¹ Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.

Therefore”—the most classic of biblical segues, this transition from what is the truth, to what difference it should make in our lives, is absolutely pivotal. The letter to the Romans turns on this major fulcrum. All commentators recognize the shift in emphasis and note also the relationship between the two.

If it is true that justification comes from God by His grace and mercy through faith (and indeed, it is true), then our lives should be transformed. While in many places in Scripture we are taught that it is the Lord who enables us (e.g. Phil 4:13), Paul here challenges us on the human side of the equation. Having already established that works by human effort play no role in our justification and salvation (that is the major point of Romans 1-11), there is still a role for human effort. We have a responsibility to act on what we now know to be the truth. The word “therefore” signals that what follows is the logical conclusion of what has gone before. It is the ultimate cause and effect, the relationship between truth and behavior. “If this is true, then that must follow.”

There is an urgent need to respond to the mercies of God, and on that basis Paul addresses his readers, his fellow vessels of mercy (Rom 9:23-24). Notice he reaches across the Jew-Gentile divide by addressing his largely Gentile readers as “brethren.” He calls them (and therefore us) to two things: complete sacrifice to God (Rom 12:1) and complete conformity to God’s will (Rom 12:2).

Some, on an erroneous understanding of the aorist tense of the Greek word used, assert that the presenting of ourselves spoken of in this verse is a one-time action. However, the aorist tense, while allowing for a one-time action, does not definitively indicate a “once-for-all” action. That determination must come from the contextual factors. In fact, the parallel commitments to “not be conformed” and “be transformed” are present imperatives in the Greek, which indicate ongoing actions, suggesting that presenting our bodies as a sacrifice is not a singular, one-time event. Greek scholar Dan Wallace writes, “The aorist tense presents an occurrence in summary, viewed as a whole from the outside.” The imagery of sacrifice is like a snapshot taken from a movie. At any place in the film, the image of sacrifice shines through. So a Christian’s life at every moment should reflect a sacrifice to God.

Lord, that is my desire—to commit my entire life as an act of sacrifice to You. And I want to do this as a way of life.