Romans 12 verses 1 and 2 hold a wealth of information when we take a close look at them. It begins “I beseech you”: I, being the apostle Paul writing to the church in Rome. Beseech means to beg, implore, urgently request. “I beseech you therefore,”: Therefore is a conjoining word or hinge-pin that ties what the speaker in about to say back to something he just said, so what was he just saying? Paul has spent the past few chapters talking about how Christians are saved by a genuine love for God and faith in Jesus, not by adherence to a set of rules and behaviors. So he’s saying, “Because God has set us free from the Law (and the condemnation of unbelief) through the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus, I beg you by the mercies of God”: Paul is able to write to them, to impart his knowledge, because God has been merciful to him, “…that you present your bodies a living sacrifice”.
Sacrifice is something that Paul’s original audience knew well. Most religions of the time involved sacrificing something to a deity. Even the Hebrews sacrificed livestock, grain, and wine, to Jehovah. Pagan religions extended their appetites to the children of their adherents and to virgin women. Sacrifice was carried out in a variety of ways: throat slitting, stabbing on an alter, burning alive, but in all cases, sacrificing a life meant death. So this statement of being a living sacrifice would have come as a contradiction. How do you offer yourself as a sacrifice to God AND remain alive? Continue reading “Sacrificed Alive”
Chapter 4 is a pivotal point which addresses faith verses Law. This is important because some Jews who converted to Christianity were insisting that followers of Jesus also keep certain points of the Law of Moses: among these was circumcision. Jews point to Abraham as being the father of their nation and the origination of the rite of circumcision as a sign of righteousness before God. There is also a modern correlation in present-day churches that put ritual ahead of faith. 
Regrets do serve a purpose. When we regret having done something, we learn from it so we can move on and do better. It’s when we decide to pitch a tent in those regrets and live there that they become destructive.
In a world that is filled with an increasing amount of noise, it gets harder and harder to hear what is important.
Do you know that Jesus was not born on December 25th? Or in December at all? Americans tend to think of the birth of Christ as being in winter, envisioning Joseph trudging through snow with Mary on a donkey. But all accounts of the announcement of Jesus’ birth state that there were shepherds abiding in the fields with their flocks. Winter in Israel tends to be cold and rainy. Sometimes it snows. Shepherds would live in the fields with their flocks during the fair-weather months of late spring, summer and early fall, but in winter Jewish shepherds sought shelter for themselves and their flocks. They would not have been abiding in the fields during the time we call December.
