Scripture References: 2 Corinthians 5:14-20
Being reconciled to God implies the responsibility to demonstrate the righteousness or justice of God to others by way of a new life of love and respect for others.
Paul is particularly concerned about our high calling to pass on the saving mercy of God, that is, the gospel truth that he had unfolded so eloquently as justification by faith alone in writing Romans chapters 1 through 11. This matter of demonstrating our salvation from guilt and the dominion of sin is of crucial importance to Paul. This newness of life is not just an appendix or an after-thought to the gospel. The sanctified life must be a new reality in the Christian’s life or he may doubt whether he participates in the redeeming power of Christ through the Spirit at all. You cannot be justified by faith and continue to live a self-centered life!
Paul focused on this gospel truth sharply in Romans, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?” (Romans 6:1-2). That counts for every baptized believer, he goes on to explain, because by baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, the believer has become “in Christ” and under Christ’s Lordship. He has received the freedom from sin’s overmastering power and has been placed under the power of the new Master: the risen Lord Jesus. This is the new reality for the baptized believer in Christ. He has entered the kingdom of God’s grace. Now he must live it and demonstrate it! Paul makes this compelling conclusion in Romans 6:12-14.
Paul indicates the transition from experienced salvation to demonstrated salvation by the challenging word “therefore” (Romans 6:12). Theologians have called this flow from theology to ethics, or from the redemptive indicative to the redemptive imperative. This means that Christian morality is not grounded in ourselves, in an abstract moral imperative, but in our experience of the saving mercy of God. Paul’s ethics is a theological ethics that is always a social ethics. Our moral life must be demonstrated among family, in church and society as a whole. Paul devotes the four chapters from Romans 12 through 15 to the moral and social claims of the gospel: to how to live the gospel among the people of the church and of the world.
Notice how he begins this important section of his letter to the Romans, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1). I like how this same verse is rendered in the New International Version; “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship” (Romans 12:1 NIV). Notice that Paul again roots the Christian moral life in the saving mercy of God. The power for the new life comes from the risen Lord, not from our own moral will or resolutions. We need to be in touch with God through Jesus to receive a changed heart and mind by the working of the Holy Spirit. This is the hidden part of our religion. But then comes the necessary visible part of our religion: that we have now a new Master in our life, one who is stronger than Satan, stronger than sin and temptation, one who makes us free to know and to obey the will of God!
Because of the redeeming mercy of God in Jesus Christ, we are now free to “present [offer] our bodies a living sacrifice” to God. What did Paul mean by this claim of the gospel? Is this personal offering of ourselves not a daily reconsecration to our divine Redeemer?
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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