Tuesday, Oct. 16

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Romans 12:1-2

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. 

When I was a boy the church my father served as pastor always had Sunday night church. That is, we not only had worship and Sunday school on Sunday mornings, but we came back to church every Sunday evening at 7:00 pm for an evening service. That service always had teaching/preaching but was also a bit more informal than the morning. And quite often there would be a time set aside on Sunday nights for “testimonies.” 

“Testimonies” (what we call “Faith Stories”) were people from the congregation standing up to share something that God had done in their lives. Sometimes it was an answer to prayer; sometimes it was a spiritual decision the person had made; sometimes just something they had been learning from God’s word. 

I remember one night a lady that I did not recognize stood up about three pews behind us (I was sitting with my younger brother, Joe, and our mom) and began to speak. She seemed nervous and her voice trembled with emotion. She said that she had just recently understood the gospel and had become a Christian. She said she believed that Jesus had died on the cross for her sins and that she had given her life to him. Then she said,

“I know I have a heckuvalot of changing to do; but I know that I’m saved and he’s going to help me change.”

Only she didn’t say “heckuva” – she used the other “H-word”! My brother and I poked each other because we had never heard anyone use that word in church before! I thought to myself, “Wow, she sure does!” because she didn’t even know how to talk in church!

Later, of course, I realized that I had been privileged to hear a miracle that night. The miracle, of course, was that a person had experienced and expressed what Paul says in Romans 1:

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation for all who believe.”

She was the living example of what Paul taught in Romans 10:

That if you confess with your mouth “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

So that woman had been “saved;” that is, she had been forgiven and had received the gift of eternal life, but what about change? How does change happen?

I think Paul is saying that while the gospel is about change, that change demands surrender.

Paul says:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. 

Whenever I read this text I always think of an old football coach I had in high school who was fond of saying, “You’ve got to sacrifice your body!”

I wasn’t terribly fond of the expression myself because he meant that, in order to be a good football player, you had to be willing to disregard your own safety, your own well being, all your instincts for self-preservation, and throw your body into the fray for the sake of the team and winning the game. When he said, “You gotta sacrifice your body!” he was calling for total commitment! He was challenging us not to hold anything back; to be willing to surrender our bodies for the good of the team. 

When Paul says, “offer your bodies as living sacrifices,” he is using language from the Old Testament. A sacrifice was that which was offered to God as an act of worship. But what does it mean to offer our bodies to God?

Paul uses an interesting combination of words here: he says we are to “offer our bodies” as a “spiritual act of worship” (italics mine). Evidently, the people Paul was writing to had separated their worship from the rest of their lives. Worship was spiritual; the body was physical; and the two had little to do with one another. I think that we can tend to make the same false separation at times. Paul is saying that our body; that is, how we live and how we behave, has everything to do with worship! 

In essence, Paul is teaching a spiritual version of what my old football coach used to say! If we want to experience the transformation that the gospel can bring to our lives, we must offer our bodies – our whole selves – to God as a sacrifice of worship. 

In other words, gospel change requires complete surrender to the gospel. We must surrender our minds to the truth of the gospel; we must surrender our hearts to the grace of the gospel; and we must surrender our bodies to obedience to the gospel.

The problem is we don’t like to surrender. We like to withhold parts of our minds, our hearts and our bodies; to keep them from Jesus and for ourselves. To the degree we withhold parts of ourselves from Jesus we deny the power of his grace to transform us from the inside out. 

But when we finally surrender heart, mind and will to the gospel we experience what one writer calls “The Magnificent Defeat.” 

C.S. Lewis describes his own surrender to Christ in this way:

“You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted for even a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps , that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (in Lewis’s book, “Surprised by Joy”).

Gospel change begins with surrender to the gospel. Have you waved the white flag?

Pastor Brian Coffey