Zambia Hunt

You cannot give your whole life to God and go on living like the world. That is the second great truth of the passage, and it stands in Romans 12:2: God’s will demands a transformed life. The verse opens with a negative and a positive. First, what we must not do, then what we must.

The negative comes first: “Do not be conformed to this world.” The word conformed means to take the shape of something. We are not to take the shape of our surroundings, the culture, the context, or the age. A life given to God, a life of acceptable worship, does not let itself be molded by the world.

Picture a jar of water. The water takes the shape of the jar. Pour it into a wider, rounder vessel, and it takes that shape instead. You can move the same water from one container to the next, and every time it conforms to whatever holds it. That is exactly how some of us live. Set me among my colleagues on Monday, and I take their shape. Set me with another crowd on another day, and I borrow their coarse language and laugh at their crude jokes, because that is the company I keep. Then I come to church on Sunday and sing, “Glory to His name.”

This is the very thing Paul warns against. A living sacrifice, a life of acceptable worship, does not conform to the world around it. The world will keep trying to pour you into its mold, and so the question is searching: have you spent enough time in the presence of God to have a shape of your own, the shape of Christ?

The world presses on us without rest, and it presses with its own values, its own priorities, its own assumptions, its own way of thinking. Paul’s counsel is plain: when you live in the light of God’s mercies, you do not let the world dictate your thoughts. Do not conform to the values of the age, nor to its priorities, nor to its ethics, nor to its religion. Why not? Because another world is coming, an eternal one, and this present one is passing away. “The present form of this world is passing away,” Paul writes elsewhere, in 1 Corinthians 7:31.

Consider water again, but frozen. Drop the cubes into the jar. Do they take its shape? They do not. They hold their own form, because something within them is different. So it is with the transformed life: it is in the world without taking the world’s shape. It does not sing like the world, nor dance like the world, nor curse, nor steal, nor cheat, nor do business like the world. Do not be conformed to this world. Keep your shape.

How a Christian keeps his shape in the world is the very thing we are coming to: the power of the Holy Spirit within us. But first, consider what its absence looks like.

A story appeared recently that I read with some fascination; I will not name the man, though the report is easy enough to find. A Zambian presidential candidate who calls himself a Christian announced that he would not attend the burial of a paramount chief, not because he was ill, nor because he was away, but because, as a traditional chief himself, custom forbade him from any contact with death. He feared, in the words of the report, “spiritual contamination.” Here is a man who claims the name of Christ, who professes to belong to the One who conquered death and rose from the grave, who holds the keys of death and Hades—and yet he kept away from the funeral of a friend of thirty-six years for fear that death might defile him. His advisor on traditional affairs explained that the restriction guards the sacred status of such leaders from spiritual contamination.

That is what conformity to the age looks like. It does not always wear the face of open rebellion against God. Often, it wears the face of a man trying to be a Christian while clinging to the traditions of the world at the same time. “Do not be conformed to this age,” Paul says. The child of God has no need to fear contamination from death, for the One who lives in him has already defeated it.

Now the positive: “but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The word transformed is the word from which we get metamorphosis, and the image is worth dwelling on. As a boy in primary school, I learned what that word meant, and I went home to see it for myself. I took a glass jar from my mother, clipped a small leafy branch and set it inside, then hunted through the garden until I found a caterpillar, one of those many-legged creatures inching through the dirt and up the stems. I dropped it into the jar, punched holes in the lid so it could breathe, set it on the bureau in my room, and watched it day after day. One morning, the caterpillar was gone. In its place, fastened to the branch, hung a chrysalis, a round, grayish cocoon of fine thread. The creature had spun itself away inside. Two weeks or so passed, and every day I looked. Then one morning, I ran to the jar and found, instead of a caterpillar, a monarch butterfly, brilliant in orange and black. I carried the jar outside, lifted the lid, and held it up, and the butterfly rose on bright wings into the sky and flew away. That is the word Paul chooses.

Do not be conformed; do not take the shape of the world you live in. Be transformed instead, from the inside out. It is what happened to the Lord Himself on the Mount of Transfiguration “He was transfigured before them, and His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became white as light,” Matthew records (17:2). And Paul says the same change is at work in us: “as we behold the glory of the Lord, we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

This transformation, Paul insists, takes place “by the renewal of your mind.” A renewed mind is essential, for without it we cannot think rightly—in line with truth rather than error. This is far more than a matter of behavior. It is a resurrection mind, fixed on what is eternally real and of eternal worth. It is not mere intellect, either, but the whole capacity to understand, perceive, and weigh things from the vantage point of God’s truth. Paul describes the opposite to the Ephesians: the unbeliever walks in the futility of his mind, darkened in understanding, cut off from the life of God through ignorance and hardness of heart. “God gave them up to a debased mind,” he writes in Romans 1:28, “to do what ought not to be done.” The unregenerate mind is a darkened mind. But the regenerate mind is being renewed in the image of God. It does not think like the world or run to the world for its answers; it thinks differently. “Be renewed in the spirit of your minds,” Paul urges (Ephesians 4:23).

The means of this renewal is the Word of God; its agent is the indwelling Spirit. Word and Spirit work together, the Spirit transforming us through the Word He has given. This is why what we feed our minds each day matters so deeply. A mind nourished on the world cannot be transformed by it. And yet transformation is not the end of the story.