Eleven chapters of argument arrive at one word, "therefore." Everything Paul has said about sin, faith, grace, and mercy toward a hardened Israel now presses toward a response. 1"I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." Mercy already given makes some answer necessary.
The picture behind "present" comes from the temple. A worshiper led an animal to the altar and handed it over, and from that moment it belonged to God. Paul takes the ancient picture and does something startling with it. The sacrifice he describes is living. The animal on the altar was alive up to the knife, and the Christian's offering stays alive the whole time, given in how the body is used every day it keeps breathing. The same body Romans has described as sin's instrument now becomes the instrument of holiness.
Paul calls this "spiritual worship." The Greek word behind "spiritual" is related to our word "logic," worship that makes sense, the kind a mind can reason its way into once it understands what God has done.
Then the sentence that shapes the passage. 2"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." Two Greek verbs sit behind those two English ones, and they describe two kinds of change. The first pictures pressure from outside, a mold pressing its shape onto something that did not choose it. The second is the word that gives us "metamorphosis," the change a caterpillar undergoes, a shift in the thing's nature. One is imposed and the other grows from within.
That renewal has a purpose. God's will, as Paul tells it, is something a renewed mind comes to recognize, as a trained ear recognizes a false note, because the mind itself has been remade to want what God wants.
Paul then turns at once from the inner life to the shared one, because a renewed mind never stays private. 3"to think with sober judgment." Everyone finds it easy to believe they are the most significant person in the room. Grace makes sober judgment possible, seeing yourself accurately in place of grandly.
That accurate self-estimate leads straight into the body. 4"as in one body we have many members." No hand has ever asked to become the whole body. No single gift was ever meant to stand alone. Paul's list, prophecy, service, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, mercy, is an inventory of one grace distributed differently, all serving the same body.
Mercy holds the passage together. It began with mercy, "by the mercies of God," and it ends with mercy exercised, 8"the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness." The same mercy that justified sinners in chapter 3 and grafted in wild branches in chapter 11 is the mercy a transformed mind learns to give away cheerfully, as its most natural work.
Ask what your body did today that was an offering and what was a habit. Ask which gift you have that the body around you is waiting for.
Prayer
Father, thank you for the mercies that make this appeal possible. Renew our minds where the world has pressed its shape onto us unnoticed. Teach us to think of ourselves soberly, to see the gifts you have given us and each other as one grace in many members, and to use them with the cheerfulness you have shown us. In Jesus' name, amen.