Living Sacrifices: A Life of Faith and Mercy

This is September the 22nd, Sunday night, and I'm going to talk about what it means to be saved, Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2, if you can find that in your Bibles. If you were to ask someone, how does a person become saved and what does it mean to be saved, what are some of the answers that you might get? Be baptized, okay. Do good deeds. Trust Jesus into your heart. Believe in God. Be an American. What? Yeah. Okay, a boat coming by, rescue you, yeah. The Bible doesn't talk a lot about salvation in this fashion, and Paul certainly doesn't himself. But what he does describe is what it means to be a follower of Christ or a Christian, one that follows him. And Paul's method of dealing with all kinds of practical Christian things is to, when you ask him a question about what should you do about this or that or the other, how should a person, Christian, live, he begins with a long discussion about the doctrines of the Christian faith. And then when he gets finished discussing the theological basis for what he's going to say, he answers those things at the last part of it. In this section, Paul has taken 11 chapters to build up to the discussion about what he wants to say to the church in Rome. We don't know the issues that were in that church, but it seems to be that there were concerns that we will see as we go through here that he was trying to address. But Paul started in a very different way. He started off talking about the fact that everyone in the world had fallen short of what God wanted for them. Every person in the world has failed to live up to the recognition of God's authority over their life. That's true for pagans, it's true for the Jews, he said. And since everyone had sinned, all of this started with Adam and Eve, and the sin of Adam and Eve has influenced the whole world. And in the middle of all of that, God has tried to respond to that. And it wasn't, he said, by circumcision or by keeping the works of the law that a person became acceptable to God. But instead, it was the act of faith as represented in Abraham's life. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. So he became acceptable to God because of his trust in God. When God told him that he was going to have a child, and he believed that, it was counted to him as righteousness. So it was this act of faith, not keeping the acts of the law, not keeping the teachings of the law, but it was this act of faith. And the works of the law came out of this faith that Abraham professed. So he's talking now about the fact that it is the faith that we place in God that brings us into a relationship of trust with him. This relationship of trust then provides a means whereby we have built in our relationship with God, and he responds with his mercy toward us. He ends this last section summarizing all of what took place in the previous part, in the previous books, in chapter 11, verse 28. As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies on your account, but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs. He's talking to these Jews and Gentiles in the church at Rome. He's saying as far as the gospel is concerned, preaching of Christ, the Jews are now enemies because of that, because they've rejected that, but as far as God's choice of them through which he was working all through human history, they are loved because of the promise God made to the patriarchs. For God's gifts and his call are irrevocable. God's promise to them cannot be done away with. Just as you were at one time disobedient to God, he's talking about the Gentiles, you refused to accept the message of God, and have now received mercy. The mercy was that they received the message of Christ and believed it. Just as a result of their disobedience, they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God's mercy to you. Because of God's mercy to you, they now see that, they'll be jealous and accept this too. For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all. Did you notice the word mercy repeated in this passage? Four times it's mentioned. And Paul is talking about now the Jews and Gentiles both have come to the place to be able to receive the mercy of God. Now when he starts with chapter 12 verse 1, he wants to describe as a result of this experience of God's mercy, what happens in a person when that takes place. Paul is describing when you come to recognize the authority of God and you place your trust and your faith in him, here is what results. Therefore this key word helps us to understand that what he's talking about now is a conclusion. Is it a conclusion just to this last paragraph? Some think so. Some think chapter 11, but I think it's probably a conclusion from chapter 1 all the way through chapter 11. All of these things I've been telling you now result in this reality being true. I urge you brothers, I challenge you, I command you. All those are different ways by which this word could be translated. Beseech is one word I think that's used in the King James Version. All of those words are true. A command, an order, or a beseeching, or an urging. This is my urge to you who are in Christ. He calls them brothers. Not in terms of the Jewish relationship, but he's talking to this church where all of them have the faith of Abraham. And since because of that they are also spiritual brothers to Paul. So he's speaking to this church, saying this is my urgent plea to you. This is my command to you. In view of God's mercy, all of these things that have taken place, and because you have received the mercy of God, to talk about God's mercy is to say that God does not treat us as we deserve to be treated. He instead treats us better than we deserve to be treated. So he has mercy. He holds back on his judgment and instead gives us something different than that. And because of the faith that we placed in Christ, he has mercy on us. He responds to our faith by mercy, forgives our sins, adopts us into his family, now begins to guide us and implants the spirit of God inside of us. All of these are acts of God's kindness to us, his mercy to us as a result of our trust and faith in him. And so I urge you because or as a result of the mercy God has in you to offer your bodies as living sacrifices. Now, Paul has already talked about when he talked about the Jewish community, about the sacrifice not being a part, not not enabling them to to be able to receive the forgiveness of God. He's now talking about sacrifice in a different way. The Old Testament system of sacrifices were gone, and the Jewish people might look at this and say, what is God's remedy for all of this? Paul's appealing to what they understood or they knew the sacrifice. He says to offer your bodies as living sacrifices. The sacrifice was something that person gave to God. He encourages them to give their bodies to God as a result of the mercy that God has shown to them. He's describing what the life of faith really is. It's not simply that you say, I believe in God or you pray a prayer or you join a church or you be baptized or you take the Lord's Supper. It is a living expression of yourself and submission and surrender and sacrifice to God. It comes not because Paul commands them to give their bodies as living sacrifices. It comes as a result of God's forgiveness and mercy in the life of a believer. So someone yields themselves to God, says to him, I now accept you as the ruler and Lord of my life. As a result of that, then God forgives their sin. As a result of that, he wipes away the fear and the shame from them. As a result of that, he places the Holy Spirit in their life. And now because of this abundant mercy of God, this kindness from God, they feel an obligation. They feel a current concern, a pressure to respond to God's mercy. If somebody does something wonderful for you, overwhelmingly wonderful for you, and you're astonished at how at the magnitude of it, what builds up inside of us is a desire, a desire to express to that person our appreciation for what's taken place. This is his appeal. Because of the mercy that God has given, you should feel inside of you the overwhelming desire to present your bodies to God as a living sacrifice. Now, he's not talking about here a living sacrifice simply saying you're alive. But he's talking about a sacrifice like in the Old Testament, where a person brought to God the very best that he had, and he placed it on the altar and let it be consumed, be given to God directly so that God could take that and possess it and hold it. He's talking about that picture. Now he's saying that old system is gone. What is in place of this? How do we express to God our yielding? In the Old Testament, you brought the animal. You had the ritual to go through. You did all that. God received it. If you had a Thanksgiving offering, you made it. If you had an offering for sin, you made that. If you had an offering for a pledge, you made that. There was a way by which you could go and you could make an offering, a sacrifice, to express to God your submission and surrender to him and your obedience to him. Now, he's saying to these Roman believers, the sacrificial system has been altered. No longer do you use the animal, but you yourself are to be a sacrifice. The living sacrifice expresses more than simply the fact that you're alive. It expresses that the sacrifice is a continual experience of your life with God. And whenever you start down this road and experience the mercy of God and you want to express to God your great love for him and faithfulness, you will find that over and over again, God calls on your actions to be sacrificial toward him. You heard Denise talk about today, in her own story, about saying to God, I give you my life and whatever you ask for me, I will do. And God said, go stand by somebody. And so she did. You see over and over the things he's asked her to do. She said, I thought I didn't have time to do these things. You know what that is? I don't have time, so I'm going to give away some of my time, which is a sacrifice of my life. And that's what he's talking about. What wells up in the side of a person who has surrendered their life to God and understands the forgiveness and grace that God gives them is an overwhelming sense of a desire to be obedient to what God asks. So Paul is urging them to be aware that God is asking them for a continual sacrifice in their life. You don't ever get through with this. You start out and you do what God wants and you live your life a little longer. And he stops and says, OK, there's something else I want from you and I ask you to make this sacrifice for me. It is a living sacrifice, not something that you do once in your life. I'm afraid sometimes that we project to people that salvation is an experience in which you pray a prayer and then are baptized and it's finished. Your sacrifice is you pray to God this prayer and then you go up and be baptized and then you've got it made. This is it. Paul presents the idea of this life in Christ as a continual living event. Where over and over again, you're confronted with the challenge from God to say to him, I hear what you're asking of me and because of your mercy, because of what you've done for me, I'm willing to give whatever you ask. I'm willing to set aside out of my life whatever you want me to do. I'm willing to change my life in whatever way you're asking of me. This is what he sees as the nature of this life in Christ. You're to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. That is something you give over and over again to the call of God. Three things he says about what we are to do, offer our bodies as this living sacrifice, offer our bodies as holy. Now, by the word holy, he means not only to be moral, which is a small part of this, but he means to be set apart as God's unique ownership. The word holy in the Bible really has as its very root meaning to set something aside. You say this is special for me and it only belongs to me and it's mine and I own it. You would use this concept of holiness so that a person that set apart for God is holy. God, you use me in any way that you want and that makes you holy. That's what makes you a saint. You see, we have a misunderstanding of this concept of sainthood in the Bible because in our culture, sainthood is the result of doing some extraordinary things that are miraculous. Like to be declared a saint, a person has to have committed a miracle, but performed a miracle. And you have to have people who can testify that something happened that's beyond any human explanation, maybe two or three. I forgot how many it is. So if the person has committed these miracles and lived a holy life, then they can be declared a saint. The Bible sees sainthood as one thing. You say to God, my life is no longer controlled by me. My life is no longer controlled by the people around me. I give my life to you. That's what it means to give your life to God. So my life now belongs to you. That makes it holy. It's only for God's use. My life is given to you to use in whatever way you want. Now, everything that you do within that life frame is a holy event. Not just the religious stuff, but everything you do within that framework to God is a holy event. Because he directs your life, and you live in obedience to him, just belonging to him. No one else owns you but God. So you give yourself as a living sacrifice, that is, every day of your life this is to be true, sacrificing yourself for God, giving yourself in service to God, and you are to be a holy sacrifice to God. Your life is to be set apart only for God's use. And the final is to be pleasing to God. This is where the element of moral living comes in. So that your life of obedience to God brings pleasure to him because you are living as he chooses you to live. So Paul's appeal is, because of the mercy of God, here's what's going to happen to you. You should present yourself to God saying, I give myself as a sacrifice to you. This should be done daily, every day the rest of your life. You should see yourself as God's only. You belong to him, that's holy, and you should do the things that would be pleasing to God. So when he tells you what you should do, you act in obedience to that. This, he says, the translation here is your spiritual worship. It's another big problem that we have. If you were to ask people what does it mean to worship God, what might they say? Go to church. Sing. Pray. He has just defined for us what he calls spiritual worship. It's these three things. These things are the spiritual worship you have for God. Now he uses the word spiritual here, but it can also be translated the rational or reasonable worship. Sometimes it's reasonable, sometimes it's translated rational, sometimes it's translated spiritual, and those might seem different. But what it does, it has the impact of saying this is the worship that comes from inside of you. Your mind thinks this way. OK, how should I worship God? I should do these things. I should give myself as a sacrifice ongoing all the rest of my life. I should be set aside as holy for God. I should do the things that please God. This is your worship. Worship defined oftentimes by people is what takes place on Sunday morning. You go to a church building or to somebody's house and you have a service in which you sing, pray, and preach. Paul describes worship as what you do day by day in your life. So when you get up in the morning and you begin your life, every action of your life is an act of worship to God. Worship means to lift God to the place of supreme authority over your life so that the choices you make that you think are consistent with what God wants for you is actually worship. When I get up in the morning and I talk to Carol and things are going maybe not like I want them to go, how I react to her, if it's consistent with what God wants for me, is an act of worship. Why? Because it is allowing God to control my mind, my mouth, and my actions. So when God is controlling me, I'm acknowledging that he is the supreme ruler of my life. Everything we think, everything we do, all the actions we make are acts of worship because the mercy of God has given us forgiveness, His Holy Spirit lives within us, and now we are living under His control. And all the things we do in obedience to Him and in His control are acts of exalting His name to the highest heaven. He is the ruler. And the word here translated spiritual, sometimes rational, sometimes thinking, is really talking about the fact that it's in our minds that this worship occurs. We've made a decision that Christ will now control our lives. That's in our minds. And what we think works out in what we say and in the things that we do. So in our spiritual mind, that is the mind part of us, we are thinking, God is in control of my life, what should I do about this circumstance, something happens I don't like. I'm sitting there listening to what's taking place, watching what's taking place, reacting to that situation, and I have one of two ways of doing it. I can either do what God would want me to do, react in that way, or I can react as I've always heard and seen in my family or my culture. So He's urging us to say, remember, the act of worship that you present to God is the way you live. That's your worship. Now, that's not separated from what you do at church. The consistency is when you come to church and you sing those songs, you mean it. When you come to church and you say those prayers, you mean it. When you come to church and the Bible is proclaimed, you hear it and you begin to put it into practice. So God says to you, here's what I want you to do. And you say, whoa, I didn't want to do that. Now you're confronted with the Word of God and you have to sacrifice. You have to say, OK, I will do what you've asked me to do. Your worship in your daily life is consistent with what you do when you gather with the family of God. All the way through the Old Testament, what God kept saying to the people of Israel, I don't like the songs you sing to me. I don't like this rituals you go through when you come to the temple because your lifestyle doesn't match it. If you worshiped in your lifestyle, then I would love your worship when you come together. But when you come together and you have this wonderful worship and it's not in your lifestyle, I do not accept what you do. Amos said, I hate, God says, I hate your song services, I hate your church service, I hate your sacrifices. They did everything exactly as they should, except it wasn't worship. It was just going through the rituals. So Paul urges us, I urge you, I command you, I order you, I instruct you to look at the mercy of God. And because of his forgiveness for you and because of the change that he's made in your life, that you give yourself to serve God every single day for the rest of your life. Set apart your life as God's life, holy for him, and do the things that please God, live in obedience to him. Now, he goes to the other side of this, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world. You see, we've been in this world and we've grown up with the patterns of it. Nobody lives in a family that we don't learn the way our family thinks and acts. And sometimes our families are far away from God, sometimes they're godly people. But still we pick up around us from our families and from our culture, the words and language that are around. And they become a part of our nature. So he's saying, don't let the world around you, the patterns of this world, come into your mind and control your language and your thoughts and your actions. You have been transformed, you've been brought into the kingdom of God, you've been taken out of the world and now you belong to God, you live in his family. So you can't let the world around you shape you as it does everyone else. Instead of that, be transformed. Now, the transformation takes place in your mind. Be transformed because of the power of the message of God in your mind. Here's what happens, you read the Bible and you see a circumstance that takes place and you realize, this is what God told these people to do. And I have been doing differently than this. In your mind, you have to learn the truth. That's why reading the Bible is so important. That's why Bible study is so important. That's why preaching is so important. That's why testimonies are so important. When someone says, I've heard God say this or I did this and I see what God wants for me, all of this is a way by which in our mind we begin to think, is that what I'm doing? Should I do something different? This conviction in our mind that we should change is critical to it. We are transformed when we learn how God wants us to think, when we learn how he wants us to act, when we learn the choices he wants us to make and the ones he doesn't want us to make. When our mind gets that, then it begins to transform our behavior and our lifestyle. Now, it's the Holy Spirit that comes inside of us and begins to teach us and show us exactly what the truth of God's Word really is. In the beginning of Romans, in chapter 1, verse 28, Paul indicated, Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind to do what ought not to be done. The depraved mind is the key to living in this world. And the language you hear, the movies that you watch, all of these things have an impact on us. What he urges us is to be changing our mind, to changing our thoughts about what's right and wrong, to allow God to teach us what is not worthless that he talks about in chapter 1, but what he's talked about now as the power of God teaching us what he wants from us. When you do this, then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is. A lot of people are frustrated about knowing the will of God. What they really want is, I have a decision to make. I want to know if God wants me to make this choice or that choice. What is God's will for me? What the Bible approaches this in a different way. The will of God is what is clearly taught in the Scripture. That's the will of God. And so when you read what the Bible has to say about any issue, and that's why Paul, when he talks about these things that they're dealing with, goes back and talks about the doctrines of the faith. You have been changed because you've given yourself to God and he's transformed you. Now live up to that. That is God's will for you. That's what God wants you to do. Whenever you let God renew your mind, when you open your mind to God's teachings, he will show you what his will is. Stop this kind of behavior. Start this kind of behavior. Take this responsibility. Leave these other responsibilities off. Debbie told me the other day that because of God saying to her, this is what I want you to do and to work with the story and the things she's doing. She had to call the Nazarene church. She's worked for three or four years on that Halloween thing that they do. And she had to tell them that she could no longer do that. Because God has said to her, here's what I want you to do in our church. And so she has to make a choice. You will be able to know the will of God when you've heard him say, this is what I want you to do. I want you to work in RAs. I want you to work in GAs. Now, the will of God is that you free up all the time that you need to do this. That's the will of God for you. It not only means just doing good things, it means to do what you know God wants you to do and to pay the price for it. God is able and you're able to test, what is this thing that I'm doing and what does God say I should do? What is this that I'm thinking about and how does it fit what God wants me to do? So I'm able to both test the will of God and to prove what God's will is. His will is always good. It's always pleasing. And it's always perfect or complete or full. It's the idea of being completed. Or the idea of perfect is more like someone who's, you used to think of a person who's driving, like someone's backing up to load some pipe, Gary, at your place. And you're back there and you're saying, come on, come on, come on. And you say, oh, perfect. You don't mean there's no mistakes. You mean the guy's close enough that you can actually get the job done. That's what the Bible talks about with that. That you're living in a way that God says, this is what I wanted you to do. It doesn't mean without sin and it doesn't mean without mistakes. It means that you're obedient to what God wants. So when you test all of this, He says, for sure, you will be able to prove what God's will is. And when you find it, it will always be what's good. It will always be what's pleasing and it will always be just right. It will be the right thing. So those are the tests in whether or not what we see and think is the will of God really is. Now, who is it to please? God, not us. What is the meaning of whether or not it's good? Does it contribute to what God says are the right things to do? Who can say whether or not it's complete or right? Does it fulfill the requirements God has for me? If I'm a preacher, does it mean that I'm doing the work that He wants me to do? If I'm a Sunday school teacher, am I doing that? If I'm a father, am I doing things that God wants a father to do? If I'm a husband, am I doing the things a husband's supposed to do? Do I measure up to doing right? Am I saying, can God say about me, this is what you should be doing? Never means it's perfect in the sense of no mistakes. But what does God expect of all of us? To say, God, I want to be a husband, a father, a Sunday school teacher, exactly like you want me to be. That is what He asks of us. He doesn't ask perfection. He asks for us to have the will to do exactly what He wants. That's all He asks of us. Errors do not make us unacceptable to God. Immaturity doesn't make us unacceptable to God. What makes us unacceptable to God is when we know what He wants and we say, I don't want to do that. The will of God is obedience on our part. And when we're obedient, we'll find that whatever we do is good for God. Whatever we do is pleasing to God. And whatever we do satisfies Him. So the Christian life is a life lived every day being the kind of person God wants us to be. Allowing our behavior to be taught to us by the words of the scripture instead of the people around us. Either our families or our parents or our own human nature, really. If you grow up in an area in which you've learned to be a certain kind of person, a mean person or a nasty person or whatever it is, you have to set your own character aside and say to God, transform this. Make me into the kind of person you want me to be. Now, you may have grown up in a family where that's the way they made you, but He puts that behind you. You want to become what God wants you to be. The Christian life is living day by day in submission and obedience to Him. Now, these two verses are going to control or direct all the rest that He has to say in the book of Romans. He's going to define for us what this means to put ourselves in a position where we are responding to God as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing, where we're describing a lifestyle where our minds are being transformed and where we're learning how to do the will of God. And so the rest of this story in the book of Romans is defining these things that He's outlined here. God's call for us is to live in submission to Him. I meet a lot of people who tell me they're Christians. And they tell me about experience they had when they were 13, 14, 20 years old. And they don't read the Bible to let their mind be changed. They're not involved in anything productive in the kingdom of God. They treat their children, their husband or wives, exactly in the way they've always treated them. A lot of times exactly the way their parents treated their mother, their own kids or each other. And they live influenced by the people all around them so that their buying patterns try to keep up with the people that are around them, their vacations they want to do just like the other people around them. Their whole lifestyle is controlled by their environment. And yet they say, I'm a Christian and I'm going to heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth. But they didn't get that on their own. We make them think that. They come down to the front, we pray a prayer, we say, it's all settled brother, sister, you're going to heaven. You look at all the people who've made those professions who do not live a life, a living sacrifice. And they're very, very difficult to reach for Christ. Because they believe that all they had to do was say these words in a prayer and come and be baptized and everything's OK. The Bible does not teach that. And we have to be careful that we do not give false message of salvation to people. What God asks is, will you give your life to me as a living daily sacrifice? Will you allow me to control you and nothing else control you? Will you live your life with your primary goal not to please yourself but to please God? So much of this worship fighting people do over music is because people are trying to please themselves. I can only be happy if I'm pleased here. The primary concern here is, is God pleased with our church? Is he pleased with our music? Is he pleased with our Sunday school classes? This is the goal. And whenever people don't have that idea, then there's fighting and quarreling and all kinds of disturbance. Because if we all tried to please God and him alone, there would be no divisions, there'd be no conflict, there'd be no tension. Because once we hear the word of God, every single issue is settled. Why? Because I am willing to sacrifice for God. I may not be that willing to sacrifice for you, but I'm willing to sacrifice for him. And once we know what he says, then it resolves marital conflicts, family conflicts, church conflicts, all those things just disappear. Paul says, this is how the Christian life is. And if it doesn't measure up to this, then you don't have it. Is it works salvation? No. The motive is, I am responding to the mercy of God. And I'm so overwhelmed with his mercy toward me that I want to do anything and everything that he asks of me. I don't earn his approval or forgiveness, but I respond to it by giving my life to him. We have a very important message for people in our world. So many need it because they think that they're living this life headed to heaven, when in reality their life is a living hell, and they have no idea how to get past it. But we have the message of life. Let's pray. And so we ask, Father, that not only would we have this message, that we would live it so that the people around us would see as living examples what it means to be living sacrifices, completely acceptable to you, holy to you, used by you. In the name of Christ, we ask us, we ask that you would make our church a place where this is lived. Amen.