Series:  Influencer

Topic:  What influences you?

Text: Romans 12:1-2

SCRIPTURE:  Romans chapter 11 ends with a hymn or doxology about God’s ownership of the universe and all things coming from him. “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.” 11:36  Romans 12 begins to answer the question of how we should live in response to this abundance.

• Verse 1 says, “… in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship.” Talk together about the phrase, “this is your true worship.” What does that mean? 

Verse 2 reads, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.”

• How does what or who we are conforming to, correspond to our ability to discern “what is good and pleasing and the perfect will of God”?
• Read 1 Corinthians 3:19. What does God think of earthly wisdom that we are often working so hard to acquire? Any examples to share?
• What other examples from Scripture challenge us not to be influenced by culture?

ACCOUNTABILITY: Read this passage in The Message. “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”  

• Look at this phrase, “God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.” 

Practically speaking, how do we do that, “place it before God as an offering,” on the Monday mornings of life? What does that look like in your life? What could it look like?

• Do we miss the beginning of the phrase, “God helping you”? Why do you think so often we try to do this work on our own? How does that usually work out for us?
• How do we really embrace what God has done for us?

TRANSFORMATION:

• Spend time with the phrase, “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.” List some ways we have adjusted to our culture? 
• As a group, can you identify dangerous ways we have bought in?
• What is one thing you do to counteract the culture? 
• How does this directive fit with the verse, “Be in the world but not of it”?

“The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. The call of Christ sets up a barrier between man and his natural life.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer