a living sacrifice

Rom 12:1,2  “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.  And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

As we have said so many times before, the word therefore requires that we look back and see what it is there for.  And in this case it signifies a the culmination of 11 chapters of doctrine, bringing us to this grand conclusion.  He is saying, on the basis of all that God has revealed to us, the following is to be our response.

And basically, to condense all eleven chapters into one or two succinct statements is next to impossible.  But the gist of what has been said up to now is this.  That because of the original sin of Adam and Eve, man is born spiritually dead.  Mankind is condemned because all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  But God so loved the world, that He sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, to come to earth to become our substitute.  He was God in the flesh, and lived a perfect life, and He took our sin upon Himself and died on the cross, so that those who believe in Him might receive righteousness.  2 Cor. 5: 21, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Paul goes on in the last chapters which we’ve been looking at, chapters 8-11, to explain to us, as much as we are able to understand it, that God’s plan for our salvation was formed by God before the foundation of the world.  He chose us to receive grace, and then He  called us, and when we responded to that call, He justified us, and now His Spirit is working in us to sanctify us, and one day He will glorify us by changing our bodies to be like Him.  And chapter 11 concludes this  expose’ on the sovereignty of God with the phrase found in verse 36, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”  In other words, were it not for the mercies of God, all the world would be lost, and we have obtained mercy according to Titus 3:4 when the kindness of God appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us.

Now God’s purpose has always been to redeem the total man.  You remember in Gen. 1 it says man was made in the image of God.  God is a trinity, God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  And so God created man in His image, and He made man in three parts, spirit, soul and body. And that order is very important.  Man’s spirit was made to be in communion with God, ruling his soul or  mind, which in turn governed his body. But God said that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will surely die.  And when Adam and Eve were deceived by Satan and ate of the tree, immediately they died spiritually.  And as a result, all men are born spiritually dead.   Satan overturned God’s order of creation.  By seducing man to sin, man died in his spirit, and God’s order was overturned.  Man’s body now ruled the soul (the heart and mind) and the spirit lay dormant.  This was the status of man on the earth.  Ruled by his basest passions, his mind captive to his lusts, and his spirit dead, condemned to eternal separation from God.

But when the kindness and mercy of God appeared to us by the sacrificial substitute of Jesus Christ, the first thing that God does in response to our faith in Christ is justify us.  He makes us righteous, not by righteousness which we have done, but by faith, according to the righteousness of Christ.  And once we are made holy and righteous, justified, God can once again have fellowship with us, and so He sends the Holy Spirit to live inside of us.  And the Spirit is life, and He gives us eternal life.

Now that is salvation.  Through the mercy of God, man is made justified, righteous, a living spiritual being, having the Holy Spirit living inside him, through which he is given life, even eternal life.  So the question now arises, what next?  What is our purpose now that we are saved?  What does God want from us now?  And the answer is now that our spirit which was dead has been born again into life, now we need to bring the other two elements of our being into conformity with the Spirit;  our mind or soul, and our body.  And Paul explains how to do that, starting first with our body.

And there are some key words here that will help us understand how this works. Paul  says, now on the basis of all this that God has done for us, in response to the mercy of God to us, I beg of you, I beseech you, I urge you, I exhort you to present your bodies a living sacrifice.  The word "beseech" literally means to beg, parakaleo, I come alongside to call you to this.  Or it could be like a coach that comes alongside you to urge you onward, to go further, to do more.

The second word that is significant here is present.  To present.  It has the idea of surrendering up, of yielding, of offering. It also is a technical term for the Levitical offerings, to bring  an offering, to bring an actual sacrifice. And what God wants us to present  here is our body.

What does that mean our body must be sacrificed? In the old covenant, the priests offered up various types of sacrifices.  And when they offered up animal sacrifices they first killed the animal and then laid them on the altar. But in the new covenant, Christ has already died.  He paid the price for our sin.  What God wants now is not dead bodies, but living sacrifices.  Now in the old covenant, when they offered up sacrifices to God, they were always supposed to be without spot or blemish.

And in the new covenant, we have already explained that we are made alive spiritually by the righteousness of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  You can’t be saved without the Holy Spirit.  We don’t have to go around looking for the Holy Spirit, you can’t be made alive without Him. John 6:63. The Spirit gives life.  So we that have been saved have been made alive by the Spirit.  And we have been made holy through the righteousness of Jesus Christ.  And through the righteousness of Christ which has been credited to our account, we have become acceptable to God.

Now positionally we have been made alive and holy by the mercy of God, but what God is asking from us now is that we present our bodies practically to Him as well as a sacrifice. Rom 6:12 puts it this way, “Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.” So this tells us that those things of the flesh which once controlled us, the lusts of the flesh, the pride of life, the base passions of the body, our worldly desires, we no longer present our bodies to those things.  But instead we present our bodies to be used for God’s purposes.

And 1Cor 6:19 takes it a step further; “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.”  Notice one very important phrase in this verse, our body is now a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you.  Listen, this is one of the most amazing statements in the Bible.  God doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands, but in the hearts of His people.  We that have been made righteous are now a temple of God.

 Peter sheds more light on this phenomenon in 1Pet 2:5 “you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” In the old covenant, God’s shekinah glory dwelled in the Holy of Holies behind the veil of the temple.  But now in the new covenant, God tore the veil in two, and God lives in the us, the Holy God living in a holy place, our spirit.  Now that ought to humble you.

Peter tells us that now we individually are the spiritual stones of God’s house, being built up to offer sacrifices to God. Listen, a church is not bricks and mortar.  A church is God’s people, a congregation of the redeemed, living stones, built upon a foundation of God’s word, the cornerstone of which is Jesus Christ. One of the things I have learned here at the beach is when the service is over, and I stand up on the dune and look back on the beach to be sure we didn’t leave anything, all you can see is an empty beach.  There is no building.  God dwells in the hearts of His people.  We are the living stones of God’s church, being built up to offer sacrifices to God.  And so that brings us back to Romans 12 which says that  the sacrifices that God wants us to bring is ourselves; surrendered, sold out.  Those are the only stones worthy of God’s building.  There are many monuments men have built throughout our country that have the name church attached to them. But what a monumental waste of time if the men and women are not living stones themselves. Men and women without the Holy Spirit living in them are simply dead.  And God doesn’t dwell in dead people, or dead stones or dead churches for that matter.

Another consideration here is that a living sacrifice is a sacrifice which lives, which perpetually lasts. An animal was put down and burned up. It was a one-time deal. But what God wants is a perpetual offering. What He wants is not something that you bring once and it's burned up, but something that is perpetually offered and never dies and is never consumed, it's just always offered, always offered, always offered.

A good illustration would be when Abraham was told to offer Isaac on the altar.  Isaac was the son that God had promised to him many years before.  And you remember that God stopped Abraham as he lifted the knife to kill his son, and revealed a ram stuck in a thicket instead.

Now if Abraham had followed through then Isaac would have been an illustration of  a dead sacrifice. But Abraham, not Isaac, is an illustration of a living sacrifice. It isn't that God is saying to you, are you willing to die for me.  What He is saying is, are you willing to live for God, even if it means that I will live the rest of my life without anything that I now hold dear if that is Your will? And that is a perpetual and lasting commitment. That's the stuff of which a living sacrifice is made. And Abraham was willing.

This living sacrifice, this surrender of our will in a humble submissive act to God, this, as Paul put it, bearing about in my body always the dying of Jesus Christ, this kind of living sacrifice is the basis of true worship. It is the foundation of all Christian dedication. It is what Paul meant when he said, "For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” If we live, we live for the Lord, if we die, we go to the Lord.  So therefore, let’s commit to live for Christ. It’s the only thing that will matter.

Someone wrote, I counted dollars while God counted crosses.
I counted gains while He counted losses.
I counted my wealth by the things gained in store,
But He valued me by the scars that I bore.

I counted the honors and sought for ease.
He wept while He counted the hours on my knees.
And I never knew until one day by a grave
How vain are those things that we spend a life to save

I never yet knew till a friend went above
That richest is he who is rich in God’s love.

God is satisfied, then, when we offer our bodies totally holy, set apart, pure, undefiled, and this is, notice at the end of verse 1, this is your spiritual worship. The word "service," or "worship," is latreia, it is used in the Septuagint which is the Old Testament Greek text to speak of the worship of God according to the Levitical law. And again we're talking still about that priestly kind of language, language of sacrifice. The priests came to worship. And that's the word used for worship in the Old Testament. And here it's still worship. You come to worship God with an offering. What are you bringing Him? Are you bringing Him an offering defiled by the world, defiled by sin?  Or is your sacrifice consecrated and holy before God?

Real worship is not just music, or even elaborate prayers, it is not liturgy, it is not ritual, it is not candles, stained glass, or ceremony. Real worship is not feeling  goose bumps in a church service. Real worship is the willful, spiritual act of giving my body first of all to God, holy, set apart unto Him. That's what God wants.

So our body is to be conformed to the Spirit by presenting it to God as a sacrifice, and then lastly, our soul is to be conformed to God.  Verse 2 says, " And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect." And here Paul tells us that the key to your soul being transformed is to be sure that your mind has been renewed. The mind must be presented for renewal.

And notice how he presents it with a negative and then a positive. "Do not be conformed to this world.”  The Phillips translation puts it this way, “Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.”   In Eph 2:1, Paul says it this way, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the COURSE of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”  And the idea of a course is like a river bed, and the current of the world carries us along on a path to destruction.  Everyone else is caught in the same course, and so it doesn’t seem so bad.  But the truth is, we are being swept along by the world, to our eventual destruction.  Paul says don’t let the world sweep you along in it’s course.

On the other hand, he says, "But be transformed," metamorphous is the root idea, totally changed.  That’s what repentance is you know, totally changing direction, changing course.  And how are we to do this?  By the renewing of the mind in accordance with our spirit now made alive.  We need to change the way we think.  We need to change our will.  We need to be changed from the inside out.  It’s like the old adage, you are what you  eat.  (I’m a krispy kreme donut).  We need to feast on the word of God.  I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation.  The word of God is the power to transform your mind.

David said it this way in Psalm 119, " Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You.” That's the key to the renewed mind.  And again David says, Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Col 3:16 “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you.”

God’s word is the only way to renew your soul, for it is the only thing powerful enough to pierce your soul. Hbr 4:12 “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”  Our mind is where the war is fought.  And this is where the battle is won.

2Cr 10:5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,

The key to spiritual victory is not getting all you can get, but giving all you have. There's a big difference. And there are people literally flocking into churches, looking for spiritual experiences to get more of God when the issue is not what they need to get but what they need to give. And that's the essence of this tremendous passage of Scripture.  We need to surrender all to Christ.  Everyday.  The problem with a living sacrifice is that it’s always trying to crawl off the altar.  But when we remember that we are not our own, we are bought with a price, and we truly understand the price that Christ paid on the cross for us, then the cost of surrendering everything to God seems trivial by comparison.  We have so much more to gain.

So that we might say with Paul, For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.  Yes, thank God for His mercies that He saved us, but now let’s present our bodies and our souls to Him as well, offering up to Him our spiritual worship.  Yes, there is a cost to follow Christ.  But it will be worth it all when we see Christ.

Therefore my brothers and sisters in Christ, I beseech you, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and set apart to God, which is your reasonable response of worship.  And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, by the renewing of your mind, so that you may do the will of God.

a zeal for God

      Romans 10:2,3 contains one of the most tragic lines in scripture.  Speaking of the Jews, some of the most religious people on the planet, Paul says,  “For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.”
     What a tragedy.  To know of the true God, to try to worship Him, to perform all kinds of religious works thinking that they were serving Him, and yet all that zeal be of none affect.  It was worthless, even damning, because the Bible says that to him who has been given much, much shall be required.  And the Jews had been given every advantage and yet failed to follow the Lord fully.
     Paul says their downfall was failing to understand God’s righteousness, what God required to be holy and acceptable.  Instead, they offered up another standard – their own.  In effect, what they ended up doing was defining God according to what they wanted God to be like, rather than what God actually is like as depicted in His Word.  And the end result of that is a form of idol worship.  A god made in their own image, according to their perspective of righteousness.
     Unfortunately, Israel fell short of God’s standard.  They stumbled over the stumbling stone -  that stone being a Savior.  They didn’t really want a Savior.  In their self righteousness they didn’t really consider themselves sinners.  So what was the point of  a Savior?  They wanted an idol, that would work as a talisman when they could use some help or good luck, but would stand mutely on a shelf when not needed.
    But  lest we look down on the poor ol’ Israelites, we would do well to remember that Israel is a picture of the church.  What happened to them was for our example (1 Cor. 10:11).  Today the church is often guilty of the same attitude towards God.  We have dumbed down God in an attempt at making Him relevant, and in the process have stripped Him of all holiness, rendering Him little more than a genie who is manipulated by our faith to bless us and help us on demand.  Then when we are out of our jam, we place Him back on the shelf and hit the mute button until we need Him again.  Jesus Christ has become the means to an end, rather than the end of our means.  Paul says, in Rom. 10:4, that Christ is the goal, He is the end.  And the goal is for our righteousness.  To be holy.  Set apart unto God for righteousness.
     The problem with the church today is not that we aren’t relevant enough to the world.  The problem with the church today is we are too relevant to the world.  We are neither light nor darkness.  We are a nice muted grey.  Unbelievers are way too comfortable in the pew.  And believers are way too comfortable in the world.
     It’s was prevalent in the church in Corinth as well.  Here’s what Paul had to say to the Corinthian church. 2Cr 6:14 Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial (Satan), or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, "I WILL DWELL IN THEM AND WALK AMONG THEM; AND I WILL BE THEIR GOD, AND THEY SHALL BE MY PEOPLE.  Therefore, COME OUT FROM THEIR MIDST AND BE SEPARATE," says the Lord. "AND DO NOT TOUCH WHAT IS UNCLEAN; And I will welcome you.  And I will be a father to you, And you shall be sons and daughters to Me," Says the Lord Almighty.