Daily Thoughts from Romans: Living Sacrifice (12:1,2)

Daily Thoughts from Romans: Living Sacrifice

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.  (Romans 12:1-2 ESV)

This “therefore” is a big therefore.  In light of all that Paul has described of the gospel he preaches, how God has declared all of us sinners, enemies of His (chapters 1-3), and yet redeemed us by the blood sacrifice of Jesus and declared us righteous in His eyes by faith alone (chapters 4-5), and given us through this message a freedom from the bondage of sin’s control of our lives (chapters 6-8) and foretold the future restoration of Israel to faith (chapters 9-11), in light of all those mercies of God we must give over our lives to Him as living sacrifices.  Such a sacrifice is considered holy and acceptable to God and is the spiritual and logical worship due Him.

Our whole lives must give up conformity to the ways of a humanity who only see ourselves living this life apart from God as the standard of right and wrong.  Our whole lives must be given over to the transformation that comes as our minds are restored by His mercy and truth.  This enables us to test by a new standard what is right, good, acceptable and perfect in accord with God’s will.  In what follows Paul unwraps what that transformation looks like.  If we are believers who have tasted God’s mercies we will feel the sweet compulsion to so submit ourselves to Him.

Someone has said that living sacrifices have a tendency to crawl off the altar.  It is true that we must in some way keep coming back again and again to this posture of presenting ourselves to God for transformation.  There is no such thing as a one-time act of any kind (total or re-dedication, Pentecostal Spirit baptism, finding the doctrines of grace, accepting Christ as Lord and not just Savior, exchanging our life for Christ’s, achieving perfection or entire sanctification, etc.) that will set us up for uninterrupted spiritual growth.  These kinds of so-called “second blessings” actually can hurt our progress, tempting us to think we have arrived, like the hare in the race against the tortoise, so that we begin forsaking the making of progress (Philippians 3:12-16).

But it is helpful to realize if I have crawled off the altar.  I will know I have crawled off the altar as I find myself relying on myself to make life and the Christian life happen, engendering a great deal of stress as well as either arrogant self-congratulations or woeful self-denigration.

 

SUBDUED (by Robert Revell)

Once I was young and sure and strong

And when I chose to pray

I asked a field to battle wrong

To help God in the fray

 

So He appointed me a place

Where zeal and strength were spent

Until I fell upon my face

In disillusionment

 

“O God,” I cried, “I’m  on Your side

And surely You must know

The Kingdom fails although I’ve tried

So hard to make it go”

 

But still He waited while I wailed

‘Til all my dreams grew dim

Then while He worked where I had failed

He held me close to Him

 

I’m learning now to work and pray

With His strong hands on mine

And from this place of rest to say,

“The Kingdom, Lord, is Thine.”