Romans 12:2

Rome measured a person by status, spectacle, and visible achievement, and Paul's readers had spent their entire lives learning to want exactly what that city rewarded. This verse opens the second half of Romans, the practical section, right after eleven chapters of dense doctrine. The change Paul calls for is a mind renewed again and again, a pattern kept up daily, across years.

The Greek word behind “transformed” is metamorphoo, the same root behind our word metamorphosis. Paul reaches for the most dramatic image of change available to him: a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, wings and flight from something that used to crawl. That kind of change begins somewhere nobody else can see, inside the mind, long before it shows up anywhere else.