Acting Out

For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.   Romans 6:19

Present – There is no way to get around it.  The bodily actions I take, the way that I use my hands, feet, eyes, ears and all the rest of me, have direct, spiritual consequences.  My issues with submission do not stop with my heart and my head.  They extend right through to my fingers.  No one can be a slave to God in heart only.  Slaves were meant to offer up their bodies as well as their minds and hearts.

Paul forever destroys the idea of a Christian dualism with this verse.  It just isn’t possible to separate myself into spirit, body and mind – as though I could serve God with part of me while the other part resisted (what we have so conveniently called the “carnal” Christian).  If I am a slave, God owns all of me.  That’s what it means to be a slave.  I don’t rent part of my life to God’s service.  Either I am living in submission or I am not.  There is no such thing as partial slavery.

In the past, you and I stood before the throne of Self and offered our faculties in its service.  In other words, we did what pleased us.  We might not have broken the law, but we broke the heart of God.  We rebelled against His authority.  We shouted, “It’s my life.  I’ll do what I want.”  Then the day came when we were crushed in our rebellion, humiliated in our arrogance and exposed for our wanton disregard of God’s goodness.  Iniquity piled upon iniquity putrefied our lives.  All we could do was say, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner by intentional design.”  He had mercy.

Now, says Paul, make a different offering.  Present (literally – stand before – paristemi) His throne and offer your body, mind and spirit (the one YOU) in total submission as His slave.  And, by the way, if there is any part of you that wants to resist that thought, any faculty or body member that still is crying out for its own way, then you know the pangs of obedience in a world of self-will.  You have discovered that you are not able to submit out of sheer willpower.  Why?  Because your will is powered by its own desire to rebel.  The only way you can submit is to ask God to do this miraculous work within you.  He must give you the heart and the desire.  They don’t reside in you naturally. 

Slavery is a fight, but it is never a battle.  The fight is to release God’s power to bring you into submission.  There is no battle because He has already overcome all the forces that conspire against you.  All that is left is for you to say, “Lord, have mercy on me” – and then present yourself.