Show Notes
Continuing the Eastertide series on Peaceable and Kind, host Derek Vreeland explores how the resurrection of Jesus transforms not just our theology but our everyday, ordinary life. Drawing from Romans 12:1–2, Derek unpacks how simple, daily acts like sleeping, eating, and going to work can become spiritual offerings to God.
Rather than separating the “spiritual” from the “ordinary,” Derek challenges us to see our whole lives as holy—lived in response to what God has already done through the death and resurrection of Jesus. This episode is a warm and hopeful reminder that transformation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but in the midst of everyday, ordinary life.
Key Takeaways
Your everyday routines—sleeping, eating, working—can be acts of worship.
Joy isn’t about ignoring pain; it’s about holding on to hope through the resurrection.
Worship starts with embracing what God has already done for us.
God changes us from the inside out, not by pressure but by love.
Singing together can lift our hearts and deepen our faith.
Whether you’re carrying burdens or simply trying to live more intentionally, this episode reminds us that God is just as engaged in our daily routines as He is in our Sunday worship.
Scriptures mentioned in this podcast:
John 15:11
Galatians 5:22-23
Romans 12:1-2
Preorder Derek’s new book, Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us here: https://amzn.to/42jSZAs
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Peaceable and Kind, the podcast where we explore the transformation. Each week your host, Derek Vreeland, will delve into the stories, scriptures, and practical steps that help us embody these essential Christian virtues.
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable and Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and I am committed. to bringing you Christian content every week that will encourage and instruct you as together We are sowing seeds of peace and kindness in our world. And if you haven’t already, let me encourage you to subscribe wherever you’re listening to this podcast. and leave a rating or a review if you like this episode. And I think you’re gonna like it. We are in the season of Easter. And I think you’re gonna like this episode. It is filled with a lot of Easter joy. And so if you like the kind of Christian content we are producing here. I’d also encourage you to share it with a friend. I understand we’re living in difficult times and people need a shot of hope. And I believe that episodes like today’s episode will do just that. It’s going to bring a little bit of light, a little bit of joy, a little bit of hope into our world. Now we are in the season of Easter. Remember, Easter is not just one Sunday. Of course, there is Easter Sunday. This is the big Christian celebration next to Christmas. Only second to Christmas is Easter Sunday, which is a day to celebrate. But Easter Sunday is only the beginning. We celebrate Easter, the resurrection of Jesus For seven weeks. And this year, Easter Sunday fell a little bit late, so we are celebrating Easter all the way through the month of May. up into the first week of June. And so this episode is thinking about our everyday ordinary lives and how the resurrection of Jesus affects how we live And one of the earmarks of the Christian life is joy And Easter every year brings me joy. Maybe it’s just the Easter candy, and we still, here we are in May, and we still have Easter candy in our house. And now when I talk about joy, I I do want to contrast that with the recognition That there are plenty of things in our world that bring us down. And I don’t necessarily want to ignore those things. I know people are suffering Maybe you know people in your family or in your circle of friends going through something really difficult. I know families are struggling. As a pastor, I’m very connected to families in their difficult times, families that are grieving the loss of someone that they love, families wrestling with a new cancer diagnosis. I understand that Things are difficult, people are suffering, there’s a lot of just uncertainty and hostility in our world. And I’m certainly not advocating for a naive, sort of happy clappy, silly kind of Christian experience. I want to fully recognize and weep with those who weep and recognize that yes, there are things not right in our world. There is still a lot of brokenness. But Christians from the beginning have been able to hold on to the brokenness of our world on one hand. and with the other hand grasp on to the love and the hope and the joy that comes from from knowing God and from knowing what God has done for us. And so, not trying to make light of suffering, but through suffering and difficult dark days, Christians can still find joy. You know, joy is the product, the produce of the Holy Spirit. In Galatians, Paul lists joy among the fruit of the Spirit. This is the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy. Peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. And joy is right there on the top of the list. And Jesus himself, before his crucifixion and death, talked a little bit about joy. In John 15, 11, Jesus said, These things I have spoken to you That my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. And Jesus said this in the context of preparing to suffer and die on the cross. Jesus wants his joy to be in us so that our joy may be made full. Suffering comes to all of us. But what makes Christians unique is that we don’t deny our suffering, but we are able to experience joy in the midst of suffering. And for me, the resurrection of Jesus is a wellspring of joy. Because if Jesus did indeed rise up from the dead, Everything’s gonna be okay. One of my favorite biblical scholars is Tom Wright, N. T. Wright. I think of all of the scholars out there, no one’s influenced me more than Tom Wright. He has been teaching, lecturing, and writing for decades. He’s in semi-retirement now He has an office in Oxford on Wycliffe Hall, and he’s still doing some writing and and some correspondence, but he has had such an impact on my life. And Tom Wright tells a story that he was traveling, speaking, lecturing somewhere, and he had to take a taxi. uh to the venue where he was speaking. So he hails this taxi and he gets in and the taxi driver is talkative and he’s like, oh, what are you doing here in our city? And Uh Tom Wright was like, well, um I’m here to give a lecture. I’m a a professor and a Christian bishop, and I’m giving a lecture. And the cab driver’s like, oh, what are you lecturing about? He said, Oh, I’m talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the cab driver says, huh. Well, you know, if Jesus rose up from the dead, then everything else is pretty much rock and roll And that brought a smile to Tom Wright’s face, and he he nodded, he said, Yeah, I guess you’re right If Jesus rose up from the dead, then it proves everything he was saying to be true. And Jesus is the one who has the words of life eternal. Jesus said he himself was the way and the truth and the life, the only way to the Father and the way to the good life. And so, yeah, I like that cab driver’s comment that if Jesus rose up from the dead, then everything else is just rock and roll. I love the joy and the simplicity of that comment. So here in the season of Easter, I’m just committed to feeling. the joy that comes with Easter tide, this the season of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus And one of the other places that I find such great joy during this time is in the music that we sing in our churches. I am a huge fan of church music, and I like all kinds of church music. I like traditional church music with hymns. I mean, I even like the ancient like chanting kind of church singing from like the early Middle Ages, and I like all of it. the the traditional hymns as well as the contemporary choruses and all the new praise and worship music that comes out And just yesterday we had our midweek chapel service. So at our church on Wednesdays, we have a noon prayer service. We’ve been doing this now for going on 24 years, every Wednesday at noon we have a chapel service and we sing songs of worship. There’s a scripture reading. We pray for all of the prayer needs in our church. We celebrate the Lord’s Supper together. It’s like a 40, 45 minute service. And because it’s in the middle of the day, it’s mostly retirees that are there. It’s maybe 20 or 30 people that join us. And yesterday, my friend Brandon Johnson led worship. Brandon is a member of our worship team. He’s a local musician. And I love Brandon because he’s a joy giver. He brings this joyful energy Anytime he’s uh performing, playing, and certainly anytime he’s leading worship, whether it’s on Sunday morning or or in our chapel. And yesterday he did some of the favorite hymns of the church. Hymns that I remember From my days in the Baptist church. He did Great Is Thy Faithfulness and Blessed Assurance. And our church primarily does contemporary music. So we kind of pepper in the hymns. And I don’t know what it was about yesterday. It was something about being in the season of Easter, something about Brandon and his joyful spirit. But I was just. Feeling the joy yesterday singing these old hymns, you know, Great Is Thy Faithfulness has such great lines like Pardon for sin and peace that endureth, thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide. Strength for today and bright hope for to morrow, blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside. Great is thy faithfulness. Now I’m not a singer, I am not a musician, but I do make a joyful noise. I mean when I am in church, I sing right out loud, whether I’m singing out of the hymnal. or following the words on the screen. I just believe in participating. And yesterday in our small little chapel service, I was feeling the joy. I was singing. but I I really could hear voices. I could hear the voices of the people in that little chapel singing uh particularly these words of of these ancient hymns and it brought me such joy and delight, not only Great is thy faithfulness, but we sang blessed assurance. You know, this is my story, this is my song, praising my savior all the day long. And so the hope and joy that we feel during the season of Easter Is one of the ways that the resurrection of Jesus affects our everyday ordinary lives. And that is what God is concerned about. Don’t get me wrong, God is interested in what we might call our spiritual lives or our church lives. But I believe God’s work of transformation in us is to connect our spiritual lives with our normal lives. I think there’s a problem when we separate out what we would call my spiritual life from my normal life. I think God wants us to be connected. God wants us to be integrated. And God cares about you not just on Sunday morning but on Monday afternoon. God cares about what you would consider the mundane ordinary things of life. Hey friends, I wanted to pause for just a second to let you know that my next book, Incarnation, 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us, is available for pre-order. This Bible study is for individual devotional use or for small group discussion. Link to pre-order is in the show notes. As you may have heard, I’m writing a three-book Bible study series entitled God in the Neighborhood, using the uniqueness of the message translation The message was translated by the late great Eugene Peterson and I love the message. The message New Testament first came out in the nineteen nineties. And then I believe Peterson spent 12, 13 years uh in totality translating the entire Bible, the New Testament and the Old Testament. from Greek and Hebrew into what was contemporary language. Peterson was first and foremost a pastor He was a trained biblical scholar. He was trained in biblical languages. In fact, he had plans to pursue a PhD and just be a professor. teaching New Testament, teaching biblical languages, but he felt this call to be a pastor. And as a pastor he saw a disconnect between the language of the Bible and the language of his people. Because when the Bible was originally written, the original hearers understood what those words meant. But we modern Christians reading a very ancient text, sometimes we need help to understand what things mean. So Eugene Peterson went to translate The Bible originally for his own congregation, the entire message Bible started because he translated the book of Galatians. for a Bible study for his own people and somehow his editor found it and they got it to a publisher and the rest is is history. But he wanted to use language of the people in his congregation as he was translating the Bible And so I love the message and have for years, I spent two years reading through the message devotionally. And in doing so, I came across a number of passages that I had never read before in the message. And I thought, wow, I’d love to do an entire Bible study. Using some of the uniqueness that we find in the message Bible. And that’s what turned into this Bible study series. So when I was in the planning stage, this was about two years ago, I put it out there on social media. Hey, what are some of your favorite verses from the message Bible? And I wanted to hear from other people because I didn’t want to miss what were some of the just gems that you find in the message. And my friend Joe Beach from Denver, Colorado. Joe Beach, pastor of Amazing Grace Church. Shout out Joe Beach. Joe sent me Romans 12, verses 1 and 2. And I had forgotten about this passage, but Joe is right. It’s one of the best. And in the message in Romans 12, verse 1, the message translation uses this language of our ordinary life. And so I want to explore today just two verses in Romans 12. Before we get to the message, though, let me read Romans 12 1 and 2 in the New Revised Standard Version. This will be the sort of traditional reading of these verses. Perhaps these verses sound familiar to you. But here’s Romans twelve, one and two in the New Revised Standard Version. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God To present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. And that’s a beautiful translation. Excellent, helpful. But listen to what Eugene Peterson does with these two verses. Let’s first start with verse 1, Romans 12, 1, 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 This is such an imaginative and helpful translation of a very familiar verse. So the New Revised Standard version said present your bodies, or the New Living Translation, which is a more modern translation, says give your bodies. But the message describes the ordinary things we do with our bodies. In this translation, bodies are understood figuratively as in what we do with our bodies, things like sleeping and eating and going to work and walking around. This translation is consistent with Paul’s intention in these verses. Paul doesn’t mean when he says, offer your body or present your body, give your body. He doesn’t mean that we literally give our physical bodies as an offering to God. Bodies here is a metaphor. Paul is thinking of our bodies metaphorically See, now that we have died with Jesus through baptism, and we have been raised with Jesus through his resurrection. Paul describes this in Romans 6. We fast forward to Romans 12, and Paul is telling us what we should do as resurrection people walking in new life. What we do is we take our body and the ordinary stuff that we do with our bodies throughout life. And we place it before God as an offering. God wants us to offer every part of our lives God doesn’t want us just to give him our spiritual life, our religious life, our Christian life but our physical life, the things that we do between Monday and Saturday I do think we make a mistake when we separate the spiritual from the physical, the sacred from the secular. God designed us to be integrated whole beings because what happens to one part of us affects the whole. You can see our created design early in Genesis. It says that God made man, made humanity by scooping up dirt from the ground and breathing into that lump of dirt the breath of life And what we see in that beautiful picture is we are both physicality and we are spirituality. We are a synthesis of the stuff of earth and the breath of heaven So we have a physical life, but we also have a spiritual life. We have a body and we have a soul. And have you ever noticed How your emotional or mental state, that’s a part of the inside stuff, the soul, have you ever noticed how that affects your body? Or if you are sick and you physically feel like you’re going downhill, how much that affects you on the inside? It’s because we are connected. We’re integrated. God designed us to be hybrid creatures, body and soul, working together in harmony And so God wants us to offer him everything we do, the things that we do with our Souls or our spirits, and the things that we do with our bodies, and offer that to God as a sacrifice. And in doing so, we experience the joy of Jesus. His joy comes in us, and our joy becomes complete. So let’s go back to Romans 12 verse 1 in the message Bible because I love the last sentence in Romans 12, 1. Now, in other translations, more traditional translations, the end of verse one says that we are offering To God, our bodies, and this is our spiritual act of worship, or this is an act of spiritual worship. But I love the way the message translation ends, verse one. It ends with this line: embracing what God does for you Is the best thing you can do for him. Now, the death and resurrection of Jesus is what God in Jesus has done for us. Jesus came to earth for us, for us, and for our salvation. Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God. Jesus came to show us who God is and the ways of God. Jesus came to show us the way to life eternal, to the good life. And ultimately, Jesus died for our sins and he rose for our salvation. This is what God has done for us to demonstrate God’s love for us. So Jesus is the one who died and rose again. That’s what he’s done for us. And so we embrace it, we embrace what God has done for us by offering up. our ordinary, everyday lives. This is the best thing we can do as an act of worship Is simply embracing and accepting what God has done for us. Let’s move on to verse 2 in the message translation 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. The temptation of the people of God from the beginning has been the temptation to become well adjusted to the culture around us. One of the values of reading the Old Testament, the story of Israel, God’s interaction, God’s covenant with Israel. is to notice the recurring pattern. And there is a pattern in the Old Testament. And it is that the people of God would follow God and walk in the ways of God. Worshiping the one true living God, the creator and sustainer of all things. And as long as ancient Israel, as long as they were worshiping God, Loving God but their heart, soul minded strength, then things went well. But what we see over and over In the story of Israel in the Old Testament, is they started looking at their pagan neighbors. And one of the things they would see is that their neighbors worship different gods. And so they would start worshipping those false gods, those idols, and as soon as Israel started practicing idolatry, what would follow is injustice and immorality. and things would get out of control. And then some kind of prophet or judge or judgment would come to Israel, and then they would return back to faithfulness to worship the one true God. This is the story that’s told time and time again in the Old Testament. And even though it’s an ancient story, it’s still relevant for us today. Modern-day Christians, as now the renewed new covenant people of God, we face the same temptation. We just call it keeping up with the Joneses So our neighbors might not be worshipping idols in the form of little gold statues, but the neighbors around us might be worshiping things like wealth, like possessions. And so we start looking around there and going, hey, that seems nice. Maybe we should start giving more attention to accumulating more possessions and making more money. That’s a modern-day example of idolatry. And when we start worshiping false gods like money and wealth and possessions What happens to us is we get deformed on the inside and we start practicing injustice and immorality. So the story of ancient Israel is given to us as an example that we would keep our eyes fixed on God. And we believe that Jesus, the Son of God, comes to show us what God is like and to show us the perfect way of following God. The way of love, loving God and loving neighbor. So this culture around us wants to conform us into a kind of immaturity But God, the Holy Spirit, is at work within us, transforming us that we might become mature. That is, that we might become more like Jesus And what some people call deconstruction is actually the process of normal Christian maturity. I mean, I I’ve never experienced what I would call deconstruction, but there’s things I believed when I was younger Christian that I just simply don’t believe anymore. I mean, there was a time I believed, you know, good things happened to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. I can give you Bible verses to show you that. But as I’ve grown, I’ve recognized the truth is that suffering comes to all of us. Even sometimes when we’re trying to do what’s right, things don’t always work out for us in the moment. So I didn’t have to deconstruct anything. I just matured. I just grew up. And so Jesus Does give us commands. Jesus, he’s our Lord. He tells us what to do. He is our king. He is our shepherd. We’re following him. But what makes Jesus unique is that not only does he give us commands to follow, but Jesus also promises to give us the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit within us is giving us energy and power to obey those commands, and the Holy Spirit is transforming us on the inside, changing our heart, changing our character. producing within us the love that is necessary to love God and to love one another. It’s the Holy Spirit producing within us the joy that we feel during Easter tide And so in listening to these verses, Romans 12, 1 and 2 from the message translation, I hope that you are seeing the value. of your entire life, how valuable every part of your ordinary day is to God And I hope today you feel encouraged to offer all of that stuff to God as a living sacrifice And as we offer all that we are to God, I believe we get transformed on the inside. And most importantly, during the season of Easter, I hope that you tap into the joy That the Holy Spirit is producing within us, and that you feel that joy not just on Sunday mornings, but in your everyday, ordinary life. Well, that’s all that we have for today. Thank you for joining me for this episode. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.