Sunday February 22, 2026

What am I Becoming?

This Sunday's message concluded the More Than a Feeling series with a final question: Who am I becoming? The series began with awareness: What am I feeling? Then moved to discernment: How do I handle this? Then compassion: What am I missing? Ash Wednesday added another layer: What am I holding onto? Now the series ends with formation.

Pastor Joel opened with a toy called Build-A-Buddy. It's a John Deere tractor that comes apart into pieces: a cab with a face, a body, four wheels, yellow screws, and a little drill to put it all back together. Peyton loves this toy. When they play with it together, she wants to do everything. She wants to hold the drill, place the pieces, drive the screws in herself.

Sometimes she gets it. Sometimes she struggles. Sometimes the piece doesn't line up right, or the screw won't catch, and she looks up for help. Joel guides her hands or holds the piece steady while she finishes the work. She's learning that the process takes time. That you don't get the tractor all at once. That sometimes you need help. And that even when it's frustrating, the goal is worth the effort.

We don't start as the finished version of ourselves. We start as parts. Scattered. Unassembled. Full of potential but not yet whole. The question isn't whether we'll be shaped. We will be. The question is who is doing the shaping, and what we're becoming in the process.

Romans 12:1-2 anchors the message. Paul opens with a word that connects everything: "therefore." He's spent eleven chapters laying out the mercies of God. Now he turns to response. "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."

The old sacrifices were dead. An animal was slain, placed on the altar, and consumed by fire. It was a one-time offering. But Paul calls for something different: a living sacrifice. We are not consumed and finished. We are placed on the altar and asked to stay there. To keep offering ourselves, day after day, in the ordinary rhythms of life.

Then Paul shifts. "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds." Two movements here. One passive. One active. Conformation happens by default. You don't have to try to be shaped by the world. You just have to stop resisting. The world presses us into its mold through patterns, assumptions, and rhythms we barely notice. Scroll long enough and you start thinking like the feed.

But transformation is different. The word Paul uses is metamorphosis. The same word used for Jesus' transfiguration. This is not behavior modification. This is deep, inward change. And it happens through the mind: the control center of thoughts, attitudes, and affections. We cannot renew our own minds any more than Peyton can assemble that tractor without help. Transformation is something we receive as we participate in what God is doing. We offer ourselves. God does the transforming.

Formation is not a one-time decision. It is a daily offering. Every morning we wake up and face the same question: Will I offer myself to God today, or will I let the world do the shaping by default?

The message closed at the Communion Table. We come not as the completed versions of ourselves. We come as people still being formed. The bread and the cup remind us that Christ gave his body for us. And in return, we offer ours to him. A living sacrifice. Broken, but held. Incomplete, but received. The Table is not for the finished. It's for the becoming.