An Embodied Faith (Rom 12:1-2)
By: Curtis Baker
Recently I have been reading the Lord of the Rings. This has kept my mind filled with the thoughts of forests and mountains and rivers, along with a sense of adventure that one develops as you follow Frodo and his circle of companions on their harrowing quest. I can easily see a parallel between their adventure and our quest to study through Romans. Romans is long, the path is winding, and sometimes a person feels as if they might be conquered before reaching its promised end. In Romans 1-3 we were taken through the low dark valleys of sin; in chapters 4-8 we were led to the highest mountain in order to take in the spectacular view of God’s eternal purposes; and in chapters 9-11 we cut our way through the thickest forest of the practicalities of this doctrine. Now, having the most difficult parts of our journey behind us, we are ready to come out on the plain to put all the aspects of the adventure together in a coherent way.
All this begins with Paul’s use of the word “Therefore” at the beginning of chapter 12. This alerts us to the fact that Paul is giving his readers the heads-up that what he is about to say is based on everything that we have learned in Romans so far. It has everything to do with what Paul has said about sin, justification, the purpose of creation, and the role of Israel and the Gentiles within that creation. Based on all of that, here is Paul’s admonition: We are to offer our “bodies” as living sacrifices.
Isn’t it interesting that Paul speaks of our bodies? In our own age, not a lot of emphasis is put upon our bodies. Too often, our bodies are seen as the necessarily evil things that carry our spirit, which is generally taken to be the best and purest part of man. The body is often looked at as if it is a secondary thing in our life, and in some extreme circumstances people think that what we do with our body is of little consequence, as long as our “spirit” stays pure. They also assume that salvation will mean setting our spirits free from our body. There are half-truths contained in all of these statements, but we would be mistaken to think that our bodies are an afterthought to our life. What we do with our body matters very much to whom and what we become as a person. Paul shows here in Romans that our bodies are right in the middle of the application of his teaching.
For those who are going to submit to the Christian faith, this is an important point to take note of. The Christian faith is more than just a matter of intellectual belief in certain ideas or facts. It is more than believing that there is a God, and that Jesus was a real man who also happened to be the Son of God. It is more than believing that Jesus is the route to salvation, even though all of these things we have mentioned are true. If the body is not engaged, being taught by our mind and with the help of the grace of God, our life (not to mention our mind) suffers terribly.
This is why the first act of a believer in Christ is to submit to the bodily act of being baptized by someone else. Because we are bodily creatures, we need more than just a mental assent to a series of facts. We need a bodily reality to make it concrete for us. In the act of baptism we allow someone to take our body into their hands, lower it in the water, and literally raise us to new life. Paul has already argued in Romans 6 that this process represents a kind of dying and coming back to life. The part of us that dies is the part that is submersed below the water. The part of us that is raised out of the water is the new life Christ endows upon us as resurrected beings. And guess what? The resurrection that takes place in baptism is only the first sign toward the greater and actual bodily resurrection that will take place for us on the day of judgment. We were made with bodies; our life in the world to come will be an embodied existence. No wonder as Paul leads us out of the thick woods of chapters 9-11 he reminds us that “bodily sacrifice” is our “logical” form of worship (Rom 12:1). God gave you a body. Ultimately it belongs to God. So now that you know what God is up to in the world, give God your body in return. According to Paul, this is the only logical response to the adventure we are on.
(Don’t forget to join me for A Message From the Heart radio program Sunday evening at 8:00pm on KJAK 92.7FM, or streaming live at www.kjak.com)
(curtisbaker@hotmail.com)
Write to: P.O. Box 157, Slaton, TX 79364
