In the next portion of his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus commands us to be holy in our relationships with our brothers (verses 21-24), our adversaries (verses 25, 26), our bodies (verses 27-30), our spouses (verses 31, 32), and our God (verses 33-37). God demands us to be far holier than we are.
If you were to look at your heart from God’s perspective, from the inside, you would see all sorts of things that would shock you: murder, lies, theft, adultery, immorality, greed, lust, idolatry, hatred, envy, prejudice, pride, covetousness. It’s all there lurking in our hearts where the disease of sin lives. The outward sins we do begin with sin hidden in our hearts. We can’t see the disease of sin hiding in our bodies so God must give us a spiritual scan, a divine MRI.
Jesus’ expert medical advice is that once you are a sinner you are going to continue to sin. The Good Doctor’s diagnosis is that you are a sinner - not because you sin, but because you have the condition called sin. It’s fatal. The wages of sin is death. There’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no self-discipline, no religious tradition, no amount of keeping the commandments, nothing in the world’s little black medical bag that can cure a heart infected by sin.
That’s the bad news. A doctor always gives the bad news first, then delivers the good news. Here’s the good news. God has a cure! The cure is found in the blood of Jesus. In his blood shed on Mount Calvary, Jesus paid for our sins by becoming sin for us. He took the disease of sin into himself and allowed it to kill him. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus is both the cure and the Physician who administers the cure.
Now that you have been given the prognosis of life, your response is to live your life in grateful thanks and faithful praise. That’s what Jesus is preaching about in this portion of his Sermon on the Mount. Living for Jesus means controlling your emotions. It means ridding your heart of anger and resentment. It means begging your brother for forgiveness. It means turning off the computer and only looking at your spouse. It means working hard on your marriage. It means concentrating on the way you speak.
And it means repenting when you fail to do these things. It means returning again and again to the Doctor’s office of the Christian Church. There Jesus diagnoses you in the confession of sins. He provides the cure in the absolution. He washes your wounds in his baptismal waters. He strengthens you with his Holy Supper. He allows you to live through his shed blood. Through these Means of Grace, now you wish to live as a Christian.
That’s what our hymn is about. “Take My Life and Let It Be” is about praying that we now live as forgiven and sanctified Christians. We are praying for the Holy Spirit to use our moments and days, hands and feet, voice and lips, money and intellect, will, heart, love, and our very selves and bodies always and only for service to Christ.
Verse one: Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee; take my moments and my days, let them flow in ceaseless praise, let them flow in ceaseless praise.
Verse two: Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of thy love; take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for thee, swift and beautiful for thee.
Verse three: Take my voice and let me sing always, only for my King; take my lips and let them be filled with messages from thee, filled with messages from thee.
Verse four: Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold; take my intellect and use ev’ry pow’r as thou shalt choose, ev’ry pow’r as thou shalt choose.
Verse five: Take my will and make it thine, it shall be no longer mine; take my heart, it is thine own, it shall be thy royal throne, it shall be thy royal throne.
Verse six: Take my love, my Lord, I pour at thy feet its treasure store; take myself, and I will be ever, only, all for thee, ever, only, all for thee.