Romans 12:1 - I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
In the Christian life, we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We are not saved by our works. The Gospel is not a list of suggestions or commands. It is an announcement of News, of Good News. It is a proclamation of a Story that has deep meaning for us. And when the Holy Spirit grabs our hearts through that Story - Jesus death, burial, and resurrection to save us for our sins - we are saved and changed.
If you are saved, you know about the battle that is the Christian life. We still have indwelling sin. We are still finite and sinful creatures. We still do things that displease God. Romans 7 is a telling illustration of this internal battle. If you are saved, you now have a principle within you that really hates sin because it is displeasing to God. You want to please God now, not in order to be saved, but simply because you love him. And you want to be done with the things that weigh you down. This battle makes me long for heaven when sin is no longer present in any capacity. What a sigh of relief and joy will come then.
Faith that saves is also faith that sanctifies. If your faith does not lead you over time to increasingly hate your remaining sin, it probably isn't real faith. Our faith may be tested by our fruits. Jesus' pictures in Matthew of those who are not fruitful are quite scary. (Jesus talks about hell a lot more than modern pastors, I think.) The faith that unites us to Jesus is the same faith that sees us through, that sees us growing.
What is the nature of that initial move of faith? It is seeing what Jesus has done for us and believing it, knowing and stepping into the knowledge that he died for me. And I couldn't have saved myself. I am incapable of it because I am a poor sinner. Without God's help I never would have found him or followed him. Saving faith is a faith that trusts in Jesus and despairs of any attempts at self-salvation. And I think sanctification involves that same basic look to Jesus. As we look to Jesus and see what he has done, as we contemplate the grace he has shown us, as we see the true meaning of the cross and empty tomb, we are changed for the better. We fall in love with God more! And from that love we properly bear fruit where we were before fruitless.
I think it does work that way, but I wanted to write this blog post because of a way I have seen myself look at things one-dimensionally. The Gospel is deep and I never want to move beyond it, or set it aside, or feel like I have mastered it. Contemplation of the Gospel is something I should do everyday for the rest of my life. And I expect God will grow me through that.
But what then to do with the law? What to do with all the things God commands? I am not talking, even, about all the Old Testament laws and what the new covenant does to our interpretation of that. I am talking about the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 12 and Ephesians 4. God clearly expects things of us. He expects our obedience. What place do these passages have in the way I look at things now? One way - a correct way I think - of looking at it is like I described above. We are saved by belief in the Gospel and further contemplation of the Gospel melts our hearts so that they become loving. And this love is the fulfilling of the law, which will mean that we more naturally fulfill these commandments out of renewed hearts.
But God works in many ways. He is up to a lot of things. And he can use a lot of different things to great effect in our lives. And far be it from me to think I have figured out all the ways he can press the Gospel into his people...
Let me describe some periods of growth for me...
My walk as a Christian is not uniform. It goes through periods of dryness, periods of great joy, periods of falling back into sin, and periods of refreshing and repentance.
Seasons of dryness and sin are also typically seasons where I have been little in the Word and little in prayer. I think they go together like oil and water. I don't think we are ever sitting still. We are either moving towards God or away from him, either slowly or quickly. But we are not sitting still.
In some of the times of refreshing, I look back at something that sparked it, and it is not always a straightforward contemplation of the Cross. Sometimes it has been that I have read a good biography. (I think Hebrews commends this idea.) I listened to Eric Metaxas' 7 Great Men to my benefit. It had short biographies of people like George Washington and Jackie Robinson and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It wasn't scripture, but my heart was encouraged. Doing this made me want to be a better man, and that desire was fuel for helping me to actually become a better man.
I also have been distinctly helped by the writings of CS Lewis. I mean writings from any genre. I have read Mere Christianity probably three times now, and each time God speaks to me afresh. I am emboldened to not go about my Christian walk out of duty but out of delight. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia and The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters have all taken me into fictional worlds, but they have all, though fiction, helped me to see myself and my own world with fresh eyes.
Sometimes I am refreshed by an extended meditation on a particular verse. My Gospel-lens says I should connect every verse up to the storyline of the Bible, but I am not always smart enough about how to do that. And yet God blesses his Scriptures in my life, in spite of my dim-wittedness.
Sometimes it is through service to others that I am taken out of myself and refreshed and changed. I have experienced it and I know others have too, the sort of buzz that you get off mission work. God is with us as we are pursuing the Great Commission in the world. It is a fight coming off a mission trip to stay doing the right things at home, but that does not take away from the reality of God's presence that you felt in his mission in fellowship with his people.
And that brings me finally to a category that I want to commend to you. I have entitled this blog entry "Promises in Disguise". I want to commend God's commands as promises.
I have had the same experience, and perhaps you have too, of meditating on God's law or commands, on a picture of righteousness, and being changed for the better into truly desiring to be the kind of person who can do those commands. I think Psalm 119 is all about this. The Psalmist delights to set his heart and mind on the commands of God. In today's Gospel-centered subculture in the church, we will say explicitly that we should set our hearts and minds on the Cross and Empty tomb, but it seems foreign to our lips to say that we will set our hearts and minds on the law. Isn't that what Jesus came to save us from?!
But I don't think that is an empty phrase to put on our lips. Or an empty action to take. We should set our hearts and minds on God's good commands.
What does it mean that God has given us commands? The Israelites were proud of the law in a good way. It meant that God had not been silent towards them. It meant that in love he had not left them to their own devices and moral confusion. God's Law will either look precious or repugnant based on what you're looking for. In our modern world, we are often looking for unfettered freedom, in which case the Law is going to look horrible and burdensome and... just let me look the other direction. But if you have come to the point that you really want to do right, you want to be good, you hunger and thirst for true righteousness... you will delight if the one who knows the answer lets you in on the truth and shines a light for you into your moral darkness.
Some of the Israelites took the Law and used it as a stepping ladder to try to fashion their own righteousness and please God by how good they were. But not all of them. Romans 4 talks about the way people were justified in the Old Testament, and it was the same way that they are justified in the New Testament, by faith. The distinction between the Old and New testament dispensations is not so radically different as you may have been taught. People in the Old Testament believed God and it was credited to them as righteousness.
The Ten Commandments were a precious gift to the Israelites. But God didn't give it to them as conditions for getting into heaven. They were more like house rules for a people who had already tasted salvation. The people of Israel had just been rescued from bondage and had been given the law. This type of logic is paralleled in the structure of Romans. God, in Romans 1-11, is gloriously working out a salvation for his people, and it isn't until chapters 12-16 that he gets around to telling them how to behave. God saves and then answers the question of how we are to live.
Why do I say that the commands are promises?
I think that some people have said "God won't ask you to do something that you are unable to do." And I don't exactly agree with that. I think God's moral law rests on our consciences before we are saved, and no one can keep the law. Apart from the Spirit of God we cannot please God. Our righteousness is as filthy rags. What is our condition before Jesus becomes Lord in our lives? No one does good. No one seeks after God. Our hearts are not merely sick, but dead, until the God who resurrected Jesus speaks life into us. To our dead hearts God says obey, and we cannot... until he graciously chooses to wake us up.
But I do want to say just that about the Christian - "God won't ask you to do something that you are unable to do." Of course, we can't do it in our own power. We need the Spirit's help. But as Christians we have the spirit, and we have a heart that is alive to God now. We do sometimes fail, and humility would ask us to admit that we will probably fail again in the future. But stepping up to any task of obedience that God requires, we now can meet that challenge in Christ. There is no temptation that is greater than the power of God to deliver you from it if you throw yourself upon Christ.
God is both glorified in and pleased with our obedience. He gets the glory because it is so obvious that we could not stand obediently apart from his grace and help. And our obedience is where our love is proven. God doesn't want throngs of people who feign love with their mouths but whose lives show that it is a mere moving of the lips.
So then, every time God asks something of us, we can look at it as a promise from him as help to perform it. You belong to the family of God because Jesus has purchased you with his blood. We are family. And the New Testament is filled with house rules because it is loving for God to guide his children.
When Christ died for his people, he was not merely purchasing their forgiveness, but also their sanctification and future glorification. We are being remade into the image of Christ. We are being transformed. Each act of obedience is helping to shape us into the picture of ourselves that God can already clearly see.
Let us treasure all of the Word of God. The Gospel frees us to appreciate the commands of God in new ways. Let us live lives of obedience, to the praise and glory of Jesus. Soli Deo gloria!
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