of your life today. Are you going to live greedy or are you going to live generously? So the world is shaped by these patterns. One of the last ones that I wrote down, and I wrote a list so that I would not go on and on forever, but a lazy and self indulgent life that can be interpreted in any number of ways. But what the world's looking for is the easiest, simplest, most self gratifying way to live and indulge in the things that are pleasurable to me.

And that's what the world is seeking now. These are some of the ways that the world is living. Anger, bitter hatred, gossip and slander, lust and pornography, greed and selfishness. Lazy and self indulgent. These are some of the things that the world is doing.

In other words, this is the shape of the world. And again, it's not a complete list. There's so much more. The world is living this way and we live in this world, but we're not called to live like this world. This is where that whole neuroplasticity thing comes back into play.

It says that our minds ought to be renewed. We're being transformed. We're not being conformed to the shape of this world. We're being transformed. In other words, we're metamorphing into a new shape.

Not by the shaping shaping of the world, but by the renewing of our mind. That neuroplasticity thing is saying an old dog can learn some new tricks. That neuroplasticity thing is saying that what we're doing is we're learning something new. We're learning a different way. We're being shaped in a new way.

God is building a new form or a new shape for us. And we are being conformed to that shape. And the shape is the image of God. We're being conformed to the image of God or shaped by the way that God looks and the way that God works. Now, a renewed mind can take shape in several ways.

And some of us struggle with memory issues. Some of you have either had that yourself. You've been a caretaker for someone you Know somebody right now that you're caring for. And some of the best things you can do to increase neuroplasticity, which, by the way, when you're a toddler, is when it's, like, the highest. Because that's when kids are learning new things.

They're learning new stuff about how the world works and how to. How to speak and how to draw and how to write things. And as they're. As they're getting older and older, the brain begins to harden those connections, and it's harder and harder to make new ones. But there are things you can do, and there's lots of people you can watch or listen to.

Like, you know, that'll help you understand this way better than I can, and it'll take a lot longer than I have to talk to you about it. But some of the things are, like, you can learn a new language or learn to play an instrument. I know we think that that's something that they do in high school and around that age, but you can pick that up. In fact, Elaine, I think you'd probably love it if we had some more instruments up here. I know I would.

I think it'd be great. Some of you guys might be like, maybe I can learn. Trust me, we'd allow that. We'd take that. Like, if you're like, I want to learn an instrument.

Cool. Come on up and do it. You know, like, we'll give you a place to practice and to play and to, like, room to stumble through it, you know, it'll be all right. There's. There's learning a new language, learning a new instrument.

You never know what happens that God might do with that once you begin learning it as well. These help to. To soften your brain, to. To soften it up, to make those new connections. You can do creative things like painting, drawing, or writing.

Right. There was a woman that was at our yard sale yesterday that. That wrote books for. Mostly for children, but they were, you know, I don't know, around 100 pages long, probably. And I bought one from her for our daughter.

But she's. She's an author now. She had had an issue where she had been in a terrible car accident, and it harmed her in quite a. You know, quite. To quite a degree, I guess.

And so that's when she started doing one of her dreams that she always wanted to write. There's more things like traveling to new places and creating new memories. When you travel to somewhere you've never been, it actually starts opening up your mind in different ways. See, we tend to stay home and travel the same roads. We always go up and down.

And that tends to just harden those old ways of thinking. Reading books, reading scripture, memorizing scripture helps with this neuroplasticity. But what that really looks like to me is a renewed mind. In other words, we're cutting off the old habits. Because just like it might take between six months and a year to form a habit, it also takes a certain amount of time to end a habit.

But that one actually takes less time, I believe, than forming a new habit. You can stop an old habit. Now, I get it. There's some things, like some addictions to drugs and alcohol, chemical substances, that might take even longer. But the way that you get away from those actions and those attitudes and those addictions is by forming those new things in your mind, by allowing God to renew your mind.

It may happen supernaturally, but it usually happens with some work on our part. There's nothing that says here in Romans 12 that says, hey, be transformed by the renewing of your mind, and God will do it instantly. It doesn't say that. It implies there's some work on our part. Sure, you're saved by grace and faith alone, and yet you have some responsibility to walk in holiness.

So how do we eliminate the patterns of this world and get a renewed mind? You stop living by the patterns of this world. Whatever things that are going on in this world that tend to shape you, you need to get rid of those things. You need to allow the Holy Spirit of God to show you where those things are and to say, I'm not doing this any longer. Then you need to ask Jesus to show you those areas.

It doesn't mean you won't be able to have fun and enjoy life. You'll actually find out that you're living life to the fullest. When he talked about giving us everlasting life, he says, life to the fullest. The best thing I think you can do in all of this is read the Scripture, the Gospels, the New Testament, do something and find a place. Like, find something in Scripture that you've never heard or read before and then get stuck there.

Like. Like stay in that day in and day out until you feel like you just fully embraced it and lived that out. Find something in the Bible that you've never noticed before and say, God, teach me something from this, and then continue on in that. And as you continue on in that, do whatever the spirit of God leads you to do in this life. Because you'll find that the patterns of this world don't matter anymore and God will begin shutting down any you know drawing that you have.

The patterns of this world are designed to suck you back in continually. But you'll find that you have freedom to walk away from those patterns the more you avoid them and embrace something that God leads you into. And what you'll find is that you find you are living life to the fullest of anything that God has ever created you to live. Amen. From second Corinthians, Chapter three.

Even to this day, when the law of Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, we are being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.