Kennystix's podcast
Present Your Bodies As a Living Sacrifice to God
The following resource is from desiringGod.org. I invite you to open your Bibles to this morning's text, which can be found in Romans, the 12th chapter, and I'll be reading verses 1 and 2. Again, Romans, the 12th chapter, verses 1 and 2. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercy of God to present your bodies as living sacrifices, 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. Let's pray together. Father, you know that I count it the highest privilege of my life and one of the greatest joys to stand under your word and before your people, to preach the gospel. What an amazing privilege, humble me under it, I pray and make me faithful to your word. It is so powerful, it is so precious. If I had not delighted in your law, I would have perished in my affliction, the Psalmist said. If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction. Lord, would you cause your word to be loved now, to be the delight of your people? Holy Spirit, would you come upon us right now and give us hearts attuned to the Word of God? So bring our minds and our hearts, indeed our bodies, into conformity with the truth that you have revealed in the Bible. So shape us into a kind of people that when we go out, there will be an aroma of Christ about us, that we will be good for the world, salt, light. We are aware, Lord, that there are tens of thousands of people celebrating sin on Hennepin Avenue this morning. It breaks our hearts, it grieves us, that there would be a parade in our city devoted to the celebration of homosexuality. Father, my prayer for that parade is that thousands of people would be mercifully made disillusioned with sin and awaken to the hope of forgiveness and the hope of redemption and the hope of purity and the hope of everlasting joy. In ways that we can't even imagine, grant disillusionment with sin and awakening to the hope of holiness. And now, here, Lord, guard us from self-righteousness, which is more damnable than any sexual sin, and make us humbly thankful for Christ in His name, my prayer, amen. It's a little bit of review. Beginning now in chapter 12 of Romans, if you have your Bible open, keep them open. And last week's point was, build your life on something. We got it out of that word, therefore, in verse 1, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers by the mercies of God, so therefore, because of chapters 1 to 11, build your life there. Don't let your life just hang in the air, don't let your life be rootless, build it on something, send your roots down into Romans 1 to 11. Then we saw in that phrase, "Buy the mercies of God," how Paul reaches for a phrase to sum up the whole thing, and he says, mercies of God, that's what it's been about. God sends Jesus Christ into the world, that He might die, that He might rise, so that we could be forgiven for all of our sins, that the righteousness of Christ could be imputed to us, that we could be made holy progressively by the Holy Spirit, that we could be given the hope of everlasting life, the door of paradise could be opened to us. So mercy abounds in chapters 1 to 11, so build your life on mercy. Send your roots down into mercy. All of it moving toward Romans 12, mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy, flowing out from us. And I hit a few highlights, like, show mercy with cheerfulness, let love be genuine, give to the saints, bless those who persecute you, weep with those who weep, associate with the holy, repay no one evil for evil, never offend yourselves. If your enemy is hungry, feed him if he's thirsty, give him drink. What's coming in this chapter is without doubt, a lifestyle of amazing mercy, mercy, mercy. What should mark Christians is that we are merciful. We go beyond what is deserved in others and bless them and bless them and bless them at cost to ourselves. That's the only thing that will awaken America to the beauty of Christ. They're not interested in whether or not we prosper. They're interested in whether or not we're willing to suffer. Mercy is what will make a name for Jesus. But now, this morning I want to draw your attention to something in verse 1 that is prior to the lifestyle of mercy. I want to make crystal clear this morning something very remarkable about the order of this chapter and about verse 1 in relation to what's coming, and it's this, before you think that Christianity has everything to do with being merciful towards people, realize Christianity is first having everything to do with being worshipful toward God. Before it is merciful, before we are merciful to people, we are to be worshipful to God. Let's read the verse and you'll see it. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which, and that which refers to all of that, the presenting of your body, holy, acceptable, your body, what you do with your hands, what you do with your feet, your eyes, your ears, your tongue, what you do with your body, all of that, presented to God, which is your spiritual worship. Before Christianity is mercy, it is worship. Before your life is merciful to others, it is worshipful to God. This is absolutely crucial to see. Otherwise, our mercy will become a mere social agenda, and I use the word mere carefully, because while I believe social agendas are massively important for Christians to have, if they don't flow from and to worship, they are mere social agendas. We need to see here there's not just a chronological temporal sequential thing going on, there is a foundation root thing going on. It's not just that verse 1 says, "All of life is worship, and then all of life is mercy comes later." That's the sequence. Be saying if you don't get all of your life as worship, it can't be merciful. You cannot be a merciful person ultimately if you are not a worshipful person first. There's a reason for that, making people comfortable or happy on the way to everlasting destruction. If you have no hope and no design in your mercy, that they would recognize the God of mercy and come to meet the God of mercy and make much of the God of mercy. If that design and that hope is not in and through all your merciful behavior, you're not a merciful person. Putting a bandaid on a cancer might relieve some skin irritation. But if you don't do surgery, radiation, chemo, something, you're not a merciful person. So when Paul begins, I want to explain something, namely, bodies, lives are for worship. Now discovering that, go be merciful with that. Because what everybody needs underneath all their other needs and through all their other needs is mercy from God. They need to worship him for his mercy. We saw that last week from chapter 15, verse 9 that Christ came in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. So this was a very significant discovery for me that this chapter built on Romans 1-11, moving into four or five chapters of merciful lifestyle has this transitional flag to wave. First, there is a spiritual worship to understand. All of life is worship. So what does he mean by a lifestyle of worship in verse 1? Let's read it again. "I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly unacceptable to God, which is your, all of that is your spiritual worship." What does he mean by spiritual worship? Now first he means presenting a sacrifice, present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Now that's Old Testament language, right? Take a sheep, a bull, a goat, a pigeon, up to the temple, give it over to the priest. The priest slits the throat. The blood pours out on the altar and God in his mercy sees that and counts it as a kind of typical substitute for you who belong on that altar with a slit throat for your sins. That's where we all belong. We have all sinned enough to merit being killed. And God ordained that in the Old Testament there be sacrifices offered up in the place of the people. That's the language here. Now every Old Testament saint knew the blood of bulls and goats does not take away sin. Hebrews 10. The blood of bulls and goats covers nobody's sin. So what's going on? They knew this, is that these animals were somehow foretaste, shadows, types, preparations, tastes. They were somehow pointing to something that someday would make it all make sense, would make it all work. And we all know that now, that they were all pointing to the sacrifice. Jesus, no, a moral animal can atone for my moral failures. There must be a moral being perfect, so much dignity, so much worth that when he lays his life down as a perfect substitute for me, that will work in the eyes of God. And so Paul says concerning Jesus, 1 Corinthians 5, 7, Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed. And even more clearly and decisively, Hebrews 10, 12, when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Oh, the glory of the once for allness of the sacrifice of Jesus. One sacrifice so that we should never give the slightest indication that we would add to it or improve upon it in any way. One atoning sacrifice that is so infinitely valuable and so completely sufficient that it covers all the sins past, present, and future of all God's people. Now that's the language of verse 1. And it's very dangerous language because it says now you take your body and bring it as a sacrifice and therefore we must be very careful that we not in any way think my bodily offering, my life, my death is somehow an improvement upon an addition to a completion of the once for all sacrifice for my sins of Jesus Christ. Everything you have in your body, nothing you do with your body by way of obedience can add anything to that sacrifice. And therefore we must now ask, what do you mean, Paul? What do you have in mind by my body being offered as a sacrifice in worship? My way of approaching this is to take the four words in this verse that define this sacrifice and unpack them with you one at a time. Bodies, living, holy, acceptable to God. Those four things define what he means by this sacrifice. Let's take them one at a time, bodies, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God which is your spiritual worship. What you do with your bodies is worship. Now the point here is not to say bodies not spirit, bodies not mind, bodies not heart. That's not the point. The point is not bodies and not that. We know that because verse two, Paul is saying I'm getting to mind, I'm going to get your mind in verse two. Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may be able to prove it is the will of God. I'm going through your mind big time in verse two, but I've got something to make really clear here in verse one, namely, don't think Christianity is a mind religion, don't think Christianity is a heart religion, don't think Christianity is a spirit religion only. I want your body. So we need to let this land on us very significantly today that the body is being focused on and since we know that the mind, the heart, the spirit, the conscience, they're all coming, what he really means is I want all of you. I want your fingers. I want your ears. I want your tongue, your hands and your feet. I want your whole body. Now at this point, understandings could go all over the place as to why he wants this body and somebody might say, why would he be interested in my body? I'm overweight or underweight, a wrinkled, blotchy, achy, diseased, impulsive, nervous, unattractive, lazy, awkward in my body, disabled, nearsighted, hard of hearing, stiff, brittle, why would he want this body? This is not one of those sheep that has no flaw. This body is very flawed. Why does he want this body? I don't measure up. I'm not a sacrifice that will suffice. I'm not one of those sheep that didn't have a broken leg. I'm broken. My body is just, I don't like my body. Now that kind of thinking misses the point. The sacrifice of our bodies to God is not a sacrifice for sin. It is not a sacrifice to deserve anything. That's done already. That sacrifice was made already. The sacrifice to deserve something was made already. Your body doesn't deserve. Everything. Peter makes this wonderfully clear for us. Let me just read you this verse. You don't have to go there. First Peter 2.5 is the closest parallel to this verse outside of Romans, probably. He goes like this. This is "offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." Now those words, which Paul doesn't mention here but surely would agree with, offer sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. The reason God can take a body like this, this aging, achy, stiff, flabby, splotchy, hair-losing body is because it's coming through Jesus Christ. It's the only reason any of our behavior can be pleasing to Him or any of our bodies can be acceptable to Him is because they come through Jesus Christ. Here's another reason that kind of thinking is out of sync with this verse and misses the point. The offering of our bodies is not the offering of our bodily looks but our bodily behavior. Let's get this really clear. When Paul says, "God wants your body, offer up your body," he's not saying, "I want your bodily looks," he's saying, "I want your bodily action, I want your bodily behavior." This is really, really significant. Your looks are what most Americans work most on with regard to their bodies. Our behavior is what God wants us to do with our bodies. The reason you have a body is to make the beauty of Christ known, visible. Now, how was Jesus beautiful? Listen to Isaiah 53. He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, no beauty that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. The beauty of Jesus Christ was not the beauty of looks, it was the beauty of love. The beauty of Jesus Christ was the beauty of sacrifice, not the beauty of skin. So when I say the reason we have bodies, the reason we have an aspect of our being that is visible in the world, touchable is to make something visible, namely the beauty of Christ I don't mean His looks, I mean His love, I don't mean His skin, I mean His sacrifice. God doesn't demand our bodies because He wants us to become models for Mademoiselle or bodies and models for planet muscle. He wants us to be models of mercy, oh, that we could get this straight, a little linger here a minute for the sake of our children, parents, single people, we're mature, we understand, we should, we may not, but we should, we should understand these things and we need to build this. We need to embed this biblical truth into the minds and hearts of our little ones, beginning at 2, 3. What kind of a bathing suit to put your three-year-old in? You think you're going to change them at 13? Don't count on it. You need to embed into our children this truth. My body means before God my behavior, not my looks. For the sake of anorexia, for the sake of bulimia, mainly with young women and now increasingly I read with young men because in part of a culture that is so unbelievably relenting in the lies it tells about bodies. From the littlest girl and the littlest boy lie after lie after lie is coming to them about what their body means and I'm afraid many parents play right into it. If we could just embed in our children the truth, God looks on the inward man and how it works itself out in mercy by the body, he does not look upon the body to see its muscles and curves and hair distribution and complexion. If only we could help them early on. I think I remember the names of maybe five girls from my senior class in high school, out of 300. And Cheryl is one of them, amazing to me that I remember Cheryl. I haven't seen her for 40 years. Cheryl was the most overweight girl in the class and absolutely the kindest and happiest and most merciful person I knew in the class. It was like an early lesson for me, I don't think I learned it, but linking back what a lesson, where is beauty in God's eyes and it isn't on your skin, it isn't whether you have in a bad hair day, it isn't on whether your hips are too broad or your muscles are not there, it's just not there. You're going to die real soon and that's going to mean zero on your deathbed. And everything that matters to you will be, have I used the little arms that I have, have I used the shape that I have to love people, to get my arms around people, to take things to people and they need them, I tell you, you show up when somebody needs something with what they need, they're going to care how you're dressed or what you're looking like. You're going to be a beautiful person at that moment. Oh, I linger here because it just feels like a big deal with our teenagers. Just such a big deal. You have a body to give bodily evidence that Jesus is your treasure. That's why you have a body. Men and men have bodies to give evidence by the way you use your body that Jesus is your treasure and that will mainly show by your behavior, not your looks. So invest a few minutes on your looks and invest 23 hours on your behavior. Be like Paul Bran's mother told you this story before, I'll tell it again, I'll love it. Paul Bran, missionary to India, his mother, missionary before him, he was a surgeon. She lived in India till the day she died, I think in her 90s. When she was 70, he went back to see her after being in England for years. She had become so wrinkled, he was just stunned, he said, "Mother, you're so wrinkled." She took every mirror out of her house at age 70, never had another mirror for the next 20 years and later life down in the hills of India for people. And when she died, thousands came from provinces all around to celebrate the beauty of the most wrinkled woman in India. It might not be a bad idea to take all the mirrors out of your house. I know that you just wouldn't be able to fix your hair or get your tie straight. I said to Kenny on the way in, you want to get your knot in the middle of your collar. But don't stay there very long. Okay, that's enough on bodies. Living, that's number one, living, the other's a shorter. Living presents your bodies as living sacrifice. Holy acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. What you do with your body is worship and now it's called a living sacrifice. So let's get out of our minds that what's in Paul's mind here is mainly martyrdom. It's not to be a faithful Christian might mean that one of the things you do with your body is let it be killed for Jesus. That might happen. That's not in view here. In view here is living bodies, living sacrifice. So that when you walk out of here into that beautiful day and you feel very much alive, let it be a living with your body to display the worth of Jesus to you. We are alive in order to make Jesus known. Let every act of your living body be an act of worship. Let every act of your living body show the worth of Jesus. Let every act of your living body be a death to everything in your life that dishonors Christ. Verse 13, put to death the deeds of the body that you might live. It's a very paradoxical thing that self-denial and mortification and crucifixion are part of living. When do you feel most alive? We were asked that at the staff retreat the other day. When do you feel most alive? And I would venture if you can remember back to the last time you shared your faith. Or did something that an undeserving person did something good for them and you came home and every fiber of your body said, "You're real!" Whereas many of our days we're living so much for ourselves, there's this little voice saying, "You're not real. You're not real. You're not real." And we don't feel alive at those moments. But when, by grace, we love people. We speak our faith and we get arms around a needy person, life comes. Don't deny yourself being alive, which is a living sacrifice. Number three, holy, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, which is your spiritual worship. The best exposition of the word holy in relation to bodies and worship is chapter 6 verse 13. If I were you, I would write in the margin beside chapter 12 verse 1, 6 colon 13 and I would write beside 6 13, 12 colon 1, because they are almost identical verses in Romans. Let me read 6 13 with you. Do not present your members to sin. Some members mean your hands, legs, tongue, eyes, ears, sexual organs. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness. That's unholyness. But present yourselves to God, same idea, right? Same word. Present God. This is 12 1 in advance. Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, living sacrifice, and your members to God, your members, your bodies to God as instruments of righteousness. Now that is what present your body as a holy sacrifice means, holy, that is, let these hands be for instruments of righteousness in the world. As they click on the keyboard or push the mouse and click, let every click be righteousness. Swear it, nail it, I will not make my index finger on the left key on instrument of unrighteousness. Oh brothers, draw a line in the sand before you meet Jesus and make these hands holy. Go to say in 1 Timothy, I beseech all men everywhere to lift holy hands in prayer. Are they dirty? What have you done with your hands in the last 24 hours? What keys have you punched? What have you touched? What magazines have you opened? What channels have you turned to with these hands? You have defiled hands this morning, defiled eyes, defiled mind. I am so thankful for the blood of Jesus, are you not? It is only through Christ that these hands can be acceptable, and let me with that turn to the last point. The last one is beyond holy to acceptable to God, acceptable to God, because all I want to do here on this last point is ask, what does that add to holiness? Present your members as instruments of righteousness, present your bodies as holy, worshipful to God, use your eyes, your ears, your tongue, your mouth, your feet, your sexual organs, your hands, use it all for holiness and righteousness, which is acceptable to God. If you ask, what does acceptable means, it means holy, righteous, doing what you are designed to do by God, but what does he add? What does he add to the phrase holy by saying acceptable to God? He simply adds God. He makes God explicit. We should be thinking about God when we say holy. We should be thinking about God when we say living, bodies, acceptable, but here he makes it explicit, acceptable to God. So I just want to close by going back to the beginning and making a big arc over the whole thing and saying he moves into chapter 12, he's moving towards bodies that are merciful. And before he does that, he says, I want you to know, before your bodies are designed for mercy, they're designed for worship. This one is all about spiritual worship with bodies, which means when you think about it that mercy is both the goal and the means of worship here. Think about it. You have to know him, love him, delight in him, treasure him, worship him before you can be a merciful person. You won't have resources for mercy and you won't know what to bring people to in mercy if you don't already have that worshiping relationship. But it's also the other way around. Mercy is what displays God. Mercy is what makes Jesus beautiful and the display of God and the making of him beautiful is worship, is what enables other people to see him. And so we're aiming at mercy by worshiping and we are aiming at worship through mercy. We're all words, we used to use it back to him about missions. That worship is the fuel and goal of missions, we used to say. Now it's the same thing with mercy. Worship is the fuel and worship is the goal. So let me close with two words from the Apostle Paul, a word of testimony and a word of exhortation. I love the Apostle Paul, one of my best arguments for Christianity and why I am a Christian, then I would say this to a certain kind of person who's on a quest to discover whether Christianity is real. I would say, you know, one of the ways to get to know whether Christianity is real is meeting somebody and getting to know them well enough that their life and their words are so absolutely stunningly authentic and counterintuitive and Godward that you cannot resist the truth of their life. Now for me, Paul has been one of those. I admit Jesus is the main one, but I would just offer that for a second. Here are 13 letters that a man wrote one time who lived about 2,000 years ago, 13 letters that he wrote, would you just read those 13 letters and see if you think he's crazy, a fool or if he's in touch with the living God? So I love the Apostle Paul and when he speaks, I listen, I really listen. I believe he is inspired by the living God and here's one word of his testimony. This is Philippians 1, 20 and it goes like this, my eager expectation and hope now as always is that Christ would be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death. I'll tell you when I hear the Apostle Paul talk like that. My hope, my design, my passion, my zeal, my reason for being is that by my body, whether I die or whether I live, by my body, I might make Jesus look good. I say, okay, I know what life is about now. John Piper has his body for what it's worth to make Christ visible and it won't happen by my looks, guarantee. It just might happen if I'm caring enough, loving enough, humble enough, merciful enough to reach out. Just tell you another little anecdote. You know that I jog about three mornings a week and I carry, there it is, I carry these. This is Quest for Joy. I recommend women, put them in your purse, men in your pocket, carry them around all the time. You carry Christian literature, you're way more likely to speak for Christ because then you can give somebody something and leave them and that's a good way to end the conversation. Would you read that? So I carry these. So I'm running down by the river and I see this guy sitting there, his headphones on listening and I stop and I pull my headphones off, I'm listening to the passion CD, I pull my headphones off and I say, what you listening to? And he said, "rap" is, let's say, I run through the neighborhood and I pray for people. Would you like me to pray for anything for you? And I say there for this guy for about ten minutes talking about Jesus and it made a huge difference that I had something to give, that he was open and that my body was there and you know what he said? He said, "action, action, I don't care about words, I look for action. I want to see action in people, talk all you want, I want action." I think that is just a perfect emblem of the world's attitude towards the church. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. It might not be a mistake that the tongue is a very small member of the body and that arms and legs are so big, that might be a symbol of something. Too little of this and much of this, maybe. That's the testimony. Here's the exhortation and I close with this. It comes from 1 Corinthians 6, 19 and 20. You are not your own. You were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. You're not your own Bethlehem, not a single person in this room belongs to yourself. You were bought, you were created in your His by creation, you were bought by the blood of Jesus, you belong to Him, your body is His, use your body to glorify God. Let's pray together. Father, we're all about worship first, mercy second, then more worship. A life flowing out of worship into mercy, out of mercy into worship. So as we close now in song, may we worship. I pray that we will say with all of our heart, take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to the take my hands, take my feet, take my silver, take my gold, take me. So Lord, as we sing now, may there be fresh consecration in this room of our bodies to you for your pleasure and worship. Thank you for listening to this resource from desiringGod.org. If you found it helpful, we encourage you to enjoy and share from thousands of resources on our site, including books, sermons, articles, and more, available free of charge. 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God gave us bodies to make his glory more visible. The aim of showing mercy is showing God.