All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Kyle, another one of the pastors here. We need to put out more chairs this week, all right? It's full. You guys didn't get the memo. It's summertime. You're not supposed to do this until September, but we are sure glad that you are here. We have been going through a series last summer and this summer called 27 that Mikey alluded to in the announcements, which were fantastic. Also, at the end, Mikey said, please rise. That's new. I like that language. A little courtroom drama in here. All rise. That's fantastic. Anyway, sorry, I got sidetracked. We've been going through last summer and this summer, 27, where we're going through the books of the New Testament. This morning, we arrive at the one that I've been avoiding for the duration of the series, last summer and this summer, because it's the book of Romans. Some of you know, others of you will, that Romans is the most theologically dense and rich book of the Bible that there is. You can make some arguments about some other stuff, but Romans is a, but I will do my best to give you a grasp of what it is to make it hopefully more approachable for those of us who have never read it before, to make it more approachable so we can know how we are reading it and what we are reading. And for those of us who know it well, to kind of think of it in this succinct way. Because here's one of the benefits of going through the whole book of Romans or the whole book of Philippians on a Sunday. And we're not going to hit all of the great details here. But here's one reason why it may actually be a helpful approach. Because when Paul wrote these letters, or when the other apostles wrote the other epistles, they wrote them to be read aloud to the church all at once in one sitting. These letters were not written by Paul to parse out and dissect and look at the Greek tense and the original meaning of this one particular word and have that compared to all the other times that word shows up in Scripture. Now listen, listen. That's good research. That's helpful knowledge. It's okay and good to dissect the Bible in that way. It's helpful to us, helps us understand. But please hear me when I say, it was not written for that to happen. It was written to be read at once to give us a big understanding of the large points that Paul or the other authors are attempting to make in the books or the letters that they wrote. So we need to be careful when we read scripture that we don't miss the forest for the trees. To that end, I would highly encourage you, if you've never done it, to sit down and read Romans from beginning to end. I would highly encourage you to sit down and read it all at once. I did it on a flight one time and not to be too whatever, but it was a really moving experience for me. I would really encourage you to read it from beginning to end. It takes about 45 minutes maybe, unless you're from Tennessee. It'll take a little longer. So it's difficult, it's difficult to synopsize all of Romans in a single verse or to point to a verse and go, this is the book of Romans. I'm going to open the argument with Romans chapter 12, verse 1. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you know your Bible well, you may be able to fabricate another argument from Romans. Maybe you think it's Romans 8.28. We could pull out other verses that I could anchor us in this morning, and they would be absolutely appropriate. But I'm going to anchor us in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, as kind of a synopsizing summary verse of the whole book. And this is what it says. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. I think this is a good encapsulating verse for the thrust of the book of Romans. Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, and I memorized it this way, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Paul's encouragement, his pleading with us, is to live our lives as a living sacrifice. And this imagery of being a living sacrifice was very clear to the Jewish audience. Much of the early church was made up of people of Jewish heritage. They understood the sacrificial system. So they understood what it was to be a sacrifice. They had probably grown up sacrificing lambs and doves and bulls and goats and whatever. There's a whole book of the Old Testament, Leviticus, that details the sacrificial system. So they understood this language well. But that's why it would be striking to them, this concept of being a living sacrifice, because being a living sacrifice is a daily choice. In some ways, I don't mean to be too crass about it, but the goats got off easy in the Old Testament. Just one time, and that was it. Done. Forever. But Paul says that we are to be living sacrifices. Sacrificing ourselves every day. And when I think of what it means to be a living sacrifice, to live your life for the sake of others, I think right now, in my context, I think of moms of young children. Okay? I know that I'm biased. I know that that's my perspective right now. We have Lily, she's eight. John, he's three. And so our house takes a lot of energy to run right now. It is physically and emotionally draining. And I don't, listen, I don't have the experience of late elementary school, middle school kids, high school kids, so I'm not up here trying to play the suffering Olympics with you. I just, this is our perspective. And I just know from what I can see that Jen, as a stay-atat-home mom lives an exhausting life. Just yesterday, we spent the day, we're getting ready, we're going out to dinner with some friends and we spent the day getting the house cleaned because apparently you have to clean your house when a 17-year-old kid's coming over that's never cleaned a house in their life. I don't know why you have to do this. We have, you got to make sure the vacuum marks are upstairs, you know? So we're cleaning the house. We're scurrying around, you know, we're doing, we're doing things. And, uh, Johnny, we refer to him, uh, as Jen shadow, just her little buddy, just always right there with her all the time. Right. And so, and he's a lot, I was, uh, I was, I was telling somebody, I was watching some somebody I was watching some sprinting, some Olympics, I think yesterday. And I was locked into this particular race. They're doing the whole preamble. Sprinting races take forever to start, forever. It's absurd. So they're going through the whole preamble, and then it's the actual race, and it's like the 4x400 or whatever it is, and I'm watching the whole thing. And I realized, I'm standing in front of the TV just looking at it, and I realized when it ended that John had been talking to me the entire time. He had been talking the whole time. No idea what he said. We sat down yesterday at the end of the day to watch some more Olympics, and he sat on the couch next to me and sang a song about elephants and grass. He's just all day long. He's going, and Lily makes her presence known sometimes. So it's just all day, right? We get a little respite going to dinner. We come back after about a 90-minute reprieve, and as soon as we get home, both kids are awake, and they're waiting for mommy to get home. They have now got to this place where they just won't go to sleep until she tells them goodnight. They're not interested in me, and I'm fine with this for a couple reasons, because I can get right back to Olympic coverage, and if you lived in a house with Jen and two young kids, you wouldn't be their favorite either. Okay. I just admit defeat there. And it's fine. So John has gotten out of bed. He's turned his light on and his noisemaker off. And we lock it. We keep him locked in. So he doesn't wander in the night. He's banging the door. So she's got to go up there, get him to sleep. I leave, I read Lily, her devotional. Then Jen comes in and helps Lily get to bed. And then Jen comes downstairs, and we're watching TV, talking on the couch. And it was like maybe 15 minutes of quiet, right? And then we hear footsteps. Oh, no. So Lily comes down the stairs. She curls up on Jen's lap. She says, I don't feel well. Will you come lay down with me? And Jen looks at me over Lily's head and she goes, this started at 6.15 this morning. I am exhausted. She goes and she lays down with Lily. This morning, I get up. I get up early on Sundays, take a shower. Get out of the shower about 5.45, 6 o'clock. Jen's not in the bed anymore. I go in, check in John's room. She's in the seat holding John with a blanket over her. And I just kind of shook my head, kissed her on the head, came to church. That's exhausting. And that's what it is to be a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice organizes their life around the needs of others. That's what a living sacrifice does. A living sacrifice wakes up every day and says, I don't exist for me. I exist for them. My days are not my days. My days are their days. My resources are not my resources. They are their resources. My time, my quiet, my solitude, my needs are not my needs. They're their needs. And this is the life that God calls us to. It is, admittedly, a remarkably high bar that Paul would say you should live your lives as living sacrifices, sacrificing every day for the sake of God's kingdom, not your kingdom. In every meeting that you are in, in your workplace, this is an opportunity to minister and to pour Christ into the lives of the people around you. Every interaction with another customer or an employee at Harris Teeter is an opportunity. It is not your time to be quiet and put your head down and get out of there quickly. It is an opportunity for ministry that God is giving you. We are living our lives as living sacrifices. When the person calls you that you don't want to talk to, but you know you need to, you take that call with a smile on your face because we are living sacrifices. We are to live every day offering every moment to the service of God's kingdom. And that is a very tall order. But nobody demonstrated this better than Jesus himself. I am blown away every time I read through the gospels, noting how Jesus sacrificially loved everybody around him all the time. You read the Gospels and pay attention to all the times when Jesus just did a thing. He just performed a bunch of miracles. He just spoke to a big crowd. He just healed a bunch of people. He just taught the disciples. He just did a big thing that would be exhausting that we'd all want to rest from. as he's leaving it says he went to be in a quiet place alone and pray and people track him down and they ask him for more things and more teachings and more questions and it was just relentless but he lived his life. He lived and died and rose again as a living sacrifice and this is the standard to which all Christians are called. Now, how can God place such a tall order on us? Because if you're like me, you'll be lucky to live a third of your day as a living sacrifice. The other two thirds are going to my bank. If you're like me, you're lucky to be cognitively aware of your call to live as a living sacrifice every day. But we sang in the third song this morning that we worship God. I will worship you. I will worship you. I will worship you. Will you? Because your spiritual act of worship isn't to sit in church on Sunday and sing praise to God. That's part of it. But your spiritual act of worship, if you mean what you sing, is that we offer our lives as living sacrifices, living every moment for the service of God's kingdom, not ourselves. And so to me, the question becomes, how can God place that burden on us? What could possibly compel us to be obedient in that way? And historically, the answer to questions like this in church, at least to me, has been because God told you to. Because he told you to. Because you're supposed to. Because he's the boss. He is Lord and you are not. He's the he's the creator we are the creature we are the creation we have to do what he says because god made you created you destined you saved you now you should live your life in service to him out of a sense of ought but i just don't think that's a very satisfying answer. And I actually think that the book of Romans offers us in total a much better answer to that question. How can God, what should compel me to offer my life as a living sacrifice? Because that's a tall order. So here's what we're going to do. If you look at your notes, Shane grabbed me. Shane, a longtime Grace partner, grabbed me in the lobby, and he held up the notes. And he goes, what are you doing to us today, man? What's going on here? He goes, this feels like class. I know. I'm going to try to make this as not boring as possible, but I just thought, here's my thinking. If I can, in very simple language, tell you what each chapter means as we build to the back half of Romans, then you'll be able to follow the reasoning narrative that Paul is writing. It's like he's laying out a case to help us understand what salvation is, how it came into being, why it's so important, and what it means to us. And so he lays out over the course of eight chapters this doctrine of salvation and I think if I can explain to you basically the theme in every chapter that you may be able to leave here with a much better understanding of what the book of Romans is and how we can approach it so that if you want to read it on your own you can and you don't have to be intimidated by it so if it's's helpful at all to you, write these down. I'm going to go kind of quick through the chapters. We'll get you out of here by one o'clock. I promise. And you can keep this and it can help hopefully make Romans more approachable and understandable. And these are, listen, some of y'all know the Bible better than I do. And you're going to see my summaries of the chapters and you're going to think, that's dumb. That's not what I would have done. You're probably right. Okay. But these are mine. So I hope that they're true to scripture. But here's the flow of Romans and how it gives us an answer to the question, what compels us to live as living sacrifices? Romans chapter 1, you open it up, starts with some basic greetings and stuff like that, and then he gets into this discourse, and the point of the discourse is to say, hey, man has rejected God. Mankind, on the whole, has rejected God and is living as if God is not existent. Living as if God doesn't matter. Most of the world carries on agnostically, is what Paul is saying. And the culmination of this chapter is to say that not only does mankind, does everybody in our current culture and society, sin with freedom, but they encourage it when other people sin too. They embrace it and they love it. This, I think, is very relatable. It's hard to exist in our culture today and not see the idea that the trend over the last few decades has been moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, towards a godless society where society conducts itself as if God does not exist. So that's what he's saying in Romans chapter 1. Man has rejected God with the way that they live. Romans chapter 2, he follows that up. Because of that rejection, God is angry. The rejection has angered God. He created us. He purposed us. He provides us with life and sustenance. He sent His Son to die for us to make a path to reconciliation to Him. And what do we do with all of those gifts? We stomp on them and we reject them and we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to them and we live as if He doesn't exist. So chapter 2 is about the earned wrath of God. He's ticked off that we have rejected him. That's the point that Paul is making. Then chapter three, he makes the point to a largely Jewish audience at the time. Hey, we cannot behave our way back into reconciliation. Our sin, that rejection of God, has broken our relationship with God, has severed it irrevocably, and we cannot white-knuckle or behave our way back into right relationship with God. We can't follow the rules well enough to make God okay with us again, to defer and overcome that wrath and that anger at our rejection, to make up for rejecting Him. We can't follow the rules well enough. That just, that can't happen. We're not going to behave our way into heaven. Chapter 4 moves through that, and he says what we can do, we cannot behave our way into reconciliation, and then chapter 4, for reconciliation, God requires our trust, not our behavior. That's why the first song we sang today was about believing in Christ. Because this is what God requires of us. He requires our trust, not our behavior. Chapter 5 tells us where to place that trust. Chapter 5, we placed that trust in Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross. There's this beautiful dissertation in 5 where he compares Adam to Jesus and he says, just as in Adam through one man sin entered the world, so now in Christ through one man salvation enters the world. And so we see Adam as a type Christ from the Old Testament reflecting to us who Jesus really is in the New Testament. He says we place our faith in Christ. And when I preach it, I always say that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And we're told what he does in chapter 5. In 6, then, we learn that we are not just delivered from God's anger, but into a new eternal life. In chapter 6, he introduces this idea of us being a new creature. And he paints this picture of baptism, where we are buried with Christ in death, and we are raised to walk in newness of life. We preach the gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ when we physically, invisibly baptize people. That's why we do it in the service. That's why we go all the way under the water because it's a picture that he paints in Romans chapter 6. That because we are saved, we are reconciled with God, we are not just reconciled to heaven for eternity, but we are also reconciled from ourselves. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are rescued from sin and we are raised to walk in a newness of life. We can walk as a new creature where it is possible to sin no more. That brings up a really interesting pickle that we're all in because all of us still sin. And that's what Paul talks about in chapter 7. It's to me maybe the most human chapter in the whole Bible. And the way I would sum it up is to say this new life causes us to be at war with ourselves. We're told in scripture that we're a new creature. That we're not a slave to sin. I don't feel like that most days. I don't feel like this new creature that doesn't have to sin. I feel like this old creature that gets really disappointed in himself for how he carries on sometimes. And this is what Paul captures in the closing verses of chapter 7. Where he says essentially, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I want to do, the things I do not want to do, I do. The things I do want to do, I do not do. And then exasperatedly cries out, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I don't have any tattoos, but if I were to get one, that would be in the running. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Man, if you haven't come there in your Christian walk, you just got saved last week. Because I feel like to be a believer is to know the good that you ought to do, is to know the bad that you ought not do, and to still struggle so much with those things. And Paul cries out and says, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who provided a way in Christ Jesus. And then that gives way, chapter 7, that war, because we're a new creature, we're going to be at war with ourselves, that gives way to chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 is the greatest chapter in the Bible. To give you a sense of how inadequately I am handling the book of Romans today. A few years ago, we did an eight-week-long series in Romans chapter 8 called The Greatest Chapter, and I could have made it 12. I just didn't want to wear you guys out. Romans chapter 8 is a soaring chapter, and it says Jesus has won the war, and nothing can ever change that. He's won the war that you fight in yourself, and he's won the war against sin and death, and there is nothing that can ever change that. Romans chapter 8 is a culmination and climax of certainty. It is a beacon of Christendom that declares the power of Christ, and it ends with such a flourish where Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor rulers nor principality nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's a powerful statement that Jesus loves you so much that he died for you, he's renewed your soul, he's reconciled you to Christ or to God and now he holds you in his grip so tightly that nothing in all creation, not even you, can separate yourself from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. It's magisterial when we look at it all the way through. And we see him build from Romans 1. We've rejected God. Romans 2, God's been angered by that rejection and hurt. Romans chapter 3, we cannot behave our way into fixing that. Romans chapter 4, we have to have faith, not behavior. Romans chapter 5, we place that faith in Christ. Romans chapter 6, because of our faith in Christ, we're a new creature. Romans chapter 7, that new creature wars with itself. Romans chapter 8, Jesus has won that war. Now and in eternity. And we can rest in that. Then we have the back half of Romans. Romans 9 through 16. And this is a gross oversimplification of those chapters. But the essential question that's being answered for the rest of the book is do we live in response to the first half of Romans? And I think Paul most succinctly answers that question in chapter 12, verse 1, when he says, therefore, my brothers. Now listen, when you're reading the Bible, especially Romans, and you see the word therefore, you have to ask, what's the therefore? Based on what? Therefore, what? Therefore, in view of God's mercy. Because of everything I just told you about in Romans 1 through 8, therefore, brothers, in view of God's mercy, in light of the rest of the message of this book and the glorious salvation offered to us by Christ, in light of that, in view of God's mercy, I urge you to live your lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. You see, it is not a sense of ought that compels us to live our life for God's kingdom and not our own. It is an overwhelming sense of gratitude that drives us. Out of an overflow of gratitude, we live lives of sacrifice. Out of an overflow of the truths of gratitude of the truths of Romans chapters 1 through 8 we live lives of sacrifice we are so compelled by what that by what he has done for us that we spend the rest of our lives trying to help other people see what he has done for them. You understand? We steep ourselves in the gospel. We steep ourselves in the truth of scripture. We steep ourselves in the sacrifice of Christ with the daily awareness of what he does for us and that he's won the war for us and that he calls for us and that he loves us. He loves us. He really loves us. And he chases after us and he won't let us convince ourselves that he doesn't love us. He won't let us convince ourselves that we're not good enough for him or that we don't deserve him. He chases after us, and he comes for us, and he died for us. And if we will daily steep ourselves in that reality, we will live a life of such gratitude that we will be compelled to live a life for the sake of others as a living sacrifice. We will be so overwhelmed by the reality of what he's done for us that we will spend our lives trying to help other people see what he's done for them too. And when that is our mentality that changes our attitude in the drive-thru, that changes our interactions with our children, with our coworkers, with our employees and employers, when we walk in that sense of gratitude, it will be easy to live our lives as living sacrifices because we are so overwhelmed by what God has done for us that we want to spend our days helping other people see what God has done for them. I am reminded of that great verse, John 1 16, and And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. So here's what I hope you'll do. And here's my prayer to you this week, for you this week. The idea of offering our lives every moment of every day for the sake of others and not ourselves, is daunting. Really, in our power, it's impossible. Our only hope is to remember the message of Romans and be so grateful for all that God has done for us, for all that he's given us, and for the way that he saves us and forgives us and pursues us. To be so steeped in that gratitude that we cannot help but sacrifice for others so that we're not the only ones who realize all that God has done for us. I hope that we'll do that. I hope you'll do that. And I hope that this is just whetting your appetite for Romans and that you'll sit down and read it on your own too. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful to you. We are grateful for your son and for your sacrifice. God, help us to live lives of gratitude so that we might live as sacrifices for others as your son lived for us. God, if there is someone here who doesn't yet know you, I pray that they would. And maybe by simply walking through this wonderful book, they can better understand how to approach you and why they need you. God, be with us in our weeks. We're going to wake up tomorrow trying to live a life of sacrifice and we're going to stub our toe and we're going to mess up and we're going to say selfish things. But God, I pray that you would give us the grace for ourselves to get back up and let you lead us more and further and deeper. In Jesus' name, amen.