Romans 6:13, Yield to God
Romans 6:13 Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
By an entreaty, the Apostle Paul with a sense of urgency requested the Christians in Rome to live a holy life before God. He urged them not to yield to sin but keep themselves pure! This desire to be holy must be cultivated and formed as a holiness habit in their daily living. The stranglehold of sin in their lives had been broken by Christ. They can now choose not to sin. There is indeed great spiritual strength that God has endued every true believer. He is to exercise it for his good.
Indeed, this is a timely reminder for every Christian to be vigilant, to zealously guard their heart – Proverbs 4:23 Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. Keep our focus in setting our hearts right with our Lord as first priority. Let our thought-life be sanctified always. Let the motives and intents of our heart be God-honouring and God-fearing so that the words and actions that flow out of our lives may be a blessing to the people around us whether they be our family members, friends or anyone we come in contact with. When we examine the heart, we examine our thought-life. Is our thought-life Christ-centred and God-ward or is it encumbered with entanglements of sin that cripple us, taking away our strength and vitality? Watch and guard your heart. This phrase “with all diligence” is placed at the beginning of the sentence in the original for emphasis. And a direct translation is “out of all observance”, observe your heart most carefully.
Keeping the heart is more important than ‘keeping’ the other physical parts of our body – like our tongue, our eyes and our feet. For the heart is the seat-centre of our words and actions. By our thoughts, we are what we are. Our actions proceed out from our thoughts. Hence, the King James translator uses the word “diligence” to show that the ‘keeping’ involves determined effort.
Our Lord Jesus judges us by our thoughts for He is God and He is able to read thoughts. Therefore, the question that is asked before us is this, “How is your thought-life?” Is it clean and pure or is it polluted and defiled? Therefore to determine how well we will succeed in God’s sight, the focus here must be the keeping of our hearts. The word “keep” is in the imperative, a command by God that we are to give due attention. When our hearts are pure, we shall be blessed and see God (Matthew 5:8). Amen.