When I was with a friend once driving through the countryside, we passed a field of daisies. I remarked that there were many young girls who would love to stroll through just such a field. My traveling companion replied that the dry stubble on the ground would only cut their feet, adding that the romantic is all in the imagination. I was troubled by this statement, but said nothing.

Many months later I was walking along a street in Europe and passed a poster with the photograph of a woman. The photo was clearly intended to catch the eye of the masculine sex–which, of course, it did. And I thought to myself: “how many other women are there on this very street of comparable beauty? And yet the mind is drawn to this particular photo.” The answer is that the woman in the photo was portrayed in such a way as to provoke the imagination. This disturbed me, but not quite as much as the statement of my traveling companion several months previous.

There would be no great buildings, colorful paintings, astounding achievements, apart from the projections of the imagination. Such things must first be seen in the mind, and desired, for them to come to fruition. So the imagination has the incredible power to bring forth reality, not on its own, but by its command of all the powers of the human psyche and body.

If it is the image of God to create, and so humans are builders and creators in their own right, then is it not also the image of God to be imaginators? If the Holy Spirit is God’s working agent, his indwelling and efficient doer, and if the Son is God’s word, his communicator to creation, we could say in one sense that God the Father is the divine imagination.

The tree of life is incomparably beautiful in that it prompts the imagination toward all that is in God, all that he desires to give. Yet Eve’s imagination was turned to the knowledge of good and evil, seeing that it was desirable. So then our sanctification is being renewed in the hope of the new creation in Christ, that is, obtaining a beatified imagination through faith in its perfect embodiment, the beautiful lamb, the crucified and risen Son.

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