Now, it is at the close of all this that the apostle’s “therefore” comes; and these are the facts and principles which give to it its point and force. It links all the disclosures of Divine love with the obligations of redeemed souls. Since God has done so much as this for you, what then? By the remembrance of the sin which left you without hope; by the greatness of the love of God who, to save you, gave His well-beloved Son to an atoning death on your behalf; by the greatness of the love of Christ who, to save you, consecrated Himself to this perfect sacrifice; by His birth and death, by His cross and passion, by His resurrection and ascension; by the freeness and the simplicity of the condition on which Christ’s salvation becomes yours; by your present peace; by your hope which blooms with immortality and with eternal life; by these, the mercies of God, I beseech you, yield yourselves to God. That surrender must be the first, the natural, the inevitable result of any vivid and practical realisation of the Divine goodness. “Yield your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.”
The Apostle Paul was pre-eminently the teacher of what are called the doctrines of grace. In the system of Divine truth which he gives us, he leaves no room for the indulgence on man’s part of the least sentiment of pride. The gospel, in his view, is the Divine expedient for what must otherwise have been a desperate and hopeless case; an expedient, therefore, which—since, from first to last, it is the expression of God’s free and sovereign love—cannot allow of any self-glorying to man as unregenerate, or of any self-satisfaction to man as Christian. Hence the uniformity and consistency of his teaching with respect to “works.” In the believer and the unbeliever alike, these “works,” judged by “the law”—the standard of moral perfection—are all defective, and therefore unavailing. The same truth applies to them all at every stage of the Christian’s progress towards heaven. In no sense does salvation come by “works,” “lest any man should boast.”
On this point, however, the apostle has always been misunderstood by persons who have pushed his teaching to an illegitimate conclusion. If all be of “grace,” why insist upon “works”? The objection was made in his day, and he met it. It is made in our day, and has still to be met. It is sufficiently met by Paul’s own method. Paul’s doctrine of grace could never, in his mind, lead to “licentiousness,” and it is one of the most remarkable phenomena of religious thought that it should have ever been suspected of doing so. The Christian man, in Paul’s view, is the regenerate man; and the regenerate man is the holy man. Without the spirit and life of holiness Paul would have deemed it absurd to consider a man a Christian at all. The passage before us, even if there were no others of the same kind, is sufficient to prove how indissolubly connected are privilege and obligation in the Christian life. As we have seen, the apostle draws the exhortations which commence with this chapter, and which are exhaustively presented in all their variety and comprehensiveness—exhortations to a complete consecration to God in all the practical forms which it can assume—from the great gospel system, the system of salvation by grace and by grace alone; evidently taking it for granted that, by the contemplation of the grace for man which is in Christ Jesus, the minds of his readers would be softened, and prepared to acknowledge the claim.
What, then, is the nature of the consecration to which we are thus urged? “That ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” Every word in this description tells: and if we gather together the elements of the service commended, we shall find that nothing is wanting, and that under the various particulars we may range all the duties and beauties of a consecrated Christian life.
The only point on which a question might be raised is as to the meaning of the terms: “That ye present your bodies a living sacrifice.” Some have supposed a contrast here between the dead bodies of the animals offered in the old sacrifices and the living self-consecration of the Christian. If the supposition be just, the idea is both beautiful and suggestive. I think, however, that the ultimate meaning of the apostle is that the believer in Christ should devote himself wholly to God, and that the term “your bodies” is only another term for “yourselves.” We cannot imagine an acceptable bodily, or external sacrifice, without the participation in it of the conscience, the judgment, the heart, the whole man. The apostle puts his thought somewhat more fully in the kindred passage: “Ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are God’s.” Observe, then, the elements of this consecration.
1. Individuality. It is to be a personal thing. “Present yourselves.” We cannot fulfil our Christian mission by transferring it to other hands. There are no proxies in religion. Organisations, committees, associations, the giving of money—all have their propriety, but none of them can take the place of personal “presentation.” For convenience’ sake, organisations of various kinds may be resorted to with a view to the maintenance and spread of the gospel in the world, and undoubtedly may be usefully employed in spheres beyond the reach of personal endeavour; but the individual Christian must himself be engaged in the service of God. Every believer in the Saviour has his own sphere of service, in which no fellow creature can be substituted for Him. The Christian law is: personal service always in so far as it is possible; vicarious service only in so far as personal service cannot be rendered.
2. Activity. “A living sacrifice.” No man fulfils his Christian commission in mere retirement and contemplation. It is true that he is not to be “of the world;” but in the nature of the case he must be “in” it. Retirement and contemplation are, indeed, needed for the rest and growth of the soul; but action is at least equally indispensable. Our practical life is the chief part of our testimony for God, and the chief weapon of our aggressive warfare upon the unbelief and irreligion around us; and in order that it may be effective, it is required, in its fulness and in its energy, to be pervaded, invigorated, impelled, and directed by the Christian spirit. Every scene, every experience, every development of life is to be hallowed. If we “present ourselves a living sacrifice,” we relinquish all self-claim, and give ourselves up to God to be used by Him for the purposes of His glory. As Christ’s sacrifice began with the moment when He left His Father’s throne, so ours must begin with the first consciousness of our salvation—“a living sacrifice,” the consecration of the whole life with all its powers.
3. Holiness. “Holy,” because to God, with the full intention and devotion of the soul. This scarcely needs to be insisted on. There may be an apparent religious devotedness which is not real, because it takes the form of ostensibly religious acts—acts, however, which have not their origin and their impelling force in grateful love to God for His saving mercy, but in some kind of selfishness, and which are therefore unholy in themselves, and unacceptable to God. The consecrated life is the life which is in sympathy with the whole character and will of Him by whom the supreme blessing of redemption has been bestowed.
4. Reasonableness. The true consecration is not the result of any mere positive or arbitrary enactment, the ground and propriety of which cannot be discerned. The true Christian does not spend his life upon a certain principle, and consequently in a certain way, merely because he is told to do so. The service which he renders to God rises out of his felt relations to God. If it were not commanded at all—if it were not even formally hinted at as an obligation—it would still be natural, “reasonable,” and therefore right. The realised “mercies of God” would be instinctively understood to claim it—instinctively felt to prompt it. “Your reasonable service.” The words are significant. “Service” is properly homage. “Reasonable” is that which pertains to the mind. So that the apostle’s phrase stands opposed to all mere religious externalism. It is the homage of the life to God with the full consent of the mind, in the consciousness of the sacred obligation arising out of the enjoyment of the Divine mercy in the salvation of the soul.
Such service is declared to be “acceptable to God.” It is so for the sake of Christ whose grace has infused into the soul the life out of which it springs; it is so because the motives which determine it are right and good; and it is so because it is the loving gift of His own children.