The Power of Submission
Paul writes to the church in Rome to be submissive to the governing authorities. When we hear that, we seem to immediately question when it’s acceptable for us to not be submissive. Although there is a time to be disobedient, Paul calls us to submit to our nations leaders because God has placed them in their positions. God is the one who gives our leaders their authority and Paul even goes so far to say that they are God’s servants—even the ones that we disagree with.
Submission to Authority
Paul writes to the church in Rome to be submissive to the governing authorities. When we hear that, we seem to immediately question when it’s acceptable for us to not be submissive. Although there is a time to be disobedient, Paul calls us to submit to our nations leaders because God has placed them in their positions. God is the one who gives our leaders their authority and Paul even goes so far to say that they are God’s servants—even the ones that we disagree with.
Love Friends and Bless Enemies
Paul has given us 11 chapters of deep theology. The only reasonable, worshipful response is offering ourselves as worship and to be transformed by God. Then, he tells us that this transformation is displayed in our humble living together as a body in love. Now we get to see what that love looks like. It’s genuine. It’s sincere. It’s without hypocrisy. It hates anything that threatens the beloved. It makes no caveats. It makes no distinction between worthy and unworthy of its affection. It makes no distinction between insiders and outsiders. This is a love that we can’t make on our own. This is a love that we can only live and display having seen it and experienced it. This is the love that we see in a Father sacrificing His Son and a Son dying willingly for rebels.
Compelled to Love
“Let love be genuine.” The mercies of God compel us to love each other sincerely to the glory of God. This kind of love clings to all that is good, rejecting all that is evil. This kind of love shows brotherly devotion and honors others over oneself. This kind of love serves, encourages, and gives, desiring to glorify God, serving Him and giving to Him. This kind of love makes no distinction: by the mercies of God, no one is rejected as an enemy—just as God’s love was given to us while we were yet sinners, so we love even those who would otherwise be the “enemy” or the “other.”
Gifts of Grace
This passage is all about showing us the people and the church that we have been longing to be: a church unified and diverse. We are unified as one body in our humility, deferring to others and thinking of Christ and the freedom He gives us to live rather than looking to ourselves and the pride and despair our comparisons bring. We are diverse as a body with many members in the vast giftings that God has bestowed to each of us to serve and uplift our body and our city, knowing that humility frees us from needing to serve ourselves or to judge ourselves based on which gifts we have or don’t have.
Transformation
After 11 chapters of Romans we have a transition. “Therefore” … that word changes everything! We so often live our lives as if all that Paul has preached in Romans 1-11 is followed by “But…” “You’re saved by grace and faith as a work of God, but be transformed and don’t conform. But it says “Therefore”! Because all of what is said in Romans 1-11 is true, we can be transformed! Present our bodies as a holy and acceptable sacrifice? We never could! But the message of Romans thus far is that Jesus’ sacrifice is sufficient for us. We can offer ourselves to God because our identity is in Christ and Christ’s sacrifice is acceptable to God.
Transformation
The call Paul makes on the lives of Christians is that they be wholly sacrificed to God. Our tendency is to hold on to parts of our selves that we don’t want to lay down before our Father. But Paul appeals to our excuses and hesitations to make such a drastic sacrifice, by asking us to look upon the mercies of God, to remember Christ and His sacrifice for us. The spiritual, true, and reasonable outpouring of our lives practically in light of God’s mercy towards us is two-fold: to not be conformed to the world and what it worships and to be transformed by God. As we choose to lay down our lives before God and experience and engage in the transformation that the Gospel promises, we will be made holy and experience the discernment of God’s will.