Romans 6:13 Neither yield you your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin: but yield yourselves to God… Horace Bushnell was a teacher in Yale College at a time of religious awakening there; and although not an atheist, not an infidel, was greatly disturbed by doctrinal unrest. He was settling his opinions; he was passing through that tumultuous period known in the experience of most diligent inquirers, in which he could raise more questions than he could answer. The pupils under him were profoundly affected by the religious movement in the college. His great manliness, his benevolence, his social feeling, caused him extreme pain in view of the fact that he seemed to stand in the way of the religious reformation of his own scholars. He paced up and down his room, meditating on his personal duty, and finally came to this proposition: "I have no doubt that there is a distinction between right and wrong. I feel sure on that one point; am I willing to act according to my belief? I have perfect confidence that there is a distinction between right and wrong; am I willing to throw myself over the line between the wrong and the right, towards the side of the right, and hereafter consecrate myself irrevocably, utterly, affectionately, to the following of the best religious light I possess?" He knelt down. He consecrated himself to the performance of all duty known to him. He rose with a forehead white, and the light of a star in his soul. Were all his doubts dissipated at an instant's notice? Not at all. But they were like the mighty pines on the mountain tops after the lightning had smitten them. They do not fall, but they cease to grow. They are no longer trees; they are timber. He went on and on, until he came to be a prince with God, one of the leaders of religious discussion, one of the most spiritually-minded of theologians. I do not accept all his speculations; but the element in him that strikes all men who once fairly see it is his spirituality. It strikes even those of a faith opposed to his. I think that our friends in the Liberal school in theology revere the memory of Horace Bushnell for his sermons on the new life as well as for his philanthropic efforts. But the central thing in him, the pillar of fire which led him into the promised land, was surrender to God, or to what he knew to be duty, and to the whole of it. At the instant of irreversible, affectionate surrender, at the instant of that adjustment of the lenses of his soul, God flashed through him. (J. Cook.) Parallel Verses KJV: 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. |
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