Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

ROMANS
CHAPTER XII.
ENTIRE SANCTIFICATION.
1. “Therefore I exhort you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living
sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, your reasonable service.” In view of God’s stupendous mercies
evoking the above exclamations of wonder and triumph, he now exhorts all the brethren, both Jews
and Gentiles, to consecrate their bodies to God, a living sacrifice, in contradistinction to the dead
sacrifice which the sinner offers to God, subject to the quickening power of the Holy Ghost. It was
well understood by every Jew that the sacrifice was holy from the time it came in contact with the
altar. Hence, everything we commit to God is sanctified by virtue of His holiness normally imparted
to it. This sanctification is not an extraordinary state of grace, but the normal, legitimate and
“reasonable service” of God’s children.
2. “Be not fashioned after this age.” We are living in Satan’s dark, wicked age of the world. If
we follow its foolish and vivacious fashions we go headlong to ruin. “But be ye transformed by the
renewing of the mind.” All sinners have the carnal mind only; sanctified people the mind of Christ
only; while the unsanctified Christians are all “double-minded” (James 1:4; 4:8), having the mind
of Christ and the carnal mind in a state of irreconcilable conflict, the one or the other destined to
perish. “In order that you prove what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.” When the
glorious transformation above specified takes place, and you are wholly sanctified, you become a
living exemplar of the “good, acceptable, and perfect will of God,” illustrated to light up the world.
The injunction to consecrate our bodies to God has a beautiful significance, from the fact that the
heart or spirit fills the whole body, making every member glorify God. Hence, when the entire body
with all its members, physical and mental, is consecrated to God, it is demonstrative proof that the
immortal soul is fully given up to Him for time and eternity. This chapter is beautifully and lucidly
expository of the sanctified experience throughout. “For I say through the grace which is given to
me to every one who is among you, not to think above that which it behooveth him to think, but to
think soberly, as God has imparted unto each one the measure of faith” Humility is the primary
Christian grace, outshining all others. It keeps you down on the Lord’s bottom at the feet of Jesus,
whence you never can fall unless you imbibe some pride from Satan and go climbing. Then you can
fall and break your neck. The perfect humility involved in the sanctified experience precludes all
pride, its inimical and incompatible antithesis. We see here that faith is the grand Archimedian lever
of spiritual power in every phase of heroic enterprise and gracious availability.
4. “For as we have many members in one body, and all have not the same office,
5. “So also we being many are one body in Christ and members one of another,
6. “And having gifts differing according to the grace given to us: whether prophecy, according
to the proportion of faith.” Precisely as the corporeal members, actuated by five hundred muscles
and a thousand nerves, all have a diversity of office and work, equally dependent upon one another,
and all equally important and honorable in the human organism, so every member of God’s kingdom