Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (45 page)

    
by the renewing of your mind,

    
that you may prove what the will of God is,

       
that which is good

                   
and acceptable

                   
and perfect.

What is the purpose of God’s transforming work? What is it going to do for us? Paul writes, “That you may prove what the will of God is.” Word study reveals that
prove
means to test or approve. For example, a person takes a
piece of jewelry to an appraiser, who evaluates it and assesses its value. “That’s genuine silver,” he says, “and it’s worth this much.” In the same way, Paul says we are going to prove three things about the will of God.

First, we’re going to assess it as “good.” The term
good
has been devalued by our culture. Suppose I advertise a car for sale, and a prospective buyer asks, “What’s the condition?”

“It’s good,” I tell him.

His tendency will be to wonder, “What’s the matter with it?” We’ve so corrupted the word
good
that unless something is fantastic or perfect, we think it’s a piece of junk.

But the word used in Romans 12 is the same word used of God elsewhere in Scripture. You want to know how “good” it is? It’s as good as God is.

Moreover, Paul says it’s “acceptable,” not only in prospect, but also in retrospect. We couldn’t add anything to the will of God and in any way improve it. We couldn’t take anything away from it and in any way make it better. His will is totally, absolutely acceptable.

And if that’s not enough, it’s also “perfect.” Again, it’s as perfect as God is. It matches His character, His holiness.

Such is the will of God. That’s what He wants us to test in our lives. Unfortunately, most people spend the bulk of their lives trying to find the will of God, when all the while they’ve never presented their bodies as a living sacrifice.

An additional discovery that we make from a commentary is that the key verb in this passage, “to present,” happens to be in a form called an aorist tense. The aorist form of this verb indicates decisiveness. This is a major division in our lives, a point at which we present ourselves to God, just as Jesus was presented. There’s no turning back. It describes a complete commitment to God, for Him to do with us whatever He desires.

Imagine a notebook full of pages that represent the will of God for particular aspects of your life. And you say to God, “This is my life as it is right now, as well as I know it. I want to present everything I am to You.” And you give that notebook to God; you
present
it to Him in an act of complete and utter commitment.

But then at a later date, you discover additional material that you weren’t able to include in the notebook originally. What then? Well, you already know where the notebook is—you’ve given it to God. Your life belongs to Him. So as you come across new areas of your life, you can take those and present them to God as well.

Obviously you can’t present your wife to God if you are a single person. You’re not even married. Nor could you know how many children you might have. But the moment God gives you a marriage or children, then you already
know exactly where they belong in terms of God’s will. They go in the same notebook that you presented to God in the first place.

That’s the idea of “present” in the aorist tense, as it appears in this passage.

Now look back over Romans 12:1–2 as we’ve discussed it in this chapter. See if this does not flesh out some of the interpretational principles that we’ve been talking about. First we looked at the content of the text. We made all kinds of observations that gave us a database for understanding Paul’s message. We also looked at the context. “Therefore” led us to go back and examine the book as a whole. We did some comparison of Scripture, using a concordance. We chased down the verbs “to present” and “be conformed.”

Then we did a little consulting. We looked up a few things in a commentary. We discovered that “present” indicates a decisive commitment of ourselves to Jesus Christ. We also found out what the transformation involves. It is something God does; the renewing of our mind is something that we do.

And so, even though we’ve just gotten our foot in the door of this passage, we’ve come up with an accurate, perceptive, biblical understanding of what God wants us to do with our bodies as His redeemed people.

W
e live in a society that is drowning in a sea of information. With each passing day, the amount of information available to us grows exponentially. This surfeit of data poses a good news-bad news dilemma. On the one hand, we don’t have to be enslaved to ignorance. Mention just about any subject, and there’s a good probability that someone somewhere has looked into it. That kind of wide-ranging expertise brings about incredible developments in fields such as medicine, physics, biotechnology, agriculture, transportation, and communication.

On the other hand, how do we find the information we’re looking for? We’re no longer searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack; we’re searching for a needle in a haystack made of needles. Furthermore, even though we have a lot of data, much of it is of little practical use. And that’s the real issue, isn’t it? How to use the information. Yet it seems that more and more careers are built around information-gathering rather than information-productivity.

The same phenomenon holds for Bible study. The majority of people who study the Scriptures get logjammed in the step of Interpretation. In the
first place they begin there, which is a major mistake. And furthermore they stop there, which is an even bigger mistake.

The result is that they acquire mountains of data about the text, and lots of speculation about what that data means. But what difference does it make in their lives? The Bible becomes little more than a collection of theological brainteasers, rather than a road map for how to live.

What a tragedy, because the Word of God does not bear fruit when it is understood, only when it is applied. That’s why James exhorts us to “receive the word implanted” (1:21). In other words, let God’s truth take root in your life. How? By proving yourself to be a doer of the word, not merely a hearer (v. 22).

Imagine plowing a field, dropping seed in the ground, carefully tending the plants that shoot up, pulling out the weeds, waiting for the rains, and then, just as harvest time arrives, walking off to do something else. A person would starve pretty quickly doing that. Yet that’s what happens if you fail to move on to the next step in the Bible study process, Application. You can go to all the trouble of preparing a rich harvest and yet starve spiritually by neglecting to follow through.

I hope by now that you are hungry to see results in your life. If so, I invite you to move on with me to the next section, where we’ll explore some ways to turn biblical investigations into practical applications.

A
reporter was interviewing renowned psychiatrist Karl Menninger at the famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. When the conversation turned to the subject of prison reform, the doctor handed his listener a book he had written on the subject. The reporter politely promised to read it.

“No you won’t,” Dr. Menninger shot back in his acerbic manner. “Besides, what would you do about it if you did? Put the book down and go on to something else?”

That’s exactly the situation confronting people when it comes to Bible study. They promise to pick up the Word, but it usually amounts to very little. The real question is this: Even if they did read and study God’s Word faithfully, what would they do about it? What practical difference would they let it make in their lives?

This is a question you need to ponder as we come to the third step in Bible study, Application. Application is the most neglected yet the most needed stage in the process. Too much Bible study begins and ends in the wrong place: It begins with Interpretation, and it also ends there. But we’ve learned that you don’t start with the question, What does this mean? but rather, What
does this say? Furthermore, you don’t end the process by asking, What does this mean? but rather, How does this work? Again, not
does
it work—but
how
?

Understanding, then, is simply a means to a larger end—practicing biblical truth in day-to-day life. Observation plus interpretation without application equals abortion. That is, every time you observe and interpret but fail to apply, you perform an abortion on the Scriptures in terms of their purpose. The Bible was not written to satisfy your curiosity; it was written to transform your life. The ultimate goal of Bible study, then, is not to do something to the Bible, but to allow the Bible to do something to you, so truth becomes tangent to life.

You see, we frequently come to the Bible to study it, to teach it, to preach it, to outline it—everything except to be changed by it.

Titus 1:1 provides a clear statement of the purpose of Scripture: Paul describes it as “the truth that leads to godliness” (
NIV
). Then in chapter 2 he gives a specific case in point.

One translation puts it, “that they may adorn the teachings”—that they would put on those teachings like a set of clothes. Biblical truth is the wardrobe of the soul. It’s much more exclusive than anything you can buy from Nordstrom, it’s always in style, it’s thoroughly coordinated, and it’s perennially attractive.

Attractive truth is applied truth. A man once told me, “You know, Brother Hendricks, I’ve been through the Bible twelve times.” That’s wonderful. But how many times has the Bible been through him?

You see, there’s an inherent danger in Bible study: it can degenerate into a process that’s intellectually fascinating but spiritually frustrating. You can get mentally excited by the truth, yet fail to be morally changed by it. If and
when that happens, you know there must be something wrong with your study of the Bible.

Our task, then, is two-sided. First, we must get into the Word of God for ourselves. But then we must allow that Word to get into us, to make a permanent difference in our character and conduct.

In this final section of the book, I want to probe into this third area of Bible study. It’s very convicting. Fasten your safety belt, because there’s liable to be some turbulence ahead. I want this material to provoke your thinking— not paralyze it.

What happens when you fail to apply Scripture? Let me suggest five substitutes for application, five routes which, unfortunately, many Christians take in their study of the Word. Every one of them is a dead-end street.

How easy it is to settle for knowledge rather than experience. If you’ve sat through enough sermons, you’ve probably heard the bromide, “May the Lord bless this truth to your heart.” As one who makes his living teaching people how to preach, I’ve discovered that this frequently means, “I don’t have a clue as to how this passage works in your life.”