Living Sacrifices

A couple of weeks ago we gave some thought to the way in which God is supreme over all things. The Apostle Paul in Acts 17 said to the Athenians, ‘in God we live and move and have our being’. This morning the aim of the text is to make us into worthy worshippers of the God we saw two weeks ago. Romans 12:1 says there’s a way to live – that’s taken from the text; ‘living sacrifices’ – there’s a way to live that is real worship. Worship of God that is true and worship of God that is fitting. The word ‘proper’ here means fitting. It means that the worship honours Him. It pleases Him. It glorifies Him. It makes much of him. It exalts him. It magnifies His worth. It gives Him His rightful place.

Now, there’s one very obvious conclusion to draw from that sentence and that is, that if the rest of verse 1 is going to show us how to worship God properly and truthfully, then there’s clearly a type of ‘attempted’ worship which is improper and which doesn’t line up with the truth. But before, I tell you how attempted and real worship differ, first of all, I want to say what real worship isn’t. The difference in Romans 12:1 between attempted worship and real worship is not the difference between saving faith and unbelief. That’s obvious because, Paul is writing his letter to Roman Christians who have already believed the message that Paul brought to them about Jesus. Listen to how he opens his letter to these people: ‘To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people: grace and peace to you from God...’ So, we can be certain that Paul, who had expressly been set apart by God to tell the gospel, regards the people he’s writing to, as gospel believing Christians. Since that’s the case, Romans 12:1 can’t be referring to the difference between believing and unbelieving worship.

It’s important to be really clear. Unbelievers cannot worship the one true and living God. The reason for that, is that the thinking of an unbeliever is darkened. Which is another way of saying, that the hearts of unbelievers are always leaning away from God and not towards him.

To an unbeliever there is nothing compelling about God. Unbelief is a veil across the eyes of the hearts of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the brilliant shining glory of the majesty of their creator God.

Unbelievers, as well as believers, were made to worship their glorious maker. But the Apostle Paul tells us the root of the problem in chapter 1 of Romans, ‘they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images...they worshipped and served created things rather than the creator’. In God, the unbelieving heart can see nothing worthy of worship. But, with things made by human hands and - significantly in our media driven times - images, unbelieving hearts are completely besotted.

It’s not that the unbeliever attempts worship but fails, they never have the slightest inclination to truly worship God in the first place.

Is that just a lifestyle choice? Is that exchange, as justified as any other choice? If God were a created thing amongst created things, then yes, choosing him over something else would be as justified as choosing something else over him. If you have a choice between a bar of Gold and a bar of Chocolate, and you choose the bar of chocolate, you might be called a fool, but no one can reasonably say you’ve made a morally corrupt choice. For sure, you’re telling us that you really like chocolate, but you can’t be judged for that preference. But if you choose a bar of Gold over a person’s life, then you’re morally culpable. People’s lives are not only slightly, but actually, abundantly, more valuable than Gold. And so, they carry moral weightiness. How much more then - when people created by the infinitely valuable God, find nothing attractive in him, find nothing in him worth praising, find nothing about him that would make them fall on their faces before him – how much more morally culpable can a person be than that?

God is supremely worthy of worship and therefore to exchange him for other things is to commit an infinitely moral offence. Your life is in his hands. In him, we live and move and have our being, and therefore He will bring us all to account for how we valued Him. In line with His worth?

Or lying about his worth?

Did we do as if we owed him nothing? Did we do as if we made ourselves, and behave as if, in ourselves, we live and move and have our being? The consequences are very grave for that kind of exchange.

I know the things of the world look great and glorious, but the reality of it is, they have been made by people for people. Their worth dies when we die. And then we face the God who made us - who never dies - and try to explain why we rejected his infinite, everlasting glory for the glory of things made by human hands.

What will we say?

We’ll clap our hands over our mouths for fear they will condemn us. Then he’ll say, ‘I’m infinitely offended that you exchanged me for them, so, my righteous anger is kindled against you’. There’s only one outcome for an infinite, everlasting offence. That is an infinite everlasting punishment. That’s what happens when people worship things instead of God.

So, right worship of God is central, and it’s significant, and it raises the stakes in Romans 12:1 really high. Romans 12:1 therefore, is about believers and it’s about how they worship God rightly.

That might surprise us because we could have the notion in our minds that once saved, always worshipping rightly. That’s not Paul’s notion and therefore it shouldn’t be ours.

We’ve been saved by God’s grace alone and now we have all the tools to worship aright, but the extent to which we accomplish proper worship ebbs and flows – it isn’t constant. Sometimes, true and proper, sometimes not. That’s why Paul is ‘urging’ them in verse 1 and, that’s why he’s showing them how to be true and proper worshippers.

So, what is true worship, and what is fitting worship? What is worship that corresponds with the worth and value of God?

Well, right at the centre of it, just like in the old testament, is a sacrifice. That’s in the verse ‘offer...a living sacrifice’. The temptation might be to allow our minds to go straight to a verse like Hebrews 9:26, ‘Jesus appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself’. But that is not where our minds should go. Jesus is indeed the sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world. But his is not the sacrifice Paul has in view here. Paul wants us to think more of our own bodies than Jesus’ body. He wants us to offer our bodies as the sacrifice.

That might sound morbid. After all it didn’t end well for the sacrificial animal in the Old Testament. The sacrifice of the animal’s body meant knives, and spilt blood and death. But notice Paul’s phraseology, ‘living sacrifices’. He doesn’t have death in mind – at least not physical death. He doesn’t mean for us to make a sacrificial offering to God of ourselves, with the death of our bodies. Paul wants our bodies to remain intact and become living – not dead – living sacrifices.

What does he have in mind?

To find out, we can use the idea presented here, of worship that is pleasing to God, and see if it appears elsewhere in the new testament with concrete examples.

And it does. And I think you’ll see that they shed light on what Paul is driving at.

Romans 14:17-18 says, ‘The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the holy spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God’. So, it’s possible to be so consumed with ordinariness that the extraordinary things are not given their rightful place. Eating and drinking (add any other ordinary thing in there) is not what ultimately counts. Yet we can get so wrapped up in them, that we fail to focus on the extraordinary things: righteousness, peace and joy. Notice, anyone who ‘serves’ in these ways is pleasing to God. There’s a service that is rendered to God by us and when it’s characterised by the fruit of the Spirit, it’s acceptable.

Next, Philippians 4:18 has an even more foundation- level point: Paul has just received some supplies from the brothers and sisters and he calls them, ‘a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God’. The brothers and sisters had seen the physical need that Paul had, and at their own expense had sent supplies for Paul so that he wouldn’t die. And Paul calls their provision an offering; a sacrifice; pleasing to God. So, when we seek to advance the cause of God and His glory – in this case through the Apostle Paul – God considers the offering sweet and he’s pleased with it.

Finally, 1 Timothy 5:4: The children of widows should learn ‘to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family...for this is pleasing to God’.

So, not counting the cost of feeding two mouths instead of one in order that the light of the glory of God might be visible and look different from the world, is a thing that is pleasing to God. It’s a spiritual act of worship.

So, I conclude from these examples that when Paul says, ‘offer your bodies as living sacrifices’, he means that the Roman believers need to die to themselves and their fleshly desires daily, and pursue the fruits of righteousness, that those fruits might be borne on the branches of their Christianity. You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honour God with your bodies.

You might be thinking, this sounds a bit like adding to what Jesus has done. It sounds like Paul is saying, in order to be acceptable to God – to worship him rightly, you need to become more than what you are in Jesus. But that’s not the case, and Peter confirms it for us. He says in 1 Peter 2:5, ‘you are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’. We do the offering, the spiritual sacrificing, but they are made acceptable to God because they go through the purifying, refining work of Jesus. He’s the one who makes our sacrifices come up smelling of roses; it’s not us.

But notice also, that Paul doesn’t only point out that these kinds of sacrifices to God with our lives are pleasing to him, but that they are holy. Jesus, by his purifying power brings to righteous fruit our every desire for good and our every deed prompted by faith.

True, but there are two other things about the sacrifice being holy.

The first is that the Holy spirit is real and He works. The Holy Spirit prompts; He creates lively workings in us. So, holy inclinations are generated within us by the Holy Spirit of God Himself. But, remember Gal 5:25 says we can be ‘out of step’ with the Spirit of God. That word comes right after this one, ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires’. So, we can fail to be true worshippers, by failing to respond to the gracious movements of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. If we do respond though, we will crucify the flesh with its passions and desires.

The second thing to say is that Holiness speaks of separateness – set apartness. God doesn’t want us to be separate from the world by removing ourselves from the world, but He does want our affections for the world to be increasingly severed. The Apostle John says it bluntly, ‘Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them’.

The final thing to notice is the sacrifice is to be offered. That means that you supply it. The act is on your part. The act is with your will. The act is intentional.

The act knows the cost, and loves God more. The act is volitional and purposeful and desired; it does not waver in unbelief.

When we are true and proper worshippers, then we are people who taste and see that the Lord is good – better than anything else. We are people who want to make much of him and please him and enjoy him. And so, we’re a people who die to ourselves daily because we know that we used to live a way of life that preferred the created over the creator. But now we’ve been set free from that empty way life we used to walk in. We seek to rid ourselves of those old sweethearts and to satisfy ourselves in our new, true love. We seek to advance his cause in the gospel. We seek to grow the fruit of righteousness which is desirable to him.

And though it cost us in this life, we know that to have more of Christ is better by far. Therefore, we are not like soldiers who get entangled in civilian affairs, but we try to please our commanding officer. And so, we offer our bodies as living sacrifices. We respond to the prompting of His Spirit; we saturate ourselves in his revealed will - the Bible, and we do works of service that are pleasing to him.

Then we are worshipping in a way that aligns with His worth.

And now look. What prompts the whole endeavour?

Mercy. In view of God’s mercy to us.

In view of the fact that we didn’t get the punishment due to us for our sins, but were treated better than our deeds deserved, put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light for this is our true and proper worship.