Do Not Conform to This World
I delight to do your will, my God. Yes, your law is within my heart. — Psalms 40:8
Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is the good, well-pleasing, and perfect will of God. — Romans 12:2
Author
Dr. Roberto Miranda
Summary: Paul calls us to continually offer our whole selves to God. The body includes not only our physical being but also faculties such as the mind, which can serve sin if they are not transformed. Living as a living sacrifice means leaving the old self behind and submitting ourselves to purification and holiness; this surrender, more than words or gestures, is true worship. When Paul says, “Do not conform to this age,” he does not mean a hundred years but the present age, marked by values and customs opposed to the Kingdom of God. Therefore, we must not adapt to this world: we live according to the principles of a different Kingdom.
The apostle Paul extends a solemn invitation to all the children of God throughout all generations to live a life of continual surrender to the Lord in every area. That is why he speaks of bodies as symbols of the fleshly, material, animal part of the human being—those areas that can become instruments of evil and sin.
Even our mind can be part of that process—the mind untouched by God, for example. We are to present to the Lord those members, those instruments of our being that he calls the body, somata, but which can encompass more than just our physical part, and live a life of sacrifice, of the old self continually dying so that the new self may rise and the new birth of which the Word speaks may become effective, real, manifest, observable in our lives.
And through continually living our lives as a living sacrifice—right?—we are alive, we live in the world, we do the normal things a living human being does, but we are like flesh, a body, a victim placed on the altar of sacrifice, continually being consumed under God’s purifying fire, shedding its merely fleshly and animal attributes and acquiring the attributes of a human being immersed in the Word and in the principles of Christ Jesus and His Kingdom.
That is why Paul speaks of offering our bodies as a living, holy sacrifice that is then pleasing to God, evidently because the only thing that can please God is a life of holiness, a life of continual surrender and continual submission to the principles of the Kingdom of God. Thus we can be a holy sacrifice pleasing to God, and Paul adds that this total and continual surrender to the process of purification and sanctification is what truly constitutes worship.
That is why we think of Christ’s words that God seeks worshipers who worship Him in spirit and in truth, meaning not merely with words or gestures or rhetoric, but truly in their lives, submitting themselves and paying the price of a holy life that is pleasing to God.
Then Paul continues, and here we come to new material in verse 2. Developing this idea of surrender and of a life lived continually before God in continual purification, he adds another element that gives it nuance, right? And so here in Romans 12, verse 2, he says: “Do not be conformed to this age.”
Paul does not mean a century in the technical sense in which we use that word: one hundred years. The word he uses in the original Greek is aion, from which comes the idea of an age or epoch, and it means a large span of time, a span of time characterized by certain attributes and certain features, right? An epoch, as we speak of epochs in the history of art or literature or in humanity’s intellectual history. There are epochs.
People speak of the Age of Enlightenment or things like that, referring to a time with certain specific characteristics, right? So Paul says: Do not conform to this time, to this epoch. And one might ask: Well, which epoch or which time?
Evidently he is referring to the present time in which we live, this embodiment of humanity, so to speak, before Christ comes and establishes His new order. Until Christ comes at His Second Coming, we will be in this age. From the creation of the world up to this moment, it is this age. And this age means the world with all its vanities, its rebellion against God, its inability to submit to the principles of the Kingdom of God; the world ruled by Satan and his powers; the world with all its sinful attributes, with all its cultural attributes that work against holiness, against surrender to the Lord, against the life of purity God desires, against an awareness of eternity and obedience to the Lord’s commandments. That is to say, against the Christian life genuinely lived.
This world, this age, this time, this epoch in which we live, this dispensation, to put it in general terms, is opposed to the principles of the Kingdom of God. And Paul solemnly says: Do not conform, do not adjust yourselves, do not attach yourselves or adapt yourselves to the attributes, customs, and attitudes of this fallen world that is in rebellion against God.
We will leave it there and continue in our next meditation, but remember this call from the Word of God. God’s call is for you not to grow drowsy, not to settle in, not to adapt to the customs and attitudes of this world. We Christians live continually at odds with the values of this world because we obey the values of a different Kingdom, which is the Kingdom of God. May the Lord bless you. Until our next meditation.