Nielsen’s Nook

The Mercies of God as the Basis for Sanctification and Paul’s Urging

Paul had written to the church at Rome. That church had some life in it in its own right. He was hashing out some of the main points of the Gospel for them and he turns to urge these good Christian people towards their created purpose. In the language of the Westminster Confession we might summarize this call or urging the Apostle Paul makes as, “I urge you to be sanctified in body and mind for that is the most human thing you can do!”

But if we’re not careful, if we don’t take the context and what has come before Romans 12:1-2 in to consideration, we might miss the very basis by which Paul expects Christians to grow in grace in demonstrating more clearly the likeness of God in greater fellowship with Him.

There are two indicators in the passage that I want you to recognize. The first and most obvious is the word translated “therefore”. That clues us in that Paul’s assertions about mind-body sanctification are predicated upon or assume more basic building blocks of faith.

The second indicator is the phrase translated “by the mercies of God.” The word here for “mercies” or “compassions” is a word unique to Paul excepting one occurrence in the Epistle to the Hebrews and it points us back to the ideas in the previous chapters of the Epistle. There we find that God was not content to give everyone over to the lusts of their flesh to defile their bodies and demonstrate their minds as failed.

God in his mercies was pleased to change the very desire structure of our hearts. In binding us to Christ by faith alone we have been justified as Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

In my study of Romans 12:1-2, the consideration of sanctification of course is at the fore. I was encouraged by what A. A. Hodge had written in his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. “Regeneration,” Hodge writes, “is the commencement of sanctification, and sanctification is the completion of the work commenced in regeneration.” Hodge reminds us that sanctification is a “gracious work of God” in which the Holy Spirit applies “the grace secured through the mediation of the Son” by distinctly inward and outward means. ¹

Faith of course is the inward means of sanctification, “the organ of our union with Christ and fellowship with his Spirit.” ²

The outward means of sanctification are four according to Hodge:

1. The revealed truth in the inspired scriptures.
2. The sacraments.
3. Prayer
4. The gracious discipline of God’s providence

Hodge reminds us that sanctification is the believer’s participation with the work of the Holy Spirit to transform her or him. In Hodge’s own words:

It must be remembered that while the subject is passive with respect to that divine act of grace whereby he is regenerated, after he is regenerated he cooperates with the Holy Ghost in the work of sanctification. The Holy Ghost gives the grace, and prompts and directs in its exercise, and the soul exercises it. Thus, while sanctification is a grace, it is also a duty; and the soul is both bound and encouraged to use with diligence, in dependence upon the Holy Spirit, all the means for its spiritual renovation, and to form those habits of resisting evil and of right action in which sanctification so largely consists. ³

One of the most clear pictures of this participation with God in his work with us is seen in the Lord’s Supper. This is in no way to lift the Lord’s Supper over the Word, as I agree with Hodge’s priority in the list above. But it is to say that when Christ presents himself to us in the Bread and Wine, he is with his people in a way that is like no other in this age between the Advents. In partaking of Christ in the Eucharist we do show forth his death we in worthy reception of the elements by faith are “made partakers of his body and blood, with all his benefits, to [our] spiritual nourishment and growth in grace.” ⁴

The word Eucharist, historically used in reference to the Lord’s Supper, is the English cognate from the Greek εὐχαριστία (eucharistia) meaning thanksgiving or thankfulness. The Eucharist then has equity and power today for us as Reformed Christians. The Eucharist is a taste of glory to come, for he who has justified his people, will glorify them and the only way between justification and glorification is through the country of sanctification on the Road Christ. The Eucharist is not merely a picture reminding us of a time in which Jesus died for our sins, but is the resurrected and exalted Christ giving himself to us now to strengthen and walk with us in the midst of our sanctification, our great existential battle with sin. That is immeasurably much to be thankful for.

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¹ A.A. Hodge et al., The Confession of Faith : With Questions for Theological Students and Bible Classes (With an appendix on Presbyterianism by Charles Hodge. Index created by Christian Classics Foundation.;, electronic ed. based on the 1992 Banner of Truth reprint.; Simpsonville SC: Christian Classics Foundation, 1996), 195.

²Ibid.

³Ibid., 196.

⁴Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 96.

When Paul pens Romans 12:1-2, he has in mind the unspeakable, immeasurable wonder of what is ours in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the man that has already experienced resurrection and brings that life giving purpose from the future into this world here and now.

We who are in Christ, who is himself the image of God in whom the likeness of God dwells with perfect fellowship, are being remade in our whole person to fulfill the purpose of God in all that we are, in both mind and body. We, who have demonstrated ourselves worthy of death, are finding that Christ has transcended death, swallowed it whole and now lives in us to root out the sticky residue that the realm of death has left behind in us.

It is out of this great flood of divine compassion that Paul writes:

¹ Therefore, I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, through the compassions of God to present your bodies as sacrifices living, holy and acceptable to God as your spiritual service. ² Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind in order that you might prove what the will of God is, the good and acceptable and telic. (Rom 12:1-2, author’s translation)

God’s will is good, acceptable and telic. There is really not a great English word to translate what is usually rendered “perfect” from the Greek. Perfection in the biblical sense, has to do with doing everything according to design, according to the purpose for which a thing was created.

These verses are the answering echo, the antithesis of what he wrote in the first chapter of this Epistle. There he gave us a warning and condemnation, that though we were created as the image of God to demonstrate the likeness of God while walking in fellowship with Him, all of humanity without distinction (viz. between Jew and Gentile) has proven itself otherwise.

We have proven ourselves otherwise. Like a Gecko’s tail that has been discharged, humanity - mind and body - writhes twitching, dislocated from our true identity. Knowing God apart from Christ, we too had exchanged the glory of God for images fashioned after our own corrupted imaginations. In lieu of this, Paul writes these very sobering words:

God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts for the purpose of dishonoring their bodies among themselves … since they did not see fit to have a true knowledge of God, he gave them over to a failed mind. (Rom 1:24,28, author’s translation)

So I hope you can see that in both the beginning of the Epistle and here in the beginning of the end of it Paul is concerned with the purpose of humanity as whole persons, body and mind, before God on this earth.

The offering of our bodies to God as spiritual acts of worship stands over against the dishonoring of our bodies.

The renewal of our minds in Christ demonstrates minds that no longer operate in contradiction to the purpose for which they were created, but now in Christ strive to do those things that prove God’s purpose for human beings.

Jesus has redeemed us. He renews us, mind and body, that we as the image of God, grow up in his likeness, demonstrating our fellowship with him, his goodness, pleasure and perfection (telos).

There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies blow. [1]

If you’re like me when you read just those two lines of poetry you probably spent as much energy if not more trying to fight off ridiculous images of flowers growing out of the pores of a woman’s face as you did trying to imagine what Thomas Campion was actually describing in his poem, There Is A Garden in Her Face.

Dorothy Sayers, a colleague of C. S. Lewis, quotes Campion in making the point that the modern day person generally has great difficulty with poetry, figures and symbols. We don’t like them because they ask more of us than we have the faculties to appreciate. We tend to like the things that can be measured and then exhausted; yet, poets and prophets have given us figures and symbols that move us beyond ourselves - to something beyond the maximum.

This seems to be true in the way we approach church and worship, in the way we order our lives, in the way we think about happiness and fulfillment, and particularly in the way we think of and relate to Jesus, our Lord. Writing to those who misunderstood the figures in Dante’s Paradiso, his work on Heaven, Sayers writes:

… one of the results of having substituted a philosophy of becoming for a philosophy of being is that the very notion of an achieved happiness has become not merely inconceivable but actually repugnant to us. Timelessness, or eternity, like Heaven itself, passes man’s understanding.2]

What Sayers writes about Paridiso applies to our approach to Romans 12:1-2 with its figures and symbols. In lusting after the measurable and exhaustible we have begun to think of the Christian faith in such terms. We have reduced Christianity down to mere propositions and steps and functions. The consequence is that the way we think about God, Christ, his Cross and even ourselves has become frozen still, comatose, even demonstrating a spiritual rigormortis of sorts.

The Pattern of Eternal Irruption into Paul’s Life

Many of us come to the Apostle Paul’s writings and we resonate with the structure of his argumentation. But let us not forget that Paul wrote as an Apostle not because he studied hard enough or tried harder than anybody else, but because God in His mysterious providence was pleased to irrupt into the Apostle Paul’s life and change everything here and now with a view towards eternity.

We are given that paradigm at the beginning of his Epistle to the Romans where Paul reminds us that he is a servant of Jesus set apart for the gospel of God

… concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh ⁴ and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, (Rom 1:3-4, NRSV)

God had come to earth in the flesh of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. In his perfect human life, Jesus lifted his new humanity to a place so great that sinners clutching to our failed depravity cannot imagine or measure or exhaust it. He has lifted us back to a place of integration and fellowship with God in himself.

Jesus Christ, Paul reminds us, was declared with power to be the Son of God on account of his resurrection from the dead, which demonstrated his life before the grave as perfect.

But resurrections don’t happen all the time do they? Scripture teaches us that all but a few resurrections will happen at the end of time, when Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, will judge the living and the dead.

Paul is telling us that something of the future has broken into the past and changed everything.

[1] Campion, Thomas. Campion’s Works. Percival Vivian, Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. 178. Quoted in Dorothy L. Sayers “Introduction” to Dante’s Paradiso, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 28.
[2] Sayers, 28.

[Humanity] had a major liberty which consists in a total love conformity of the will to God.  This was man’s glory, as it was his shame, for he was the broken rung in the ladder of created being…. His work had to be redeemed by being incorporated into the Humanity of the Incarnate Godhead.  The Incarnation is a new glory given to mankind; but that glory belongs to the act of God and not to the nature of man.

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Dorothy L. Sayers in the Introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy III: Paradise, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 26.

¹ Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, through the compassion [a] of God to present your bodies as sacrifices living, holy and acceptable to God as your spiritual service. ² Do not be conformed [b] to this age, but be transformed [c] by the renewing [d] of the mind in order that you might discern what the will of God is, the good and acceptable and telic. [e]