Present Your Body As A Living Sacrifice

Church Family: Here is a heavy thought for you today. God demands everything from you as His child. He does not ask for 10% nor 90%. He commands everything, 100%. He calls you to be a sacrifice, a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). The implications of God's call for you to be a "living sacrifice" impacts every area of your life. You cannot hold back 1% of your life from God's reign and kingship and still be a living sacrifice. This kind of thinking in our western Christianity is more and more foreign. We tend to think that Christianity is just a system of beliefs or a way of living. Instead, God calls us to much more as Christians. He calls us to a life that is a continual living sacrifice.That is heavy.

In Romans 12, Paul speaks about how we are to worship God in light of the mercies of God poured upon us in salvation (Romans 1-11). Paul uses words from the Old Testament to describe how God is to be worshipped. Remember in the Old Testament when a worshipper came to God with a sacrifice, they laid the animal on the altar as an offering to God. Their blood was spilled and their complete life was given. Their was only a total commitment offered by the sacrifice, no turning back. There were several different kinds of sacrifices but at the heart of it was that sin demanded punishment. The slain animal represented God’s mercy to accept a substitute so that the worshiper might live and have an ongoing relationship of forgiveness and joy with God. The reason animal after animal had to be sacrificed day after day, in an endless bloody scene, was because they were not a sufficient payment for the penalty of sin. The animal sacrifices were God’s gracious provision until the coming of the ultimate, final sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus stood as a substitute, doing what no animal sacrifice was ever able to do: atone for sin once and for all (Hebrews 10:1-10).

As one who has received God's endless mercies in the Gospel, you are also to present a sacrifice to God daily. The sacrifice is yourself. You are to "present" your own body as a living sacrifice on the altar of God. No turning back. You are to “present” yourself as a living sacrifice to God just like the Old Testament priests presented the animal for the sacrifice. However, as a "living" sacrifice, you are to "present" yourself up to God joyfully, wholeheartedly, enthusiastically, eagerly with devotion to Him as your worship for God and His eternal mercies (Rom. 12:1; 15:9). You are not merely to present your mind or spirit or heart but your body as well. God wants your physical body to be a living sacrifice to Him because that is the way in which your soul expresses itself.

Presenting your body as a living sacrifice means that you live your life as Christ lived for you. When you contemplate all that God has done for you in Christ's work of redemption on the Cross, His mercies, it is only reasonable that you give your body back to Him as a living sacrifice for service. Nothing less than a complete presentation of your body will ever be acceptable to God. Your sacrifice must involve an entire and full surrender as a living, joyful, energetic, delightful sacrifice because Christ has brought you from death to life.

What are you holding back? What is God asking you to loosen your grip on to hand over to Him with joy and great expectation?

1 Corinthians 6:17-19 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
 
See you Sunday, as living sacrifices: Steve