Living in the Spirit
June 26, 2014
Scripture Reading: Romans 6:12-23
Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. — Romans 6:12-14
On the evening news yesterday, I watched a 22 year old born with spina bifida and some resulting paralysis do hair raising flips and jumps on a skate board track in his wheel chair. He was encouraging children with similar challenges to work at being all that they can be. That is exactly what Paul is saying to those of us who claim to be the followers of Jesus Christ. While our limitations are not as obvious as those of one who is physically paralyzed, they can be disabling.
The gospels tell us stories of people that Jesus healed who were blind, paralyzed, had leprosy, were out of their minds, or were gravely ill. In those stories the malady was not necessarily the physical or mental problem. Jesus returned each of these persons to wholeness.
Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem Idylls of the King talks about being surrounded in a world that seemed to have been created by a lesser god.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,*
When we choose to serve the lesser gods that surround us, we separate ourselves from the God of All Creation and that results in our not fully being the person God created us to be. Society, the Christian faith actually, can sometimes try to isolate our separation from God into nice little categories of activities in which most of us would never, ever be involved. We all need to look a little closer to home and see the lesser gods that all of us worship from time to time, like greed and pride and jealousy, and with God’s help rechanneled that energy toward loving God and our neighbors—make ourselves instruments of righteousness.
Prayer: God, make us instrument of righteousness and forgive us when we are self-righteous. Amen.
All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.