Are You Sold Out To God?

Rom 12:1 Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.

There is a rule I learned in my English Lit. Classes, “To better understand any sentence one must read the entire paragraph. To better understand the meaning of that sentence you must read the entire book.” I have been asked many times, and some of them worded skillfully, if I were truly a fool and believed the Holy Bible to actually be of one context from the very beginning through the last Amen of Revelation 22, the fact of the matter is, yes!

I have often heard the verse above preached and most often, without having intended to, the Preacher preached it out of context. The book of Romans is not! The book of Romans is, in English, the letter to the Romans and so it is, you see, Paul did not number chapter and verse, another, likely, hundreds of years later that was done. Paul wrote an epistle, a letter, to the Romans.

When we look at Romans 12:1, the very first word is “Therefore.” There has been something said in the previous eleven chapters, as we know them, that has brought Paul to this point and before we go further, it is important to know why Paul has arrived here to explain to us that we must consider ourselves a sacrifice to be done with as it would please God, our Father. Why?

When we look at chapter three we see that we are, everyone of us, unacceptable sinners. And further on we learn how to change that unacceptability and then there is chapter eleven. Paul explains to us about Agriculture and how raising Olive Trees relates to the condition of the Jewish Believer and the Christian Believer.

Many, today, have never known the truth that once upon a time, “these Christians are just another sect of those pesty Jews!” And in chapter eleven I believe it is wise to consider the root of the tree Paul Speaks of is Father God. If all you have ever studied is the New Testament, you should understand that God called Jacob and renamed him Israel and he had twelve sons and that was the beginning of the nation of Israel, God's called people.

From this people, Jesus chose twelve Jewish men and converted them to Christianity. One, was the required traitor, and the other eleven and Paul, the out growth from the Root, did their best to teach lost men and ladies that they can be grafted into the Root, also. If we will take the time to Mine the Scriptures we will learn that this sacrifice we are called to offer to God makes us to “belong” to Him. As objectionable as it is to the average men, many of them in Service, every Sunday Morning, we, the adopted sons of God are the slaves purchased by the suffering of the Son of God.

May God bless you with His truth.