If you go back and read Romans 8:37-39 and then skip to Romans 12, it would seem that there is a natural flow. Paul took a bit of a turn in Romans 9–11, and then he has seemingly returned to the gist of what he was saying in Romans 8.
Based on the security we have in Jesus, in the salvation that was so richly purchased for us, we now have this responsibility. Jesus brought back the possibility for us to have FREE WILL again. As sinners, we did not have free will, so to speak; we were sold under sin, and all of our thoughts were sinful all the day long, according to Romans 3. But now that we are saved, we have the ability to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to God. He does not need dead sacrifices; He wants us alive.
This would have been an interesting picture to the Jews he was writing to; you see, they saw sacrifices every day. They knew death and the bloodshed that came with sacrifices. Sacrificing meant death to something. The idea of a living sacrifice may have been missed by them. But Paul was calling us to exercise our free will, the free will we have in Jesus with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Now, we can choose to offer ourselves to God out of love and gratitude for all He has done.
There is a call to stop and then to do. Stop conforming to the world, stop being shaped by the world’s ideas and philosophies. We see in the modern church that there are so many who claim Christ but then preach evil. They say that Paul wrote things that were not right, or one woman I heard claimed that Christ was a racist. But this is just as evil as those who claim that they can correct the Greek language with the KJV.
Paul encourages us, beseeches us, pleads with us to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God. We are to be transformed by what God has done for us, and when we explore the grace and the priceless gift that was bought for us, we should want to transform into the image of Jesus. We transformed; we get the word metamorphosis from this: the caterpillar into the butterfly. One dies and the other flies. The caterpillar willingly dies to become the butterfly, and we should willingly die to self to be transformed by Christ.
Vs 9-21: When we are transformed, when we begin the process of dying to self and selfishness, we are able to love our neighbor like Jesus loves us. We can love without hypocrisy; we say we love someone and then actually live up to the responsibility of that commitment. True, godly love always comes with a responsibility: God so loved that He gave.
In vs 10, we are called to be kind; we are supposed to be kind to one another, even when the other is not there. We are to be eager and diligent to help when we can. All too often we say, “Oh, come back tomorrow” when we can help today. True transformation helps us to view the trials and troubles of life differently. We can find the joy in the trials; we can find the hope in the troubles of life, and we can get through.
When we are transformed, we deal with revenge another way. We no longer seek revenge. We can begin to bless those that persecute us. What a call and a challenge for us in this current world! We see Christians in Nigeria getting killed and Christians in the UK being arrested for praying outside of abortion clinics. Just a few days ago, a Christian couple was sentenced to 50 days in jail because they did not include lessons about homosexuality and all of the queer stuff when they homeschooled their kids. The kids were accomplished in multiple languages, on the piano, and passed all the psychological exams; yet the judge sentenced the parents to 50 days in jail.
There is rampant hatred for all things Christian in the world, and the same people are embracing Islam and other evils like atheism. We are called to love our enemies and not to seek revenge. We are called to overcome their evil with the good; this is how transformed people live. I beseech all of us to die to self and choose to live for Christ.
Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario