Zambia Hunt

If the mercies of God are the reason we respond, what exactly are we being asked to give? In the first part of this passage, Paul grounded the whole Christian life in mercy. Here, he names the offering that mercy calls for, and it costs us everything.

Romans 12:1-2 “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.”

A Response of Sacrifice

This response is not only motivated by mercy; it is also a response of sacrifice. “Present your bodies a living sacrifice.” It is a bodily offering. The word present carries us back to the Old Testament priest preparing the lamb. He would slaughter it, catch the blood, arrange the pieces, and lay them on the altar in the prescribed way. The lamb had to be without blemish, and every detail had to follow the law of Moses. Then the fire was lit, the sacrifice was wholly consumed, and the smoke rose to heaven; it is said the aroma was a sweet fragrance in the nostrils of God. That is the picture behind the word: the priest bringing his offering to God. To present your body, then, is a decisive, once-for-all commitment that is afterward lived out every single day. You offer your flesh and blood, your will and your emotions—everything you are and everything you have—and lay it on the altar before a holy God. It is worship, the response of a heart overwhelmed by mercy.

It is a bodily sacrifice, and it is a living one. The animals of the Old Testament died and were burned to ash; this offering is different. It is the giving up of our life to the worship and service of the God who alone is worthy. It is the glad confession that God is free to ask anything of me and to do anything with me. He is completely right, completely just, completely fair, and completely free. He may take my body and do as He pleases. He may send me anywhere. He may require of me whatever delights Him.

It is a living sacrifice, and it is a holy one as well: “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy.” The word holy here means to take what is common, ordinary, and everyday and set it apart for God.

We can mistake what that means. Some time ago I was in Egypt, worshiping with Grace Baptist Church in Cairo, and one day I visited one of the oldest Coptic churches in the city, called the Hanging Church. I stood in their worship center—built, if I recall rightly, in the second century—and around its edges lay the relics: “Saint So-and-So” displayed in a glass case, supposed splinters of the cross, and much else besides. I watched the faithful come in. They would take the cloth hanging there and rub it on their foreheads. They would lean over the relics—the bones of saints—and kiss them, or kiss their own hand and lay it on the glass, believing these things would bring extra blessing upon their lives. It was regarded as a holy place, filled with holy objects, and money was never far from the transaction; you could pay to light a candle. Holy relics, it was thought, could secure a blessing.

But that is not the holiness Paul has in mind. To be holy is to take what is normal and unremarkable—something with no value of its own—and set it apart for God’s use. Think again of those Old Testament sacrifices. The priests needed a knife to cut the animal’s throat and basins to catch the blood. Imagine the need is announced, and some dear woman who loves the Lord goes to her kitchen and takes out her knife—the one she uses to cut the family’s fish and prepare their meals, a knife the household has owned for years. “They need a knife for the sacrifices,” she says. “I will give mine to the priest.” And she does. She hands over a plain, ordinary knife, and in that moment it becomes holy—common metal set apart for the use of God.

That is what it means to present your body a holy sacrifice. You take your ordinariness, your “nothing special,” and you give it wholly to God for Him to use as He wills. So do not think of yourself more highly than you ought. There is nothing in you of value in itself, and yet you may set yourself apart and place yourself entirely in His hands. Paul’s own question silences our pride: “What do you have that you were not given?” We are tempted to protest—”Ah, but I am gifted; I am intelligent; look at the fine suit someone gave me”—and the question only returns: what do you have that you did not first receive?

We sing it easily enough: “Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.” It is a simple song to sing on a Sunday morning. It is quite another thing to mean it—to say, “God, here is my life as a living sacrifice. Use me. Spend me. Do with me whatever You will. I have no demands, no agenda, no future apart from You. You are my everything. You are God, and You are sovereign—the first eleven chapters have proved it. You are gracious and merciful. You saved me when I was not even looking for You. You came, You loved me, You wrapped me in Your love, You gave me a new life, You forgave my sins, and You secured my future in heaven. So I want only to worship and to serve You well. Take my life. If You would have me marry, give me a wife; if not, then not. It is wholly Yours to decide. I am Yours—a sacrifice, set apart for You.”

That is what makes a man a saint. Not that he is unusually pleasant, nor that he holds an office, nor that he does good things, but that God in Christ has set him apart for Himself. In Egypt I stood before the supposed remains of one revered saint and thought, with a smile, “Then I am Saint Phil.” And so I am—Paul says as much. Not because I am holy in myself, and not because I am remarkable. I am not the most educated man, nor the most brilliant in any room. Neither were the twelve disciples. No one assembling a team of impressive servants for Jesus would have chosen them; line them up, and Peter looks more like a rough character than a candidate. Yet these were the men God called. He does not seek us out for our talent or brilliance or beauty or wealth or credentials. He says simply, “Present your bodies a living sacrifice.” Set apart the ordinary for His service.

The offering of Isaac shows us what such a sacrifice looks like. In Genesis 22, God comes to Abraham and says, “Take your son, your only son. Go to the mountain I will show you, and offer there your only son, Isaac—the son of promise, the one you waited a hundred years to receive—as a sacrifice to Me on Mount Moriah.” Early the next morning Abraham rises. He saddles the donkeys and takes Isaac, who by now was likely about thirty years old, a grown man and no longer a boy. He gathers the servants, the knife, the fire, and the wood, and they set out. After three days they reach the mountain.

As they climb, Isaac says, “Father, have we forgotten something?” “What are you thinking, my son?” “I see the fire and the wood, and I see the knife—but where is the lamb?” “My son, God will provide for Himself a lamb.” They reach the summit. Picture the two of them setting the stones and building the altar, laying out the wood, carrying up the little pot of coals. Then Abraham says, “Son, get up on the altar. You are the sacrifice.” And Isaac willingly climbs onto it. This was no struggle of an old man overpowering a youth; a man of a hundred and twenty does not wrestle his thirty-year-old son into submission. My own father could not have done such a thing to me at sixteen, let alone at thirty—I would have said, “Father, I do not know what has come over you, but this will not happen.” Yet Isaac lays himself down willingly. Abraham binds him, takes the knife, and raises it to obey God. And just as the blade begins to fall, the voice of God breaks from heaven: “Abraham!” “Yes, Lord?” “Stop. Now I know that you have not withheld from Me the thing most precious to you—your son, your only son. Take Isaac off the altar.” And there in the thicket is a ram caught by its horns, offered in the boy’s place. Isaac comes down from the altar a living sacrifice.

A Response of Worship

That is precisely what Paul means: present your body as a living sacrifice. It is a responsive sacrifice, and it is responsive worship as well—”acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Worship here is not first of all a ritual, a set of songs and readings, a ceremony performed in a building. Worship is the offering of our whole life to God. That is the worship He desires. He is not chiefly interested in what we can do for Him or give to Him; He wants us—all of us. He does not want our money so much as He wants us. And of course, when God has the whole of me, He has everything I carry: my car and its keys, my checkbook, all of it follows.

Yet how easily we deceive ourselves. We leave a service saying, “Worship was wonderful today—how we worshiped!” But have we mistaken the singing of a few songs for worship itself? The all-seeing eye of a sovereign God looks past our lips, past the words that leave them, and into the heart. When He looks into yours, does He find a heart fully consecrated as a living sacrifice? Or does He find locked boxes there—one or two of them open, the rest sealed shut: “God, this part is Yours, and this; but these others I will keep for myself”? A heart of worship is the only acceptable offering. This is the priestly service of the new covenant, and it redefines worship entirely. God does not want a coin tossed from your pocket, nor an hour and a half of your week on a Sunday morning. He wants it all. It is the only reasonable response to the mercy He has poured out on you.

Give us men and women, then, who will go to the very end—to death itself, if it is required—because they have already died to self and presented themselves alive to God. Give us a church wholly committed to Jesus, with nothing held back. For when you lay yourself on the altar, everything changes.

(Edited from sermon transcript: https://tinyurl.com/2e4jubf7)