Good morning! I hope that you have been praying about how we can think like men and women of God who seek His Kingdom first. For our final week in this series, I want to take us to the Book of Romans, chapter 12 verses 1 and 2: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—-this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer 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.”

Notice how this Scripture doesn’t tell us to move out away from the world. It just tells us to not conform to the pattern of this world. We need to be in the world, but we are called to think and act differently.

We are in New York City visiting my brother-in-law and his family and we worshipped at Redeemer Presbyterian Church yesterday. The pastor quoted G.K. Chesterton’s “The Ethics of Elfland” paper during his sermon on Psalm 136. This quote from Chesterton hit me as one way how we can and should think differently as Christians. We are born with such a wonderment of life and as we get older we conform to the pattern of this world and soon lose our wonder at all of the glorious gifts God gives us on a daily basis. Chesterton’s quote:

“…it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are to strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God makes every daisy separately, but has never tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE.”

Can we re-train ourselves to think differently from the pattern of this world? Join me as we try!! And I hope you enjoy the next sunrise as much as God does! ENCORE!!

More to come,
Jeremy