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Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship (Romans 12:1, NASB1995, emphasis added).
I have a long history of disliking hugs. Unfortunately, I pastored a church in which congregants didn’t listen when I said, “Hugging is unbiblical.”
I didn’t have a Biblical verse to support my anti-hugging bias, except for common sense: hugging should be confined to spouses, parents with children, and the occasional consolation hug when someone experiences loss; in all other situations, my viewpoint was to keep your distance.
Now I confess that during a recent Greek word study of Romans 12:1, my anti-hugging theology has been upended.
My capitulation focuses on the word translated in English as “urge.” I always considered “urge” to be a stern exhortation, given Paul’s encouragement to the Romans to present themselves as a “living sacrifice” or to “a living death.”
For such measures, a stern “urge” would be needed for acquiescence by the Romans.
About 50 years ago, I memorized Romans 12:1 but had never looked closely at the Greek word translated “urge” until about a month ago. The Greek word for “urge” is “parakaleo,” which comes from the same family of words as “parakletos” or “paraclete,” meaning “called alongside” to help and assist.
In John 14:16, Jesus says, “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper [paraclete].” Yes, Jesus used the word “paraclete” to describe the Holy Spirit who walks alongside us for our comfort, consolation, and edification.
The word “urge” in Romans 12 is very similar to the word “helper” in John 14:16.
For over 50 years, when I considered the word “urge” in Romans 12:1, I had the image of my third-grade teacher shaking her index finger at me. Admittedly, I’ve deserved a good “finger shaking” many times in my life, and have experienced finger-pointing with my first-, second-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade teachers.
However, in the third grade, on a sunny spring day, I was looking out the window and telling jokes to those sitting next to me when I was called upon to read the next page in our class reading time. When my teacher asked me to read, I didn’t know where in the book to start.
Something broke in my third-grade teacher as she dragged me to the front of the class, gave me a whupping with her ping-pong paddle, pushed me back to my desk, sat me down in the seat, and then started shaking and pointing her finger at me while saying, “Next time, pay attention!”
That’s the image that I continued to visualize for decades whenever I came to the word “urge” in Romans 12:1 or God shaking His finger at me while shouting, “Grant, pay attention to this verse!” Admittedly, I needed to pay attention in the third grade and to Romans 12:1, but the Greek word for “urge” (as I’ve recently discovered) has absolutely nothing to do with finger-pointing.
In John 14, Jesus uses the root word “paraclete” to introduce the “helper” or the Spirit. Paul reflects this idea with his “urging” (same root word that Jesus uses), indicating that the Spirit “urges” us by coming alongside us, to encourage us in our next step of being a “living sacrifice” for spiritual growth.
The new image I now have of “urge” is not the finger pointing of my third-grade teacher, but the Holy Spirit coming close, putting His arm around my shoulders, and saying, “Let’s walk together to get through this next phase of your dying to self.”
Romans 12:1 supports the idea of brothers and sisters giving one another encouraging hugs, not guilt-inducing finger-pointing.
But I still don’t like hugs.