What does a person possess in and of them self? There is the vestige of God’s image, though now fallen and corrupted. There is the capacity for ‘good’ insofar as this world calls good the things which are beneficial and ostensibly selfless. This good of the image of God; it is the ability to act selflessly and the ability to build up another. How then does Paul say that in him there is no good thing? But he adds “that is, in my flesh.”

The flesh never wants to do anything selfless; the flesh wants what makes the flesh feel good. So truly, in the flesh dwells no good thing. But yet in the created will of humanity there is what we call goodness. There is compassion, sacrifice, mercy, and other virtues that remain in people because of the image of God. But none of these virtues can raise anyone from the dead.

People are dead in their sins, “in the uncircumcision” of their hearts. That means that they are not ‘set apart,’ and though they do things which are good, yet the desires and inclinations of the heart are toward those things which accommodate the flesh because of the sin that is in them from the day Adam sinned and because every sin committed since their birth strengthens those fleshly inclinations. The desires which draw all people away from salvation that is offered in Christ are the ‘uncircumcision of the heart.’

It is for this reason that all must depend on grace. Grace is not a wrapped package that is given and subsequently abides in a person. No, saving grace exists solely in God, who exudes grace, if you will, giving favor upon those who have faith in the life that was bought by the blood of Christ.

Nor is this faith a wrapped gift that a person can possess of them self after it has been given. All people have some sort of faith. There are many faiths, for every individual has the propensity for faith in something beyond one’s self. The strength of faith depends in no way on the individual having faith, but rather on the strength of the object of one’s faith. If the strength of one’s faith depends on the individual, then the faith is worthless, for though it may produce good works from time to time, it ultimately depends on a person who is always burdened with the flesh, which blindly seeks not the object of faith, but one’s own pleasure.

Rather, faith that saves must be faith in the savior. Though all have some sort of faith, the only faith that saves is that which has as its object the one who has the power to kill the flesh and raise the body up again to be a glorious body. This faith conquers the flesh because it is faith in the sin- and flesh-conqueror. This faith can only be given and sustained by the one who is the author of life and salvation and who calls us out of darkness of serving ourselves in the flesh and into the light of grace, flowing from the father to all who believe.

In Romans 12:1 the Apostle Paul says: “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.” There is a curious use here of the physical body as a spiritual sacrifice. This use would not be so curious in the Old Covenant as there are many physical sacrifices to be found in the law. But in the teachings on the New Covenant we need to stop and think about what exactly he means; it’s not quite as obvious as the symbolism of slaying an innocent lamb for sins.

When we come together as the body of Christ in a worship service we sing and listen to the Word taught and fellowship. This is called worship. The word used in the verse quoted above for ‘spiritual’ is ‘logikhn’;Sometimes this word can mean ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’. In any case it is dealing with the nonphysical reality of a concept, that is, the idea of it, the perfect idea of it in it’s essence. So in this case we speak of worship, or service; words used in the context of the priest’s service in the temple, and in Paul’s writings, of the service that believers render to God as a living priesthood. So the perfect idea of worship in its essence is spiritual. One may also argue that ‘divine’ is a good word to use. And indeed, many Christian traditions have called the liturgy the “divine service”.

What Paul is speaking of then, is a worship that is a service, like that of a priest who is a ‘slave’ of sorts to God, and it is a service that is very real in its spiritual significance. It is of the essence of what worship is all about; that is the meaning of ‘logikhn’: it is of the essence.

But how does one go about doing this? “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” So this is not a mindless sacrifice, as if we are causing ourselves to suffer just for the sake of being a sacrifice. Rather, we are to make this sacrifice of ourselves, a true spiritual and divine sacrifice, by a radical change in the way that we think. The sacrifice is not a destruction, but a transformation.

Our paradigm for this is of course the cross, where Jesus both died and rose again as a complete, perfect and acceptable sacrifice to God on our behalf. He was not destroyed

The human is by nature of a contingent will.

Because humanity is contingent, there is a finite number of possible scenarios in which they can exist. Therefore their choices are limited to pre-established, finite possibilities. It is from these pre-established dispositions that they ‘choose’ with the will. Because they are restricted and thus choose according to a certain existential pre-determination, their context and possibility of choice is of a certain exclusive character. This exclusive character is their nature. Therefore what a person chooses is indeed of themself, and what is of themself is of their nature and therefore exclusive. In this way any choice excludes the other possibilities within their nature and leaves them with a more restricted nature than before: slavery to sin.

In God all things are possible and the choice to continue to exist in this possibility is the choice to not choose anything but what is already given in God. When humanity chose something finite which was not already given, they chose necessarily to have an exclusive nature whose character was that without the infinite possibility of God’s provision, i.e., death necessarily. So the choices now available to the will are exclusive to death.

The solution of Christ is that he shares of the non-contingent life of God; the first premise does not apply. Though he took on contingent flesh, dependent on his father also spiritually, althewhile he remained non-contingent God. He has a nature whose exclusive character is God and so is the only one able to give to the contingent person God’s life by exchanging a nature exclusive to death for the nature exclusive to life as the non-contingent son of God in contingent humanity.

When a person receives this life of God by faith in Jesus they have all the possibilities that are in the infinite God, with infinity defined as God’s will; and they rest in them, not grabbing one or the other, but trusting in him who provides all. So then they are free and have a freedom in regards to all things, yet the very joy of that freedom is essentially in the rest and not in the exercise of choice (which would in fact leave the person in a more exclusive position) but in the exercise of submission to the non-contingent will of God.