On this point, however, the apostle has always been misunderstood by persons who have pushed his teaching to an illegitimate conclusion. If all be of "grace," why insist upon "works"? The objection was made in his day, and he met it. It is made in our day, and has still to be met. It is sufficiently met by Paul's own method. Paul's doctrine of grace could never, in his mind, lead to "licentiousness," and it is one of the most remarkable phenomena of religious thought that it should have ever been suspected of doing so. The Christian man, in Paul's view, is the regenerate man; and the regenerate man is the holy man. Without the spirit and life of holiness Paul would have deemed it absurd to consider a man a Christian at all. The passage before us, even if there were no others of the same kind, is sufficient to prove how indissolubly connected are privilege and obligation in the Christian life. As we have seen, the apostle draws the exhortations which commence with this chapter, and which are exhaustively presented in all their variety and comprehensiveness--exhortations to a complete consecration to God in all the practical forms which it can assume--from the great gospel system, the system of salvation by grace and by grace alone; evidently taking it for granted that, by the contemplation of the grace for man which is in Christ Jesus, the minds of his readers would be softened, and prepared to acknowledge the claim.
What, then, is the nature of the consecration to which we are thus urged? "That ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service." Every word in this description tells: and if we gather together the elements of the service commended, we shall find that nothing is wanting, and that under the various particulars we may range all the duties and beauties of a consecrated Christian life.
The only point on which a question might be raised is as to the meaning of the terms: "That ye present your _bodies_ a _living_ sacrifice." Some have supposed a contrast here between the dead bodies of the animals offered in the old sacrifices and the living self-consecration of the Christian. If the supposition be just, the idea is both beautiful and suggestive. I think, however, that the ultimate meaning of the apostle is that the believer in Christ should devote _himself_ wholly to God, and that the term "your bodies" is only another term for "yourselves." We cannot imagine an acceptable bodily, or external sacrifice, without the participation in it of the conscience, the judgment, the heart, the whole man. The apostle puts his thought somewhat more fully in the kindred passage: "Ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are God's." Observe, then, the elements of this consecration.