The Responsibility of Our Calling

The Responsibility of Our Calling

The Apostle Paul provides a unique discussion of the calling of God’s people in Romans 9-11. He concludes his discussion in Romans 12:1 by encouraging the members to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service”. By doing so, he focuses on the responsibility we have to God and to one another as a result of our calling into the spiritual body of Christ. In his discussion in Romans 11, Paul uses the analogy of two olive trees to picture the process of our calling. He then immediately moves into a discussion of Pentecost, with a scriptural reference to Leviticus 23:10-20. He ties the two discussions together to show that God’s people are holy because of their connection to the Firstfruit and the root of the olive tree, both referring to Jesus Christ. It would be reasonable, or logical, to God’s people that theirs is a responsibility to the body of Christ and the members of it, which is why Paul talks about presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice. We have been privileged to have been called and figuratively been grafted into the olive tree, to be partakers of the goodness, or fatness, of the cultivated olive tree, which is spiritual Israel. With that calling comes the responsibility to function within the body, as God wills, being individually members of one another.