From Romans 12:10 consider the love we are to have for one another as it expresses itself in the family of God. Consider also how such true love rushes in to give honor to others in a way that honors what Christ has done and is doing in them.

Most people begin life in such a circumstance where they are getting primed to love. We have to receive love before we can give love. Most babies come into the world and arrive in loving arms. That mother gets an extra measure of love stoked in her as that baby comes to her breast. She is giving herself in love and so from the start we humans are gaining something of the love we will return to the next generation after us. It is a common grace of homes all over the world that love is received and then given out and the cycle can go like that from generation to generation. What is true of this most basic element of human interaction... this glue of love that binds and stimulates anything healthy in any society... is supernaturally true of the Chrisitan life and community. We have to receive love in order to give love.

Is the gift of prophecy present today? Is the residual of this grace still active in the church? If so how are we to receive it?

Brothers and sisters before us in the text are three things that are to instruct and guide our lives together. Three things essential for life before one another in the church. 1st You must think of yourself rightly. You must think of yourself first before you think of others. 2nd You must then accept yourself among the others God has placed you. 3rd You must then apply yourself in the grace God has given you for the benefit of others.

In order to live morally you have to have words, words you can think about and consider and respond to. Words that direct you to God and his will and allow you in this moral sense to think God's thoughts after him. It is in this area of words and thoughts that our enemy has set up his battle lines against us. Satan's strategic battle is for the mind. He attacks us at the command center of our thoughts before he goes after our actions. If we would live morally congruent lives to the glory of God we must learn how to win the battle for the mind. The question for us today is how how do we win this battle?

A strange sacrifice God asks of us. Presenting our bodies? Consider up to this point in Romans 12:1 what Paul has told us of our bodies. Then consider the miracle of God as we present that body to him!

The simple words principally found in Romans 12:1 will show us the wonderful foundation for the Christian's ethic and moral practice…and our approach to our morals.

Paul is brought to this exclamation of praise and adoration and wonder as he begins to see that God uses our sins teach us the value of his mercy. God knows all the details of information that can and would bear in upon your life. God wisely in keeping with his justice, holiness and love charts a way or a path to your life. To maximize the moment when you might come under the outpoured richness of His own life through mercy and grace.

Here is the Mystery: God has a plan to bring his salvation upon all the nations, culminating in the final and full redemption of the nation of Israel. God will do this by bringing all under the conviction of their disobedience so that they will understand that a right standing before Him can only come through His mercy— it is not earned or gained by moral effort, it is only received by faith.

Judaism is at our roots. It is the ladder by which we are brought up into the promise of Jesus Christ. Don't neglect your Old Testament. Don't look down upon the Israel of God. Don't think you can stand in your Christianity apart from the undergirding and the promises God gave and will keep to all of Israel. The Gentile believers Paul was writing to could not trace the faithfulness of God through their own fathers who were pagans. And so, they may have felt as if they stood out as singly the people who have been birthed by God. Paul tells them, you are here because of God's faithfulness to the Jewish fathers and his promises to them. Don't boast over them be humble.