“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

Paul spends most of his letters to the Romans explaining—in stunning detail—the intricate theology weaving together the coming of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, the role of faith in the life of the believer (both Jewish and Gentile), the relationship of the believer to the law and God’s righteousness, and the unity in diversity of the body of Christ being comprised of the adopted Children of God, the ones who are foreknown and called, both the siblings of Paul according to the flesh and according to the Spirit. Now, in the last 1/3 of the letter, Paul turns to speak about the ethics and ethical posture of the body of Christ.[ii]

Christians are justified with God by faith in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit; all of this is (very much!) apart from any work and deed, both bad ones and good ones. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t now and as a consequence of this event of justification have a robust relationship with works and deeds. For Paul, and according to the logic, flow, and theology of Romans, Christians are liberated from attempts to self-justify so that they can be, in word and deed, the representatives of Christ in the world by the power of the Holy Spirit for the wellbeing of the neighbor to the glory of God.[iii] Tl/dr: Christians are called by God and justified so that they may participate (liberally and voluntarily) in God’s mission of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[iv]

Romans 12:1-8

Paul begins chapter 12 with three exhortations,

I beseech you, therefore, siblings, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and well-pleasing to God, your rational service. And do not be conformed to this age; but be transformed by the renewal of the mind so that you can discern the good, pleasing, and mature will of God (vv1-2).

These three exhortations are strong urgings and neither commands nor polite requests.[v] Both polite requests and commands can be given without love; exhortations, on the other hand, come from the depths of love for the beloved, like a parent desiring their kids to remain safe in various and potentially precarious situations. An urgent pleading or a strong urging comes loaded with heavy love putting the beloved in an obligation to respond and (especially) to respond affirmatively. While there is an option for the beloved to resist the urging or pleading, the resisting won’t come easy because urging and pleading have a direct line to the conscience where they make their home in the heart and mind of the beloved. Thus, the Roman Christians—both Jewish and Gentile—is being verbally moved, by Paul, to begin to conform to the Spriit of God and cease conforming to the spirit of the kingdom of humanity that thrives in the toxicity of its antagonism to the reign of God.[vi] In this way the sinner—in becoming righteous (always and repeatedly[vii]) by faith alone—now becomes the one who moves from non-being to being and, thus, non-doing to doing.[viii] This being and doing means that Christians, according to Paul, no longer offer animal sacrifices to appease God; rather, they are offer themselves over to God, they hand themselves over to be molded and shaped by the Holy Spirit—through prayer and worship—to begin to be like Christ.[ix] The Roman Christians are to be and do in the world in a way that their persons and their being[x] are daily sacrifices to God, midwives and child-bearers bringing forth God’s will and reign,[xi] not concerning themselves with getting it perfect but with getting it aligned to God’s love made known in Christ.[xii] (“Not my will, but they will be done.” [xiii]) According to Paul, this is the only and right (logical/rational) service to God as a response to and out of faith,[xiv] for both individual Christians and the corporate Church, the body of Christ.[xv],[xvi]

How are the Roman Christians to do this? Paul begins,

For, I say by grace being given to me for all people who are among you not to be arrogantly minded beyond that which is necessary to think, but to think with the result of being of sound mind, each one according to the apportioned measure of faith/trust. For just as we have many members in one body, and the many members do not have the same function, in this way we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and members of one another (vv3-5).

The very first thing Paul mentions is the way the Roman Christians view themselves. First and foremost, the Roman Christians are not to think more of themselves than they should. How much should they think of themselves? An amount that accords with the gift of faith and God’s grace.[xvii] But what does this mean? Remember, Paul spent 11 chapters disabusing the Roman Christians of the hierarchies that decorate the kingdom of humanity; none of that is allowed in the body of Christ[xviii] because the playing field is leveled by faith and God’s grace given (by God!) to sinners.[xix] Christians must reject (repeatedly) the temptation to see themselves as better (or worse!) than other people. For the Christians in the church in Rome receiving this letter, it means that the neither the Jewish Christians nor the Gentile Christians can consider themselves to be better than the other.[xx] Concurrently, this means that Christians are not categorically better than those who are outside the church (thus, they are not better than Paul’s siblings according to the flesh (Romans 9-11) and not better than their fellow Roman (Gentile) citizens (Romans 1-3). Every day, and not just on the day of worship, these Christians are to be humble toward others and toward themselves, refusing to elevate oneself because of class, birth, wealth, religion, and occupation (etc.); there’s no better and well-pleasing sacrifice to God.[xxi]

Paul then, in a less organized way than elsewhere in his epistles, speaks of broad categories (not hierarchies) of specific giftings and how they should be performed individually for the corporate good,

Now having gifts that differ according to grace being given to us: if prophecy, then according to the proportion of faith; if service then in serving; if the one who teaches then in teaching, if the one who exhorts, then in exhorting; if the one who gives a share then in liberality; if the one who rules then in diligence; if the one who has mercy then in care and cheerfulness (vv6-8).

As the Roman Christians embrace their justification that is by faith alone and consider what this means for how they view themselves, then the way they perform their various calls will serve to edify and encourage the community of believers. The prophet will prophecy with words that align to faith and the declarations of God in Christ and will not be in opposition to the incarnate Word of God but may be in opposition to the kingdom of humanity (prophecy=proclamation).[xxii] The one who is gifted to serve will serve with their full being. The one who teaches is called and inspired by God[xxiii] to teach so that those who do not know Christ come to know Christ, while the one who exhorts is to help those who already know Christ to grow and mature in becoming more like Christ.[xxiv] The givers are to give with no strings attached, the rulers are to rule invested in the well-being of their citizens remembering that they are the God’s beloved,[xxv] and those who offer mercy should do so not in dourness but with cheer, bringing light where there is darkness.

Conclusion

Our faith, while it liberates us from slavishly trying to fulfill the law, puts us on the hook regarding the will of God in the world. This is the truth that Paul is communicating to the Roman Christians, thus to us all these years later. Faith in Jesus, faith that justifies us with God and ceases our selfish and self-consumed pursuits at self-righteousness that comes from self-justification, liberates us to be in the world in a real and fulfilled way. For Paul, faith is eager to manifest in loving deeds, just like Jesus’s faith manifested in the loving, liberating, and life-giving deeds while he walked the earth all those years ago. We, by faith, become a member of the body of Christ and are, thusly, exhorted and shaped by the power of the Holy Spriit to be as Christ in the World as Christ’s representatives, both individually and corporately. We get to be liberated from our selves by faith and liberated for the wellbeing of our neighbor—to bring love where there is indifference, liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death. We get to walk, arm in arm, with Christ and with each other; one body serving God and serving those whom God loves, the beloved neighbor in here and out there. We get to stand up and be a person of substance in the world knowing who we are and what we stand for.

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[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Lancaster, Romans, 202. “Being baptized into Jesus Christ brings us into life with this faithful and righteous God, so we must consider well how that life should be lived. Paul’s use of ‘therefore’ in this sentence is not merely a word to show a change of subject; rather, it indicates that he is drawing conclusions from all that he has said previously. To understand his reasons for drawing these conclusions, the reader must keep the scope of his previous argument about the faithfulness and righteousness of God in view.”

[iii] LW 25:104fn2. “Up to this point he has taught how to become a new man, and he has described the new birth which makes the new man (John 3:3ff). but now he is teaching concerning the works of the new birth which anyone who has not been made a new man does in vain and presumptuously. For being comes before doing, and suffering comes before being. Therefore the order is: becoming, being, and then working.”

[iv] LW 25:433. “The apostle is about to teach Christan ethics, and so no other concern is of such prime importance up tot eh end of the epistle as to eradicate our own wisdom and self-will.”

[v] Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Romans, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 2010-202. In re: Παρακαλέω, “Paul is not giving the Roman followers of Jesus a command or rule, but neither is he simply making a request. He is urging them to demonstrate in their lives their loyalty to the God he has been describing throughout the letter.”

[vi] Lancaster, Romans, 202. “If the followers of Jesus have obligations on the basis of their allegiance to God, it is on the basis of a faithful and merciful God, and it is only through that mercy that they may fulfill their obligations. The counsels that Paul will commend to them are not new laws, but rather they are his idea of the appropriate response to the mercy God has already shown.”

[vii] LW 25:434. “Thus it is most correct to say that man is always in privation, always in becoming or in potentiality, in matter, and always in action…Man is always in nonbeing, in becoming, in being, always in privation, in potentiality, in action, always in sin, in justification, in righteousness, that is, he is always a sinner, always a penitent, always righteous.”

[viii] LW 25:434. “…nonbeing is a thing without a name and a man in his sins; becoming is justification; being is righteousness; action is doing and living righteously; being acted upon is to be made perfect and complete. And these five stages in some way are always in motion in man. And whatever is found in the nature of man—except for the first stage of nonbeing and the last form of existence, for between these two, nonbeing and being acted upon, there are the three stages which are always in movement, namely, becoming, being and acting—through his new birth he moves from sin to righteousness, and thus from nonbeing through becoming to being.”

[ix] Lancaster, Romans, 203. “Although Paul uses common religious language, he suggests something different, though, than offering something representative (an animal or some other girt to stand in our place): Paul tells them to present their own bodies. That is, they. Must give their whole selves to God.”

[x] Lancaster, Romans, 206. “…[Paul] is pointing to the intimate connecting between them. Logikos worship must include the mind as well as the body. When our minds are renewed after the mind of Christ, we more clearly discern the will of God. Understanding the will of God is the first, necessary stoep toward enacting it with our bodies.”

[xi] Lancaster, Romans, 203-204. “To say that we should present our very selves to God as a living sacrifice is to say that our daily life ought to be a form of worship, an ongoing offering. Everything we do should not only be guided by God but also offered to God.”

[xii] Lancaster, Romans, 207. “Related to telos (end, goal), this fullness does not require that we enact God’s will without any mistake or flaw, but it does requires that we pursue the goal that God wills and not one determined by the present age or our own selfish desires. Discernment of that will is key.”

[xiii] LW 25:438. “For faith itself transforms the thinking and leads us to acknowledge the will of God.”

[xiv] Lancaster, Romans, 205. In re λογικός, “This worship is not carried out in a temple as one performs cultic duties, but rather it is carried out every day in one’s living. Both Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus would be challenged by this image to think in a new way about how best to honor God.”

[xv] Lancaster, Romans, 202. “Because they are loyal to this faithful and righteous God, they have obligations to one another.”

[xvi] Lancaster, Romans, 207. “The task of the community to be transformed by the renewing of its mind is every bit as necessary and ongoing as the task of any individual.”

[xvii] Lancaster, Romans, 208. “We see ourselves in a fair and sensible light when we judge ourselves according to the faith that God has given.”

[xviii] LW 25:438. “For whenever God gives us a new degree of grace, he gives in such a way that it conflicts with all our thinking and understanding.”

[xix] Lancaster, Romans, 208. “It is more likely that Paul means ‘measure’ not as amount but as criterion. In other words, we should measure our thinking against faith.”

[xx] Lancaster, Romans, 208. “If we allow faith to form our judgments, then we can see more clearly how we belong together in one body.”

[xxi] Lancaster, Romans, 205. “We show our allegiance to the dominion to which we belong through the way we carry out our lives, in all our daily actions. Because the followers of Jesus have left the dominion of sin and accepted the free gift of the dominion of grace, they are obliged to demonstrate their new allegiance daily.”

[xxii] LW 25:446. “in the same way he is trying to say here that prophecy must be in harmony with faith, so that it is concerned ‘with things not seen’ ….lest by change it become the wisdom of the world, which is concerned with things which are seen, either in causes or in effects.”

[xxiii] LW 25:447. “…for without the call of God neither the ministry nor teaching succeeds.”

[xxiv] LW 25:448. “The difference between teaching and exhortation is this, that teaching is directed to those who do not know, while exhortation applies to those who do know.”

[xxv] LW 25:450. “…although everyone who is exalted is exalted for the purpose that he seek nothing for himself nor seek to live for himself, but that he recognizes that he has been made a servant of his servants.”