From Secret Prayer to Hands Laden with Blessings

Alexander Maclaren observes a profound movement in Romans 12:13-15: the Christian soul ascends into 'the secret place of the Most High'—that solitary communion of rejoicing hope, endurance, and unbroken prayer—only to emerge into the public world 'with the light of God on his face, and hands laden with blessings.' This is no accident of arrangement. The juxtaposition reveals the animating principle of New Testament morality itself: devotion to God is the indispensable basis of all practical helpfulness to man, and conversely, practical helpfulness to man is the expression and manifestation of devotion to God. They are inseparable.

These three injunctions—pursuing hospitality, blessing persecutors, and rendering sympathy to the glad and sorrowful—appear dissimilar on the surface. Yet they spring from one fundamental disposition: love. Maclaren notes that love 'varies in its forms according to the necessities of its objects,' bringing temporal help to the needy with one hand, meeting hostility with blessing with another, and rendering tears and joy with the third. This is love's infinite flexibility.

Remarkably, Paul's verbal association between 'pursuing hospitality' (diōkō) and 'pursuing you' (hostility) is not mere wordplay but characteristic of his habit of 'going off at a word.' The command to bless persecutors emerges almost organically from the preceding injunction. Thus the sacred and the persecuted are bound together in one love that neither withdraws from the world nor loses itself in it, but moves always from the throne room of prayer into the marketplace of mercy.