What Does Romans 12:2 Mean? — Tozer on Being Transformed by Renewing of Mind
⏱ 15 min read
You have known the verse since you were a young Christian. Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. The verse arrives, in most modern discipleship contexts, with a small implied accusation — that you have been conformed and you ought to be transformed, and the fact that you do not feel particularly transformed is on you. The verse becomes, over a decade, the slightly tired chorus of a Christian life that has been pattern-matching to a culture it no longer recognises, while quietly suspecting that the renewing the verse names was supposed to have happened by now.
This is the slow read. A. W. Tozer, whose The Pursuit of God is the modern devotional book that has done more than any other to recover the older tradition of slow inward seeking, is the guide here. Tozer’s vocabulary — the children of the burning heart, the misty lowland, the long seeking — is the older language the verse was actually written into, and the question what does Romans 12:2 mean is the question this article walks. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is the slow companion to this kind of slow reading, if you would like a place to take the practice afterwards.
For now — read with me. Slowly. The verse will not be the bumper sticker by the end of the article. (If the larger background of the year has been the deeper question of what sovereignty means in the patterns of your particular ordinary life, what does it mean that God is sovereign — Tozer on the Knowledge of the Holy is the companion piece. If the part the verse keeps surfacing is the constant low-grade anxiety under the pattern-matching, prayer for anxiety and overthinking — calm your mind with scripture is the practical companion. And if the page of the journal is the place the renewing has started to actually happen, Christian journal prompts for anxiety — 30 prompts to quiet your mind walks the prompts the mind needs when the mind is the thing being renewed.)
What the verse is doing — before the accusation arrives
Romans 12:2 sits at the hinge of the letter to the Romans. The first eleven chapters are doctrinal — the long careful walking of what God has done in Christ. Chapter 12 turns. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God. The therefore is structural. Everything that follows in the second half of the letter is the practical consequence of the eleven chapters of mercies that precede it. The verse is not the start of a list of demands. It is the start of a meditation on what kind of life the merciful God’s mercy naturally produces in the soul that has received it.
The Greek verb for transformed in this verse is metamorphoō — the same verb used in the Gospels for the transfiguration of Christ. The verb describes a change of form that comes from the inside out. It is not the application of an exterior pattern. It is the slow surfacing of an interior reality. The woman whose discipleship reading has been telling her to try harder to act differently has been at the wrong end of the verse. The verse is about the interior shifting until the exterior naturally follows. The exterior is the consequence. The interior is the seat.
The Greek verb for renewing — anakainōsis — is in the present continuous tense. The ongoing renewing. The verse does not describe a one-time renewal. It describes a slow daily renewing that happens across the whole length of the Christian life. You will not finish the renewing this year. The verse is not promising you will. The verse is promising the direction. The renewing is ongoing. The transformation is the slow consequence. The woman tired of pattern-matching has been measuring herself against a finish line the verse never named.
The first passage: the children of the burning heart
“Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty divine! To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshipping soul: ‘We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, / And long to feast upon Thee still: / We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead / And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.’ Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Tozer is naming something the modern Christian discipleship literature has almost completely lost — that the renewing of the mind is the work of a burning heart, not a tidy programme. The children of the burning heart are Tozer’s name for the long company of saints who refused the too-easily-satisfied religionist posture and continued to seek God after they had found Him. The seeking did not stop at conversion. The seeking continued, daily, hourly, across the whole length of the life, and the renewing of the mind happened inside the seeking.
This is the part that re-orders the entire transformation question. The renewing is not the consequence of better behaviour. The renewing is the consequence of deeper seeking. The woman whose discipleship has been a struggle to behave better has been working at the wrong layer. The behaviour will follow. The seat of the change is the desire. The renewing of the mind happens in the soul whose desire for God has been kept burning — slowly, daily, quietly — through the years.
They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. The phrase to sit with is the long seeking. The renewing is long. The seeking is long. The transformation is long. Tozer is gently dismantling the modern expectation of fast spiritual results. The older Christians — the children of the burning heart — were not in a hurry. They knew the renewing would take a lifetime, and they set themselves to the slow daily work without measuring how close they were to the finish.
This is also the part that quiets the chronic guilt of the woman who has felt, for years, that her spiritual life is not advancing. The advancement was never measurable by the metrics she has been using. The metrics — do I read more, pray more, behave better, feel more, witness more — are exterior. The renewing happens at the interior, in the slow burning of the desire, and the exterior changes are the slow downstream consequence. The woman whose interior desire is being kept burning by small daily means is being renewed even when her exterior life looks exactly the same as it did last year. The renewing is happening at a layer the metrics do not see.
What does Romans 12:2 mean in this passage’s light. It means the slow keeping-burning of the heart’s desire for God across a lifetime. The pattern of the world is the pattern of easy satisfaction — the next purchase, the next achievement, the next destination, the next solution. The renewed mind is the mind that has been un-easily satisfied — that, having found God, continues to pursue Him, because the soul that knows Him knows there is always more, and the more is the renewing.
The second passage: the misty lowland and the new work of love
“O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’ Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it twice. The second time, slow on the misty lowland where I have wandered so long.
Tozer is praying — and naming, in the praying — the actual interior condition of the modern Christian woman whose mind has been conformed for so long that she can no longer quite remember what un-conformity would feel like. The misty lowland. The phrase is exact. The lowland is the long stretch of conformity in which the mind, slowly, ceases to notice that it has been conformed. The mist is the fog of cultural assumption that settles over the conformed mind so quietly that the mind, after years, cannot see clearly enough to tell what it is conformed to.
The woman in the misty lowland is not a bad Christian. She is a Christian whose mind has slowly absorbed the patterns of the culture she lives inside — the productivity expectations, the appearance metrics, the comparison reflexes, the achievement framings — and has been measuring her own life by them without quite noticing. The conformity is not loud. The conformity is the mist. The mist obscures what un-conformity would look like, which is why the verse keeps feeling abstract.
I want to want Thee. This is the petition that begins the renewing for the woman in the lowland. She does not start by wanting God; she starts by wanting to want Him. The honesty of the starting place is what makes the renewing possible. The discipleship literature that tells her to want God more lands on a mind that does not yet know how to. Tozer’s older prayer gives her the actual first sentence: I want to want Thee. The first sentence does not require her to already have what she does not have. It requires her to honestly name the desire for the desire, and the naming itself is what God responds to.
Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. This is the second petition. The work is His to begin. The renewing is not initiated by her striving. The renewing begins by His mercy in response to her honest I want to want Thee. The agency, at the foundational layer, is His. Her part is the opening — the small honest naming, the daily quiet sit, the un-conformed minute that interrupts the long lowland mist.
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. Tozer is quoting the Song of Solomon, where the Bridegroom calls the bride out of her hiding into the open. The image is the renewing image. The soul that has been wandering in the misty lowland is called up — by name, with affection, with the slow patient voice of the One who has been calling her out the whole time. The rising is not by her own strength. Give me grace to rise and follow. The grace is the means. The rising is the consequence. The renewing is the slow accumulated upward motion of a soul who has, in many small daily moments, accepted the call out of the mist.
This is what Romans 12:2 means at the experiential level. The renewing is the slow rising out of the lowland mist into the clearer air of a mind that has been re-shaped by the One who calls. The transformation is the visible arrival, after years, in a mind whose default patterns are no longer the lowland patterns. The verse is not a command to climb. It is the description of a slow ascent that begins with the honest I want to want Thee and proceeds, day by day, through a thousand small mercies that lift the mind a little higher than yesterday’s lowland fog.
The somatic that the rise up of Tozer is pointing at
Pause here. The lowland mist is not only mental. The body, after years in the mist, has its own settled posture — the head slightly forward, the chest slightly collapsed, the shoulders rolled in toward the chest, the breath shallow into the upper lungs. The mist has a body. Before the next passage, the body needs a small piece of the rising.
Sit somewhere quiet. Without changing anything, notice the position of your head. Most modern necks carry the head slightly forward of the spine — the screen-reading default. Slowly, gently, draw the head back so that the ears sit directly over the shoulders. Not strained — aligned. As the head rises, the chest naturally opens by a small amount. As the chest opens, the breath finds a slightly deeper passage into the lungs.
Take three slow breaths in this lengthened posture. Then return to the page. The body has just done a small physical version of rise up. The lowland posture has been interrupted, briefly, by the more-upright position. The mind, downstream of the body, has cleared by a small amount. Tozer would not have used the language of postural alignment. But he knew, by long practice, that the body and the mind ascended together, and the slow daily lifting of the head was part of the slow renewing of the mind.
A daily home for the slow reading
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is the 140-day version of what this article is the long letter of. One short passage each day — the renewing walked at the pace it actually happens at, with room for the honest I want to want Thee the modern discipleship handout never asked for. Built for the woman whose mind has been in the misty lowland for years and is ready, slowly, to rise.
The third passage: the kindred mingling of personalities
“God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it slowly. The phrase to sit with is kindred personalities.
This is the sentence that names, more precisely than almost any other in Tozer’s writing, what the renewed mind is for. The renewed mind is not the mind that has correctly memorised the doctrine. It is the mind that has been re-shaped enough to enjoy the kindred mingling of its personality with the personality of God in divine communion. The renewing has a destination. The destination is the enjoyment of God — the slow mutual mingling of two persons, the soul and the Lord, into a fellowship the woman was formed for from the beginning.
This is what re-orders the entire transformation question one more time. The renewing is for enjoyment. Not for productivity. Not for performance. Not for moral compliance. For the kindred mingling. The modern Christian woman has often been told the goal of transformation is fruit — that she will produce more, behave better, witness more effectively. Tozer would gently disagree. The fruit is the consequence. The purpose is the communion. The renewed mind is the mind that has been re-shaped enough to enjoy God, and the enjoyment is the centre of the renewed life.
Kindred. The word means of the same family, of the same kind. Tozer is making a claim that the modern Christian discipleship literature has sometimes been afraid to make — that the human soul, made in the image of God, is kindred to Him in a way that allows for genuine mutual enjoyment. The renewing of the mind is the slow re-fitting of the kindred personality, after years of conformity to the world, into a shape that can again receive the mingling. The mingling is what the Christian life is for. The conformity has obscured the kindredness. The renewing restores it.
What does Romans 12:2 mean in this final passage. It means the slow re-fitting of the mind into a shape that can again enjoy the kindred mingling with God for which it was formed. The transformation is the aim. The renewing is the means. The end-state is communion — the mutual enjoyment between two kindred personalities, one infinite and one finite, one Father and one daughter, sharing a slow daily fellowship that was the original point of the soul’s creation and that the misty lowland has, for too long, obscured.
What the verse will mean over a year of slow renewing
You will not be fully renewed in a year. The verse was never asking you to. The verse was asking you to be being-renewed — present continuous — across the whole length of the Christian life, in slow daily increments, by the mercy of God working on a soul that has honestly named I want to want Thee.
What you can do, this year, is the small daily sit. Three minutes. One verse. The honest naming of the desire for the desire. The slow lifting of the head out of the lowland posture. The small kindred mingling that begins to happen when the soul has been still enough that He has somewhere to come into. The renewing will not feel dramatic. The metrics will look mostly the same. But the centre of gravity of your mind will be moving, slowly, toward the One who is calling you up out of the mist, and the transformation will be the slow downstream visible arrival of a soul whose interior has been quietly re-shaped by the long daily work.
What does Romans 12:2 mean, then. It means the slow renewing of the children of the burning heart. It means the patient rising out of the misty lowland. It means the re-fitting of the soul for the kindred mingling with God it was formed for. It means the long present-continuous transformation that does not finish this year and is not supposed to. (The sibling pieces in this verse-reading series sit at what does Hebrews 11:1 mean — Owen on the substance of things hoped for and what does Psalm 42 mean — Spurgeon on the deer panting, if you would like the same slow reading walked on different verses.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day a short passage, room for the honest I want to want Thee the modern handout never asked for, and the kind of slow page that lets the renewing happen at the pace it actually happens at.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Tozer’s slow vocabulary — the children of the burning heart, the misty lowland, the kindred mingling — into a daily companion built for the woman whose mind has been in the lowland for too long and is ready, slowly, to be renewed.
