Jim Van Gelderen: I’m podcasting from Joplin, Missouri, where my wife and I are finishing up a week of camp here with a group of churches, not only from Missouri, but from several surrounding states. And they come together for a youth camp and junior camp every year. And the amazing thing is they’ve done it for years, so much so that much of the leadership of the camp actually came here as juniors and teenagers as well. I was here two years ago, thoroughly enjoyed it, had a wonderful week and I believe God did a great work here yesterday. All week long actually, there’s been a teenager that one group particularly was burdened about.

He’s very open about his moving toward an atheistic mindset. He even talked to me some, and God was clearly working in his heart. He’s a very honest young man, but yesterday, a group from his youth group—fellow teenagers, I should say, gathered for prayer, he came with them, and they gathered around him and prayed for him, and as one teenager said to me, he said, God was in the room. I love it when young people start to seek the Lord and God just manifests his presence, and that was an encouragement to me, and I hope some of you young people from the Baptist youth camp of the Ozarks are listening to this, and are encouraged with what God did in your heart and what God did in fellow youth group members. Keep praying, keep trusting the Lord, and remember the Christian life is total surrender to God’s will and a total dependence on his grace to live it.

And that’s of course the byword, total surrender, total dependence of Thee Generation. By the way, if you’ve never joined the generation, you can do that. And all you gotta do is just sign a pledge. It’s a very basic pledge. And it is not a pledge to get you to be self-dependent or try harder, absolutely not, it’s the opposite.

It’s a pledge that your heart’s desire is to surrender to God’s will and depend on his grace to live it. And it’s not a promise of perfection, it’s a declaration of direction. Sometimes it’s good to say, you know what, this is my intent in my life, this is where I’m going, and that’s why we encourage young people to do that. And so you can look at that, and I hope some of you will. Well, I’ve been thinking about a verse that’s very familiar, I’ve been preaching on it—in fact, really a message I’ve been preaching on the enemies that we have, a world flesh and the devil.

But there’s a verse I refer to in that message, Romans 12:2, a verse that some of you have memorized. Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. I dealt with that verse when we talked about who we are in Christ and that we become transformed as our mind is renewed. And I’m not gonna totally redo that, but I. I do wanna just remind you of a couple of things.

Those are two interesting words, they’re opposites, conformity and transformation. You know, it’s kinda like this, they both have the word form in them, which is the, it’s the word morphe in the Greek, we get the English word morph out of that particular word. But conformity has the idea of being on the outside, what you are not on the inside. And it is something that is easy to do. Many Christians on the outside look worldly, look like their allegiance is to some secular ungodly rock group instead of reflecting on the outside the fact that they do not have an allegiance to the world.

It’s so easy to identify with things that are worldly. And again, the world, I said it before, but I’ll say it again. It’s not planet Earth. The world is the world system that hates God. And that, of course, would be anything.

That would be there’s worldly music, there’s worldly dress, there’s worldly behavior, there’s worldly language, there’s worldly jokes, there’s worldly media, there’s worldly entertainment. All of us get that, and this is all that comes out of the world system that hates God. It all has elements that are unbiblical and ungodly, and in some cases, evil and wicked. In some cases, it’s more nuanced. It’s subtle, it’s just compromising.

And God is telling us, gang, that that is not where we’re supposed to go. We are not to look in any way, by these outward things, as though our allegiances are toward a world system that hates God. But instead, we’re supposed to be transformed. Now that phrase, “be transformed,” is passive in voice, which means you can’t transform yourself. It’s something really obviously God’s gotta do.

Well you say, how do you do that? How do you allow God to transform you? Well the verse tells us, by the renewing of your mind. Well another problem with the word renewing is it’s passive as well. Because the word renew is found five times in the New Testament, four times it has a direct object.

You renew the new man, you renew the inward man, you renew the spirit of your mind, you renew your mind as here in Romans 12:2. Only one time does it have a subject. It’s found in Titus 3.5, the renewing of the Holy Ghost. So the renewer is the Holy Ghost. And let me give you a clue, he’s the transformer too.

He’s the one that has to renew our mind. Now our mind, for those of you that have been with us on the podcast, is a part of our soul, mind, will, and emotions. That’s that circle, if you were listening in a previous podcast, that surrounds the spirit. The spirit is that which got regenerated. It’s where you were regenerated.

You became a new man created in righteousness and true holiness. It’s that part of you that’s in union with the Holy Spirit, that part of you cannot sin. But around that is your soul, your mind, will, and emotions. That’s who you are, that’s your personality. You know, before you got saved, if you liked a certain baseball team or hockey team or football team, after you get saved, normally you do as well.

In fact, your likes and dislikes are pretty much the same before you get saved and after, unless of course that appetite was sinful, and then of course that can diminish, just like an alcoholic can love alcohol, get saved, and not wanna touch it anymore. So there are differences in the soul, but most of the time, our human personality is pretty much the same after we get saved. If you like ice cream before, you’ll like it afterwards. But the part of that soul is your mind. And the Bible says the way you get transformed, how do I say this?

Transformation is maturing and growing into who you already are. Many Christians are trying to become something they don’t think they are. But the Bible teaches us we’re actually growing into or maturing into who we already are because we’re a new man in Christ. That’s who we are. And so transformation is that process whereby we become metamorphosized, so to speak.

That’s the Greek word that is translated transform. We get the English word metamorphosis from that Greek word, which is different than conformity because metamorphosis is a total change. When that caterpillar comes up and spins that cocoon, it comes out transformed. I mean, it’s totally different. Its essence has been changed.

There’s really nothing about it that looks like a caterpillar. Now that DNA was already there, but it had to get into that cocoon, mature and grow, have a process of time, and it matured into a butterfly. It was transformed. That seems to be the picture that God wants us to get out of this whole thing. And you say, well preacher, how do I get transformed?

The Holy Spirit’s gotta do it. If the Holy Spirit’s the one that renews my mind, how does that happen? Well, there’s an important part of that, and the Holy Spirit has a tool, and that tool is pretty much found throughout the Word of God, it is the Word of God. What does the Bible say? The sword of the spirit, which is the Word of God.

The Holy Spirit’s sword, or his instrument, his tool, his scalpel, if you wanna say, is the Word of God. And you don’t want a swordless spirit. You want the spirit of God to have that sword. And notice it says the renewing of your mind. That clearly is talking about something that changes the way your mind thinks.

And we know that concepts and words and philosophies are very important because how you think really determines what you’ll do and who you’ll be. So the Word of God is that which transforms your mind, or transforms your life through the renewing of your mind. So my challenge for every Thee Generation listener out there is don’t neglect the word. You need to memorize it. You need to daily spend time in it.

You need to think about it. You need to embrace it. You need to study it. At times you read books about it. A good book, a devotional book, is a book that drives you back to the Word of God.

A book that stirs you. That’s why I like The Complete Green Letters by Miles Stanford because it’s a book that’s got so much scripture in it and stirs us about who we are in Christ and reckoning and believing that. And those truths are truths you need to imbibe. You need to embrace. And in doing so, you put the scalpel or the sword of the Spirit in the hand of the spirit.

And he uses that to renew our minds. That process transforms us. We mature into who we already are. So I just wanted to make an encouragement to each one out there. Don’t neglect the Bible.

It’s very important that every day you spend time in it, and recognize the importance when verses impact you, you memorize them. They become a part of the way you think. Romans 6 is a great chapter in this regard, as are other chapters. Ephesians 4 has a lot of truth in that regard. There’s a lot of chapters in the Bible or parts of chapters.

I would encourage you to memorize. I remember, I’ll conclude with this, I remember several years ago, I had several young men in a row come to me struggling in their thought life and I challenged them to memorize Proverbs five, six, and seven. The last half of six, but all of five and all of seven. There’s also good verses about the strange woman in Proverbs 2, Proverbs 9, and Proverbs 23, but start with Proverbs five, last half of six and all of seven. I had a man come to me who had started memorizing those chapters and said, Brother Van Gelderen, it’s already making a difference.

Now that shouldn’t shock us because there’s power in the Word of God. It is the sword of the Spirit. And it’s a definite part of us understanding what the will of God is so that we can surrender to it and understanding what the grace of God is so we can depend upon God and his supernatural grace to live the Christian life. God bless you.