The passage: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.
“You preachers tell us to give up our own wills and do the Will of God. But how are we to find out what that will is?” Many are asking this, and they get various answers. One tells him the Will of God is fully declared in Scripture, in language the most ignorant can understand. He replies that he has had the Scriptures since childhood, yet hears daily of new interpretations, held as indisputable by one school or Church and rejected as monstrous by another. Who will tell him which is right? Some are delighted at his perplexity: “Doesn’t this show the need for an authority to pronounce on Scripture’s meaning—that the Bible is useless without the Church?” Then comes the next question: “Where is that authority? Suppose I find it—how does it help me apply the right explanation to the tangle of my own life? How do David’s experience or Paul’s words to Ephesians or Corinthians tell me what to do here in London in 1857?” Others hear this difficulty with satisfaction: “It drives you to seek a guide for present emergencies, not mere generalities—an infallible voice for the whole Church, and for you a director of conscience to whom you owe simple obedience in every personal difficulty. With these, Bible and Church serve you well; without them the system stands apart from you, untouched by your individual feelings and actions.”
Any of these three answers seems to the anxious inquirer far more practical than St. Paul’s answer in the text. “Be not conformed to this world; be transformed, that you may prove what is God’s acceptable and perfect will” strikes him as far less manageable than “Read the Bible,” “Attend to the Church,” “Accept a Pope,” “Submit to a Spiritual Director.”
But once he has tried any or all of these, he will find something still wanting—that he has not reached the root of the matter. He must begin again, or his Bible, Church, Pope, Spiritual Director will all fail to show him the Will of God or how to obey it.
Why is this so? Because the more precisely we are told what to do, and resolve to do it, the more we find that obedience belongs to something within us which says: “No book, no authority from the past, no mortal teacher, however weighty with tradition, can bring me into real, living subjection. I may try hard to surrender myself, to be a pupil, a child, a slave—but that very effort is an act of will, an assertion of choice. I was never so proud as when stooping to that government; each new step of apparent submission is a fresh assertion of self-will. I might in the end become a stone, all consciousness and affection dead in me—but until then I am still a rebel. My lips and hands may obey; I myself resist.”
I. Consider St. Paul’s teaching here and throughout his epistles, and ask whether it meets your case better than these Protestant and Romish prescriptions. All agree it is the Will of God you must obey—set forth in Scripture, interpreted by the Church, recognized in a Pope, submitted to in a director of conscience. But Bible and Church alike confess that this Will works directly upon you, upon the very thing within you that had to be muzzled or killed before you could even seem to obey. Do your Pope and director deny this? Do they hide that the Spirit of God is at work in you to bring you into conformity with His Will? Then they are liars, and you must tell them so—for they deny the Creed, deny that the Spirit has come to convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment, and undermine the very Church they claim to guard. But if they affirm that the Spirit has come, that you were baptized into His Name, that the Creed has not mocked you—believe them, and act on it. Say to them: “What you cannot do—for you can only speak to my outward ear and influence my outward acts, and whatever more you do, you do by God’s Spirit—that the Spirit is doing: acting on me, on my will, that I may know God’s perfect and acceptable will and be conformed to it.”
We might suppose “conformed to the world” and “transformed by renewing of the mind” describe a state fit for this present life versus one fit for the next. That is a slovenly reading. The man conformed to the world is not the one who understands or admires it best, or adapts to it most skillfully. He is too enslaved to visible things to reflect on their meaning, too devoted to outward shows to perceive their hidden harmony, too confined to his own class’s habits to enter into the feelings of those outside it. “Conformed” means strictly this: he takes his form from things around him, which become the mould of his mind. St. Paul will not admit this to be the form any man is made to bear—Scripture holds that man is made in God’s image, that his mind’s form should come from his unseen Father, not from the things subjected to him. This was true even of the heathen who bowed to idols, resisting the conscience that told him he was God’s offspring, God testifying to him through the visible things of His invisible power. But we, redeemed from that worship, adopted as God’s children, sealed with His Spirit to know Him—we resist that Spirit far more directly when we let the world fashion our minds, when we take its stamp. That stamp changes with each age and place, for the world’s very nature is to be always shifting, with no fixed principle—which is why conformity to it is so shameful: it strips a man of all power to look before and after, makes him a creature of the moment, fluctuating, insincere, a leaf blown by every gale. How can such a man know the Will of God, which is fixed and eternal? What good is it to give him the Bible and teach him it is divine? He will believe it as readily as anything else, simply because it is the fashion of his time and place—until the fashion changes and the same instinct that made him revere it teaches him to scoff. And while he holds it sacred, he judges every word of it by the rules of the society around him, which determines how he interprets Lawgivers and Prophets, how he judges even the Judge of all the earth. Nor does adding a long series of Church decrees help, for these too are referred to that same court of appeal—the opinion of the day, or of his own faction, which fixes how he receives them, refracted through its own definitions and practices. And what is the infallible Dogmatist or Spiritual Guide but the habits and maxims of the age or party in human form—the world’s own spokesman, sent to spare him the effort of thought and belief, the necessity of being a man?
Deliverance from this kind of conformity is the transformation named in the next clause. That transformation, far from unfitting a man for the world, alone enables him to live in it, appreciate it, and influence it. It let the prophet hear the trees and floods break into singing; it let St. Paul become all things to all men; it let St. John see the kingdom of God emerging from the kingdoms of this world. They saw all things in God’s light, not the world’s false light—saw the world as God made it, not as men’s rebellion had remade it. Having received the true form of men, they could use the world’s forms freely, adapting to Jewish, Greek, or Roman customs without ever being enslaved by any of them, their spirits never narrowed by the temporary dress they wore. In communion with the eternal, members of a spiritual and eternal fellowship, they could see history not as shifting scenes but as events moving toward a divine outcome—the fulfillment of a Will that seeks only good.
St. Paul calls this process the renewing of the mind—a phrase suggesting the change when spring foliage covers winter’s bare boughs. It is not exactly a recovery of what was lost; the substance is unchanged, but quickened. The change is wonderful yet entirely inward, and it is gradual, not sudden. The power once given works secretly, often amid the obstruction of harsh winds and frosts, yet that beginning already contains the sure promise of its completion. The man will be renewed in the image of his Creator and Father, because the Spirit of that Creator and Father is working in him.
V. That was last Sunday’s lesson—the Pentecostal gift. Today we go a step further: we thank God for enabling us to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and to worship the Unity in the power of the Divine Majesty. How were those who first prayed this enabled to confess the Eternal Trinity? Did they discover the doctrine by collating texts, or learn it from some dogmatist or director, simply accepting words with nothing answering to them in heart or reason, crushed under some infallible Juggernaut? Must we reach our confession the same way? I believe they were able to confess the glory of the Eternal Trinity because they first sought, in the simplest acts of life, not to be conformed to the world but transformed by the renewing of their minds. While conformed to the world, they sought God among the visible things around them—heaven, earth, the waters beneath—for His likeness. But a voice told their hearts: “You have a Father, the Father of your spirits. Turn from these visible things to Him. Seek Him from whom you have wandered; He is not far off—He is seeking you.” The voice said: “Through Me, the Word holding converse with your hearts and consciences, you may find this Father. I am the way to Him. I took your flesh and dwelt among men, that they might know what I am and what He is—how distinct We are, and how entirely one—that they may know the Father through the Son.” The voice said: “You cannot know the Father and the Son unless the Spirit of the Father and the Son works in you, transforming your will to His and bringing your reason into submission to His perfect Reason.” By this they were led to confess the Eternal Trinity, and by no other process shall we be led to the same confession—not by studying or repeating words, but by entering the divine life; not by straining our own wills and reasons toward a difficult conclusion, but by seeking the simplicity of a child, or of the true scientist; not by subjecting will and reason to human authority, but by embracing the freedom God promised, do we come to share the faith once delivered to the saints. And how did they learn to worship the Unity in the power of the Divine Majesty? They felt how divided and at strife their hearts were, how inward strife produced outward strife, how impossible it was to find unity for themselves or for the world. They asked God to make them one, and found it was His will to do so; they found His Spirit had taught them the very prayer for unity they uttered; they discovered He must be the Author of all peace and unity, both in themselves and among men; they found that the Father and the Son rejoice together forever in the Unity of the Spirit. So they learned, in the power of the Divine Majesty, to worship the Unity. May we learn this secret as they did! May we hold fast the faith that Father, Son, and Spirit is the one God of Everlasting Love, blessed forever! May that Love shine forth in us, that we may glorify our Father in Heaven as He was perfectly revealed in the Only-Begotten Son, and as He reveals Himself by His Spirit in His adopted children! May we be taught to enter that Unity which fills the spirits before the throne with wonder, worship, and joy!