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Apr 14, 2024
Included | Romans 12
His Body, Our Body
Romans 12 is the description of what happens when God’s mercy overflows in a church’s life. Lifelong attitudes change, love becomes genuine, mocking enemies are not met with equal and opposite force but, quite the opposite, with peace and gentleness. Be praying even now for how God will speak uniquely to your small group.
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- Was there an event in your life in which someone showed you mercy? What difference, if any, did that make in your life since then?
- How might a Christian in 2024 offer their body as a ‘living sacrifice’?
- Describe a specific way in which God has 'renewed your mind', maybe changed your thinking or interests or attitudes.
- How has God gifted you to serve? How are you doing at using that gift for the good of others?
- In what specific way is God calling you to ‘active love’. What need(s) are you aware of and how are you moving towards that need?
- Is there a difficult person or situation in your life right now? What would it look like to retaliate in your response to that? And what would it look like to respond "in view of God’s mercy”?
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Paul never recovered from God including the Gentiles in the salvation invitation.
Like some of us, perhaps, he felt like some people should be excluded by virtue of where they were born or how badly they have behaved.
More than included, Paul instructs that former ‘outsiders’ should be treated as precious insiders, treated even better than we would treat ourselves. What would it look like if love came to town?
Human beings need reminders about how to get along, and Christians are no exception. We especially need reminders about how to love each other while we disagree. Paul draws the believers' hearts and minds back to what Jesus has done, and that paves the way for loving each other well through conflict.
How do we live with Jesus in a society that opposes him? Paul tells us to wake up to our resurrection hope. When we do that, loving others and rejecting sin in our own lives makes sense.
All along, we’ve been saying that God’s heart is to see us INCLUDED. That’s why Jesus came, and that’s the subject of Paul’s letter to the Romans. At times, Christians forget God’s radical inclusion of them and go back to the old patterns of competing and comparing. Sadly, that was happening in the Roman Church. Paul has one powerful dose for that sickness.
The resurrection changed everything! The story includes an invitation, a blessing, and a commission for the first witnesses … and for us today.
I love it when people have the gift of communicating clearly. Paul, following Moses in the second half of Deuteronomy 30, does exactly that: communicates clearly. Here’s what it means to become and be a Christian: it means believing the Resurrection and not keeping that good news to yourself! Clear, but not easy! This is something you’ll do for the rest of your life!
