Word and the Spirit

Excerpt from Let Love Be Genuine by John Piper

[Romans 12:9-13]

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Reading over texts like this once, and quickly, has little effect to produce all these beautiful things in our lives. So what are we to do? What would make these things happen?

Paul gives us guidance in chapter 15. In Romans 15:15-16 he says . . . (keep in mind he is writing mainly to Gentiles, that is, non-Jews in Rome and he is explaining how his ministry of writing this letter helps him accomplish his aim of transforming Gentile sinners into a worship gift to God),

On some points I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God 16 to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

Notice several things:

1. His aim is that the Gentiles be an “acceptable offering” (v. 16)—just like he said in Romans 12:2 that we prove what is good and “acceptable”: the will of God.

2. His means of preparing the Gentiles—us—for God as acceptable living sacrifices of worship (Romans 12:1) is to write to us and remind us boldly of things we may already know (15:15).

3. But the writing alone does not produce the holiness and the newness and the love that Paul is aiming at in us, so he says at the end of verse 16, “sanctified by the Holy Spirit.”

So now we know Paul’s goal for us when we read Romans 12. He writes to us boldly to remind of some things that we already know with the aim that we be transformed in our hearts and minds and begin to embrace the acceptable will of God, and that this all happen by the power of the Holy Spirit. Neither can be excluded from Paul’s strategy: the word and the Spirit. Not the word without the Spirit, and not the Spirit without the word. The 13 exhortations of Romans 12:9-13 are written so that the Holy Spirit may take them and make them the means of his transforming, sanctifying work.
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