Selah Covenant Church

Women Ministries Sunday

February 14, 2016

LIVING SACRIFICE

Our text for this morning is Romans 12:1-2. Familiar? (Show of hands) Too familiar? Brad’s series on the Kingdom of God… How fitting then to focus today on our response. Please stand as you are able for the reading of God’s Word.

This is the Word of God…

We’re going to walk through this passage together. But first, I want to show you another rendition of it, written by someone suffering from “mefirstosis” – a disorder in which the patient insists on putting him or her self first:

“Therefore, I suggest, in view of the possibility of there being a God, that you volunteer in a church occasionally to earn points with God. This is a reasonable response that should satisfy both you and God. Do not risk standing out from the culture around you or question the need to look out for number one, but blend in by absorbing this mindset. Then you will be able to test and approve your own best choices—your self-fulfilling, self-protecting and self-gratifying choices.”

We’re going to go through the version in the Bible—very carefully. Let’s start. Verse 1: “Therefore…” STOP!! Therefore is THERE FOR a purpose. When you see a “therefore” in Scripture you need to ask what comes before it that makes the next thing logical. This “Therefore” bridges all that Paul has just stated with what he will now build on it. It immediately follows the doxology just before it. But why was he moved to break out in praise right then?For 11 chapters, Paul has given a comprehensive account of the good news in Jesus Christ:

Chapter 1-3 – how God’s righteousness was imputed to an unrighteous people
Chapter 4-5 – how we are justified by faith and can have peace with God
Chapter 6 – how we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection,
Chapter 7-8 – how we are no longer enslaved to sin but empowered by the Spirit,
Chapter 9-10 – how God intends to incorporate Jew and Gentile in his new community.
Chapter 11 – how God’s ultimate purpose is mercy

Paul finishes spelling out God’s incredible plan for the salvation of both Jews and Gentiles, this incredible doctrine of the faith, and he is overcome himself with what he has written! He bursts into praise, drawing from Old Testament writings and ending with:

For from him and through him and to him are all things.

To him be the glory forever! Amen.” THEREFORE!!!!!

Let’s read on.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy… STOP! So, tell me, how does Paul feel about what he is about to say? KJV: beseech you; NLT: plead with you. Suggest? Recommend? URGE YOU! Paul is beseechingus, pleading with us to hear what the living God is saying to us! Don’t take this lightly, he says! We’ve just considered the enormity of God’s mercy to us! There is NO CONDEMANATION for those who are in Christ Jesus! We are justified by faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ alone. Not by any works we do, lest we should boast. In view of God’s incredible mercy, Paul URGESus to do what naturally follows, what we’re wired to do by the one who created us:

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies…” STOP!BODIES? Don’t we evangelicals usually say “Give your HEART to Jesus”??Shouldn’t this say, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to give your heart to Jesus”? Nope. The Holy Spirit inspired Paul to say bodies for a purpose—to speak to people living in the 1st century and to speak to us living in the 21st century. And no, it is not a synonym for the whole person. It means physical body.

Greek philosophy, when this letter was written, said the body was corrupt.In that day, he Greek view of the body was a shackle and a prison-house; the ideal was to be freed from its degrading influences. So this language was significant, even shocking, for the first readers of the letter.

For believers, Paul reminds them that through the physical bodyis often how sin is revealed. Turn back to Romans 3, verses 13-18. Note the parts of the body and the sin it reveals:

Throats – open graves, foul speech
Tongues – practice deceit
Lips – poison of vipers, killing words
Mouths – full of cursing and bitterness
Feet – swift to shed blood, injury to another
Eyes – no fear of God

So Paul is right on when he urges us, in view of God’s mercy to us, to present our BODIES to God. Romans 6:13 is the index to Paul’s meaning here: “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness—not your lips, your tongue, your mouth, your eyes, your hands, your feet—but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.”

Offer your bodies to God! Then as John Stott so beautifully says, “our feet will walk in his paths; our lips will speak the truth and spread the gospel; our tongues will bring healing; our hands will lift up those who have fallen; our arms will embrace the lonely and the unloved, our ears will listen to the cries of the distressed and our eyes will look humbly and patiently towards God” (John Stott, Romans, God’s Good News for the World). Read on.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship.” STOP! This is my favorite oxymoron: living sacrifice. I picture an altar; most animals sacrificed on an altar are already dead when they get there! The human body is not presented to be slain but as a living sacrifice. It is a body alive from the dead that the believer is to present, alive from the dead because the power of sin has been destroyed. Holy, pleasing to God.

And Paul continues by saying, THIS IS TRUE WORSHIP.NASB: “which is your spiritual service of worship.” KJV: “which is your reasonable service.” NLT: “This is truly the way to worship him.” Look with me at the NASB translation. The Greek word translated “spiritual” is only used once by Paul in all of his letters and the word only appears in one other place in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:2). Why this particular word? Its meaning is rational—enlisting our mind, our reason, our intellect. Active, engaged. It is rational in contrast to mechanical or automatic. Paul is making a contrast between worship that is rational, enlisting our whole selves, and worship that is ritualistic in a negative sense, worship that is mechanical. He probably had in mind ceremonies of the Jewish and pagan cultures.

“This is true worship.”I appreciated what Commentator William Barclay said: “The true worship, the really spiritual worship, is the offering of one’s body, and all that one does every day with it, to God; it is not the offering to God of a liturgy, however noble, and a ritual, however magnificent. Real worship is the offering of everyday life to God. Real worship is not something which is transacted in a church; real worship is something which sees the world as the temple of the living God, and every common deed an act of worship.”

Put the whole verse together now. In view of God’s mercy to you—his unfathomable grace to seek you and rescue you from the kingdom of darkness, to justify you through Jesus’ sacrifice, to declare you righteous before him, to reconcile you to him, to fill you with his Spirit, to empower you to overcome sin and to be his instrument of grace—I urge you, he says, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. HOW DO WE WORSHIP HIM FOR THIS INDESCRIBABLE MERCY? As God so freely gave himself for us, we give ourselves to him. This is true worship.

It is also radical discipleship. By presenting ourselves as a living sacrifice to God we surrender control of our lives to him; not only is God wholly available to us for our needs, we are wholly available to him for his needs. Am I ready for that? Are you? Lots of people wanted to follow Jesus; however, many also drifted away. Jesus never implied following him would be easy. His advertising strategy would not have won him any awards: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it” (Luke 9:23-24).

I want this. I want to be a living sacrifice, to worship God in this way as a response to his mercy to me, as an expression of my love and devotion. Let me share a personal mental prompt that helps me; perhaps it will inspire you to form your own. While living in Chicago, I periodically went to Catholic Retreat Centers for personal retreats.When I registered, I had to declare what type of retreat I wanted: prayer and fasting, silent, or regular. The first gave me a room and access to the facility; the second gave me that and meals in a private dining room in which no one spoke while they ate; the third gave me a room, access to the facility and a fun opportunity to meet people from all over. But I always wondered if the question was a measure of my spirituality! If I was REALLY spiritual, I’d go for the first option; if I was Spiritual-Lite, I’d take the meals but eat in silence; and if I chose the latter, I must surely be a spiritual wanna-be.

Both centers had phenomenal sanctuaries and were the reason I went. One, however, had an altar that I loved. It was enormous! In fact, it was long enough and wide enough to accommodate a person lying on it. Did I actually do that? No, too scared to. And before leaving Chicago, I seriously considered going back there one more time and getting permission to do it! But this is how it ministers to me, then and now: I envision myself stretched out on that huge altar and I pray that I will again die to self in order to be a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, my spiritual act of worship. The physical position is one of humility, vulnerability, of ceasing from striving. I do this mental exercise when I am in need of refreshing my spirit; when I am about to serve him in a challenging assignment; when I am convicted of sin and in need of cleansing. There is something very intimate, very strengthening in the experience. If it doesn’t sound totally whacko to you, I would encourage you to create your own personal visual of “living sacrifice” to strengthen you.

After Paul urges us to present our bodies as living sacrifices, he points out that this requires a radical change. “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world…” STOP! NASB puts it in the passive, do not beconformed, which is closer to the Greek’s present passive imperative verb tense. Both this verb and the next, be transformed, are in this tense. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world.

So how would you describe the pattern of this world?

Ours is a fast-paced, pressure-filled, self-directed, self-focused, over-extended lifestyle – and Christians aren’t exempt from it. If you have driven anywhere in the last 24 hours, it’s very likely you drove by America’s symbol of that lifestyle – The Golden Arches!

McDonalds tops all charts for number of customers. Why? Because it’s the best food of all restaurants? No. Because it’s “fast food”. We don’t have to sit at a table and wait 20 minutes for our food and have a conversation with our family. We just stand in line and its handed to us; we sit down, chomp it down and we’re out of there in 20 minutes! But even after fast food was invented, people still had to park their cars, go inside, order their food, take it to a table, all of which took time. So they invented the Drive-through lane so people could eat in their cars, as nature intended.

McDonalds hasn’t shaped our culture so much as it has cleverly marketed to what our culture demands. We can’t fault McDonalds for offering cheap, fast, unhealthy food – they are providing what the market wants. If the market demanded cheap, fast healthy food, McDonalds would be serving us Greek yogurt sprout smoothies and tofu burgers! “Do you want kale with that?”

Burger King takes the symbol and gives it language that actually articulates the pattern of this world: “Have it your way.” That’s what the enemy whispers to us all the time! He wants to give us a severe case of “Mefirstosis”. He doesn’t want us to think about the living God and his indescribable mercy to us. He doesn’t want us to worship him in response. He wants us to focus onourselves. He wants us to become conformed to the world, blending in with no noticeable difference. If he is successful, he can keep us weak, disconnected from the power available to us; he can keep us disoriented, chasing after different things to find meaning in life. He wants us to choose a life symbolized by the Golden Arches, not one symbolized by an altar; he wants us to choose “Have it your way” rather than “Have it God’s way.”

How do we fight that?

Paul gives the answer: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Conformed or transformed! Two value systems! The world’s and God’s. And they are incompatible, even in collision with one another. The transformation envisaged in this verse is one of character and conduct, away from the pattern of this world and into the image of Christ himself. Only by the renewing of our mind can we be transformed!2 Corinthians 3:18 says, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” So we know the Spirit is transforming us; what is our part?Romans 8: 5 “…those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.”

Want to see how you’re doing on that transformation? Romans 12:9-21 offers a test of sorts where we can grade ourselves. Check it out sometime.

Back to verse 2. How does it end? “Thenyou will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Raise your hand if you would like God’s good, pleasing and perfect will? I’m going to be blunt: We won’t be able to discern it if we have an acute case of “mefirstosis”; we won’t be able to discern it if we are living closer to the Arches than the altar. Notice that God’s words says THEN YOU WILL BE ABLE TO test and approve God’s will. The ability to discern God’s will begins with the renewal of our minds which results in being transformed in Christ’s likeness; that followsoffering our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, in true worship.

There’s a question that creeps into our church culture: “Would you like to…?” Sounds like Dr. Seuss for the Church: “Would you, could you for a fee? Would you, could you quarterly? Would you, could you if no pain? Would you, could you for your gain?

Starting point: is God’s will just another option? Because once we know it,wereally only have two options: obey it or disobey it.

So how do we discern God’s will?

Let’s believe that God wantsus to know his will!! He’s not playing hide-go-seek with us; live instead a life of seek-go-find!
Let’s get off our throne and get on his altar. If we’re heading for the Arches, turn around!
Let’s watch for the answer.

We will begin to see events in our lives differently; that wasn’t just a coincidence—it was a holy coincidence, a spiritual marker pointing, along with several others, in the same direction. The greater, the more significant the discerning process, the more there will be, enough until we are able to test and know we’re on the right path. The Apostle Paul: should I go to Bithynia? No, to Macedonia. Me: should I go to Congo with Brad? Should I go to Chicago? Should we go to Selah? For every decision, he was gracious to provide all the confirmation we needed.

As we begin our journey to the Cross during this season of Lent, contemplating Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, may we be challenged to examine our response to such great mercy. Am I willing to be a “living sacrifice”? It’s a choice, isn’t it, and as Jesus told us, it is a daily choice—daily deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him. It is revealed in every choice we make. And oh the joy of discerning and following his will—his good, pleasing and perfect will!

In closing let me review our text from the “mefirstosis” perspective:

Therefore, I suggest, in view of the possibility of there being a God, that you volunteer occasionally to earn points with God. This is a reasonable response that should satisfy you and God. Do not stand out from the culture around you and its pattern of looking out for number one, but blend in by absorbing its mindset. Then you will be able to test and approve your own best choices—your self-fulfilling, self-protecting and self-gratifying choices.