The Devotional
Comment:
In raising a family some of us are
good at it and some are so poor at it that we should have stayed single. The responsibility
of marriage and parent-hood is the most serious responsibility of God’s
creation. Even the animal kingdom is instinctively responsible to their
families and survival. Extinction of human life, except for the recorded flood
in Genesis 6 – 8 is in these days a man conceived genocide, and the extinction
of various breeds of animals is driven by the greed of mankind who present
their image/talent to do the devils work. John
8:44 – You are of your
father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the
truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from
his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. As
humans we do not need a written word from Satan to do his evil, we are all
children of the devil. We knowingly are
liars and murderers, we knowingly
are images of our father and know we
are born in this fallen image of our father Adam, Genesis 5:1-4.
Challenge: Romans 12:1-8
Up
to this point in Romans, the apostle has explained our pitiful condition of being
alive in Adam’s race, Romans 5:12-21. In the natural righteousness of Adam all
die, but in the grace gift of God, that is; in the Perfect Righteousness of
Christ is justification, a new life in Christ. Grace provides life while sin
provides death. The apostle speaks clearly of God’s action through time, in the
first two thousand years of ignorance and the following two thousand years of
the Law and the chosen family, the message is clear. This carries us to Romans
12 and the ongoing years of the New Covenant of grace.
In
these verses, the apostle, looking at the church and not you and me as
individuals, (although there is much in these eight verses of scripture of
Romans 12 as personal application). The apostle is addressing church leadership
to present the body of Christ as a living sacrifice, a body of New Testament
believers as a holy and righteous body of saints (children and recipients of
God’s grace). Note that Romans 12:3-8 these words are teaching us as a body of
saints to utilize our spiritual gifts in the process of being a living
sacrifice.
Also,
we are to be instructed by these same gifts of the Spirit to remove our lives
from the world’s way of death and allow God through the Word and the Spirit to
renew our minds (individually) in order that the church as a whole body can
prove to the world around what God considers good and acceptable and perfect.
God’s will is that His church should be alive in Christ’s Righteousness. This Spiritual
ability of each child of God is the only acceptable service that the children of
the New Covenant can do that is pleasing to God. God calls this service a
sacrifice of living holiness or abiding in Christ’s Righteousness – Romans
3:26.
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