Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2 (NIV)
A Mind God Renews
The bridge over the canal goes up eight times a day, and the road stops for it eight times a day. A bell and a striped barrier, then the deck swinging off to one side on its own once the keeper turns his key. Drivers ease off the gas because the car ahead did, and every one of them would say they were driving, and they’d be right about that. Not one of them has decided anything since they left the house.
Paul asks the Christians in Rome to offer their bodies to God, and he calls that their true and proper worship. He asks them not to be conformed to the pattern of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of their mind. All of it is asked of them, and the renewing in the middle of it is God’s own work, done inside a person’s head where no amount of effort reaches on its own.
And then, Paul says, they’ll be able to test God’s will and approve it, and to call it good and pleasing and perfect. It’s a lot to be able to see from the middle of an ordinary week. God changes something in a person, and the change is what lets the person see it.
Why does God do this so slowly? I’ve never had an answer for that one.
Most of what has shaped you got in while you were looking at other things, in cars and in rooms where people were talking. Paul’s answer to that is a mind God renews. That work is God’s, and the verse doesn’t say how fast it goes.
At noon the woman first in the line rolls her window down and tells the keeper that her father did this same job on a canal two towns over. He asks the name, and when she says it he knows it. “He taught me this key,” the keeper says. “He’d hold it a second longer than felt right, and I’ve held it his way ever since.”
A Prayer to Remember
Change my mind about the thing I’m surest of. You know which of my opinions I’d defend hardest, and which I picked up by standing near people who had them. Take that one. I’d rather be right than changed, and I’m asking anyway. Ask me this year for something I’d have refused last year.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
