Romans 12

Read Romans 12.

Once we turn the page into Romans 12, the letter becomes easier because now Paul is talking directly to Christians about what the Christian life should look like. He supplants Israel’s old sacrificial system with an oxymoron: “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices.” But a sacrifice dies… That’s what a sacrifice does. We die to sin and evil desires (6:11) but we are definitely alive in the Spirit (8:4ff.)
And he makes this comment, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (12:2). I love that statement! One of the necessary tasks for the Christian is to see clearly the ways in which following Jesus, giving complete allegiance to Jesus, means having to pull away from the world, to recognize where the world demands different allegiances.
Paul gives examples. Take humility: the world encourages us to think of ourselves first, but Paul says that our new life means not thinking too highly of ourselves. The “I want” of the old nature is replaced by the Spirit’s “what do you need?” The whole second half of the chapter is a manifesto of what it means to live counterculturally, in step with the Spirit but out of step with the world. No tribalism, no personal autonomy, nothing but love for others inside the fellowship and outside it.
In a sense, this was how Israel was supposed to live—in the words of a the old King James translation, as a peculiar people. Israel was distinct in terms of how they marked time, what they ate, how they kept themselves from impurity. Christ’s people are set apart by their ethic of love, eschewing old distinctions, old animosities, old values.
It’s a beautiful thing, this new way of life. Imagine what effect if Christians every where lived up to this non-conforming vision of a transformed life!