Changed (P 5)

Romans chapter 12 is full of instructions on the practical aspects of living the Christian life. The first issue that Paul deals with is the issue of “worship.” Worship, for the Gentile Christians, as for the Old Testament Israelites, has a priority in our lives.

We need to notice the dispensational emphasis of Romans 12:1. When Paul writes, “I beseech you by the mercies of God,” he’s not referring to the mercy of the Lord in general, but to the specific mercy that he has just written about in the previous chapter.

Romans 11:30, 31 “For as you (Gentiles) were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their (Israel’s) disobedience, even so these (the Jews) also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you they also may obtain mercy.”

Here Paul describes the changing of the dispensations. In previous times Israel had fellowship with God while the Gentiles were afar off, without God and without hope in the world. Yet now, because of Israel’s disobedience, the Gentiles have obtained mercy. The Messiah had come to Israel in fulfillment of the promises made to their fathers, but the people of Israel had rejected Him and crucified Him. Still Jesus prayed, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” The early chapters of the Book of Acts reveal how the Holy Spirit preached forgiveness to Israel, if they would repent and believe in their risen and ascended Messiah. But again Israel was disobedient, persecuting the apostles and Messianic believers, and finally stoning Stephen, a man filled with the Holy Spirit.

Because of Israel’s disobedience, God “cast them away” in Romans 11:15 and raised up a new apostle, Paul, the leader of Israel’s disobedience saved by pure grace, and revealed to him, “the dispensation of the grace of God” in Ephesians 3:1, 2. Because of Israel’s disobedience, mercy went to the Gentiles, but because of the mercy shown to the Gentiles, the Jew also now may receive mercy and be saved by the grace of God through faith in the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul is writing Chapter 12 in the light of the dispensational change that the Lord had revealed to him. The Gentiles who were once far off, not allowed to enter any further than the “vestibule” of the temple, now saved by grace, are invited to worship God. But note carefully how they were to worship the Lord. Not by imitating Israel’s worship, not by building a temple, not even by going to the temple in Jerusalem (it was still standing and operating when Paul wrote this letter to the Romans), but by “presenting your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable worship.”

There was a profound change in God’s plan for acceptable worship. It once required all those complicated requirements for acceptable worship: a temple building, with furniture and relics and a priesthood and an altar and animal sacrifices according to the calendar, but now all that is changed. God no longer has a temple building of stone and wood, but in this new dispensation of the grace of God, the temple of God is the believer’s body!

“Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you” (1 Cor. 6:19).

That is just the beginning of the changes. Today we worship God, not by going to a building (after all, we are God’s building), making use of certain furniture, and the appropriate personnel, and observing a certain ritual; our worship is to present our bodies a living sacrifice. When Paul writes, “which is your reasonable service,” we should underline the word “your.” Israel’s acceptable worship was there at the temple, doing the prescribed ritual, but Paul writes, “YOUR worship, the worship God had commanded from you Gentiles, you members of the Body of Christ, YOUR worship is to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”