Romans Chapter 6 cont'd
No longer turn over your human powers to become weapons of unrighteousness and thereby continue in sin. Rather, consciously and deliberately surrender your powers of both mind and body to God and he will possess and use them as weapons in his powerful hands for his noble purposes. After all, you are alive for his pleasure.
Comments:
If we read Romans 6-7 in too much of a "surface-y" way, it is easy to get the impression that Paul tagged the human body as the source of our moral/spiritual struggles. The thought that the body and its needs and drives are intrinsically evil and opposed to spirituality is ancient, powerful, popular and very damaging to biblical spirituality...as though we'd be better off to escape this "prison of the soul". It is also quite "natural" for us to think this way and this is why gnosticism and the dualism that undergirds it are regularly cropping up in their various forms throughout history within religious movements (including the church world--and especially in "revivalistic" environments). Our physical drives are an "easy target" for angry, ambitious or bored preachers and false guilt is powerful lever that can be, and has been, used to pressure people into responding extravagantly to their persuasive appeals for surrender, service, time or money. (We have enough real guilt to deal with in our lives...who needs false guilt thrown in to confuse the issue?!)
For years I have been laboring to help believers acquire a healthy and scriptural view of the body and how it's proper use fits in to the overall process of becoming more like Jesus Christ (who, even still, has a body himself). Through a "redemptive" lens, we can overcome any past intimidation that our bodily drives/passions held over us and come to see how the body is actually our friend, not our enemy, in sanctification. As Paul implies above, it's members can and must become "weapons" of righteousness instead of "weapons" of unrighteousness.
More to say....
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