Devotional of the week: Holiness (8 in Fruit of the Spirit series)

Photo: Paul Writing His Epistles by Valentin de Boulogne – Blaffer Foundation Collection, Houston, TX, Public Domain

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. (Romans 6:1–23)

I wonder what it was like for Paul on his missionary journeys. He must have felt the pain of separation with the huge gulfs of geography between the new churches springing up; he was unable to visit them all and he certainly didn’t have the immediate updates we enjoy from friends and family across the world with our video chats and social-media updates. But Paul knew the secret weapon for true change in his new charges – Christ dwelling in them.

Paul strongly urges the church at Rome to live out of the new self; that which is inhabited by the Holy Spirit. He longs, as he says in verse 1, that they would not harbor the secret desire to sin because they hold to God’s assurances of forgiveness (St Augustine’s, “Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet”). Nor should they be slaves to sin – ruled by what they crave. But rather he desires that they would offer themselves – their souls and our bodies – to God as instruments of grace. Living lives transformed.

Paul uses the word for fruit in verse 22 (above). When we die to sin and don the clothes of Christ, we reap the fruit of holiness, which leads to eternal life. Holiness, our robes washed pure and clean. Holiness, desiring God’s will and living in his ways. Holiness, ushering in the life of the kingdom of God.

We all have our own domains that we can either submit to the Lord or keep tightly within our grasp. When we relinquish our rights, whether in the big questions such as where we’ll live, or in the smaller but daily issues such as will we bless or will we curse, we bear the fruit that the Lord grows in us. May this life be seen in us today.

For reflection: “Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee; take my moments and my days, let them flow in ceaseless praise” (Frances Ridley Havergal).