Present your Bodies (Part 2)
Until you get that glorified body, God wants your current one! What?? Why? What would God want with this weak, corrupt, vile, sinful body? The aim of this little study is to find this out.
Rom.12:1-2 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. (2) 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.
If you have read, understood, and received what Paul has taught you in the first 11 chapters of Romans, concerning God’s righteous wrath and what He did through Jesus Christ to justify you and quicken your spirit, you will know that the only proper, and personal response you can make to His grace and love, is to present your body as a living sacrifice to God. But what good is our flesh body to God? Paul, in Romans 3 to 8, has informed you that your flesh is corrupt and sinful and that God’s work to save you was not achieved in your flesh, but judicially in His Son. So, why is Paul appealing to you to give God your futile body? Well God has a use for it, and it is for the glory of His Son.
We cannot live unto God with this flesh body. It cannot function the way God intended! If we hold onto this dead vessel, it will never be worth anything. It will never be able to serve any useful function for God. It is temporal and wasting away every day. However, if we present it to God, He can quicken it from within and make it valuable and functional for His purposes. God has an incredible and worthy use for it.
2Cor.4:7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.
The knowledge and acceptance of this brings us to the reason for Paul writing to us the following appeal.
Reckon yourselves dead
Rom.6:11 Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
“To reckon.” This is a mindset. You recognize it. You count it as true and determine in yourself that you are dead to sin and alive unto God. It does not mean you’re not going to sin. It’s a mind and an attitude we ought to have. We must come to truly understand what it means that we are dead to sin. In other words, what is happening inside us, what is God going to do in this dead body, why is it so valuable to Him?
Rom 8:10 And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
You can reckon your body is dead, but what exactly does this mean?
Your body is dead because of sin, referring to the spiritual (and physical) consequences of sin and separation from the life of God. The flesh is subject to corrupt passions and desires and has none of the elements of spiritual life. However, through the cross work of Christ, your body, by faith, is crucified with Christ, Rom.6:6; Gal.5:24, putting to death the sin state in you, allowing for the Spirit of God to dwell in you and bringing your body into a new state that can be used by God.
Rom.6:4 Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life [spirit].
God’s use for your body is to fill it with newness of life. This vessel of clay you inhabit is the container that can hold the new spirit-life of His Son. Paul so vividly writes about this to the Galatians when he says,
Gal.2:20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
So, now you know that God wants to glorify His Son in your body, but now you need to learn how God plans to do this. This is the next step we will deal with in this study about, ‘presenting your body’ to God.
