Living Sacrifices and the Hope of God's Promises

If you would open your Bibles to Romans chapter 12. This is November 24, Romans 12, chapter 12, and I want to read beginning with verse 12. Join me in prayer. So we ask, Father, that the meaning of these words would be alive to us. We know you've written these, that we might find life in ourselves and that our church might find life in its ministry and message. So we pray that whatever you want to say to us would be clear and plain. In the name of Christ, we are open to you, amen. Paul is writing at the conclusion of the book of Romans, and chapter 12 is the beginning of this practical application of what he had to say. I go back to read verses 1 through 2 to get a picture of what the rest of this chapter is about. Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy, pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing, and perfect will. Paul is describing what it means to have a life of faith. He talks about this through the book of Romans, that you have faith like Abraham had, and you submit yourself to God as Abraham did, and then you are entering the family of God. You become a part of the people of God. These Holy Spirit comes into your life and begins to guide and direct you. Now he ends this by talking about the practical dimensions. Since all of this is true, that's what the word therefore means. Since all of this is true, in view of God's mercy towards you, you are to give your bodies as living sacrifices. This is the deed you do. You say to God, I trust you, so I'm going to live my life sacrificially. I'm going to do the things you tell me to do, regardless of what I think, regardless of what other people think, regardless of how difficult it is. When you do this, you're to ignore the way the world thinks, and you're instead to let your life be filled with what God thinks, be transformed so that your mind is renewed so you think like God thinks and you act like God thinks. When you do this, you'll be able to find when a thought comes to your mind or some action comes to your mind, you'll be able to test it to say, is this what God wants me to do? And you'll be able to approve then what God's will really is. It's his will, good, pleasing, and perfect. This is how you find the will of God, giving your life in terms of a sacrifice. Now I want to skip to verse 12 where he talks about three different things that are involved in this sacrifice toward God's will. Be joyful in hope. Now the word hope, oftentimes in our understanding, has to do with something we wish would be true. I hope it rains, or I hope it doesn't snow. That means that we're sort of wishing that something would come to pass. But the word hope in the Bible is a very different word than this. It doesn't point to something that you wish would take place. If you read it that way, it would say, be joyful in the things you wish for. That didn't make any kind of sense. Instead, hope in the Bible is the confidence we have that the promises of God will come to pass. God has said, if you will take up your cross and follow me, you will find life. That's the promise. The promise he makes in the covenant. The promise that he says, I will guide you to all the choices you need to make, and so I come to a choice, and my hope is in the fact that God will guide me. It's hope in the sense that it hasn't come to a reality yet, but it's a confident hope that because of the promise of God and who God is, he will give me the choices that I need to make and let me know what they are. He will provide for me. So no matter what the circumstances are, however black it might look, if I have nothing whatsoever to eat or to live on or no money, God has said, I will take care of you. Seek first my kingdom and righteousness, and all these things you need, I'll give to you. That's my hope. So regardless of the circumstance, I have this hope. The hope that God will deliver his promise in the future. Not a wish, but it is a hope that God who says this will bring it to pass. It's confidence in God that what he says is truthful. So now that's what he's talking about when he uses the word hope, a little different than we would use it. So he says, be joyful in the hope. Now there's a couple of ways to look at this. It could be that you would say, I'm joyful because God has made this promise to me. Or you could say, my joy comes because this hope has come to me. One could be the result. The joy could come from the hope. And the other one is that your joy results in the hope that you have. I don't know which way that a person would take that. The writing in the Greek would allow you to do it either way. The NIV translates it in the sense that this hope is a hope that is being joyful in the hope. It reads it in a way that says it is the hope that you have that brings joy. Now we have to put this back in the context of what he's talking about. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, completely acceptable to God, regardless of the circumstances. God has made you a promise. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to protect you. I'm going to provide for you. And so you start out in your service to God, and then bad things happen to you. In spite of the fact that bad things are happening to you, you're to find joy in the promise that God has made to you. I want to read from Jeremiah, chapter 20. Jeremiah was sent on a mission. God had called him to be a prophet, and his message was to say to the people of Israel, if you don't change your way of living, God's going to destroy this nation. They thought that was the stupidest thing they had ever heard in their lives. God had promised David that this kingdom would be there, and it would always be there, and he would take care of them. He promised that there would always be a king in the future forever. Now Jeremiah comes saying you've so violated God's principles that he's going to destroy this nation, and he'd been preaching that over and over again. His ministry lasted 40 years. He preached this the whole time of his 40 years, and it didn't happen. Verse 7 of chapter 20, Jeremiah has been talking to one of the leaders of the nation, and they had no confidence in what Jeremiah had to say. In fact, because he was saying that they were going to be defeated by the enemy, they decided they would beat him. So they put him in jail, and they beat him. Jeremiah now had heard the call of God, had the message God had him to give, and he gave the message God gave him, and the result was he was put in jail and beaten. Jeremiah said, O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived. You overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long. Everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out, proclaiming violence and destruction, which is the promise which God told him to proclaim. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say I will not mention him or speak any more of his name, his word is in my heart like a burning fire, shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in. Indeed, I cannot. I hear many whispering, terror on every side, report him, let's report him. All my friends are waiting for me to slip, saying, perhaps he will be deceived. Then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him. I'm going to skip down to verse 13, excuse me, I will read verse 11, that's a mistake. But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior. So my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced. Their honor will never be forgotten. O Lord Almighty, you who examined the righteous and probed the heart and mind, let me see your vengeance upon them. For to you I have committed my cause. Sing to the Lord, give praise to the Lord. He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked. And then he changes his tune a little bit. Cursed be the day I was born. May the day my mother bore me not be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, a child was born to you, a son. May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning and a battle cry at noon, for he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb? To see sorrow and end my days in shame? You can see in the story that Jeremiah is faced with a tremendous sense of tragedy about his life. He sees the fulfillment of what he was asked to do as only bringing more and more disaster. But in the middle of this, both before and after these terrible things that he says, he says, but the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior. This is the promise God made him. It hadn't come yet true. So my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. It hadn't come true. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced. Their dishonor will never be forgotten. It wasn't happening. O Lord Almighty, You who examine the righteous and probe the heart and mind, let me see Your vengeance upon them. For to You I have committed my cause. Sing to the Lord. Give praise to the Lord. He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked. Before and after this very enlightening praise that he gives to God, he tells you of the agony, the pain, and the suffering of being obedient to God. I will promise you this. You will never begin service and obedience to God that you don't find yourself sometime in Jeremiah's spot. You never will. There'll be people that criticize you. There'll be people that dump things on you. There'll be people that will say things about you behind your back that'll get back to you. There'll be people that won't cooperate with you. We probably won't face what Jeremiah did, to be thrown in prison and beaten, but you'll feel the emotions of being rejected, not helped, beaten, criticized. Every single person has that happen to them when you start serving God. In the middle of all that, you have a choice. You have a choice to say, I don't have to do this, and you don't. You have the choice to say, I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm not going to put up with this. I don't have to. I can quit. There's kind of a saying that they say to pastors, don't ever resign on Monday morning. Because for a lot of pastors, Sundays are very, very devastating and depressing. People don't do their job. They don't show up. They come and tell you the things that people say bad about the church and what you're doing. You see people who leave, say, I'm not getting fed, God's not helping, He's not here. All those things that cause you to feel as if your ministry is absolutely a failure. But it not only happens to pastors, it happens to everybody in the church. Happened to Jeremiah. It happened to Jesus. You remember Jesus. You know, He had thousands of people following Him, and at the end of His life, He had only His mother and John, who were standing there with Him. Even all the twelve guys left Him, except John. John was there because Jesus said, take care of my mom when I'm dead. He had a kind of a burden that He had to carry to do that job. What is it that gives you the possibility of keeping on going? God has made His promises. My Word will never return without accomplishing its purpose. So you can teach in GAs the Word of God. You can teach in Sunday School the Word of God. You can proclaim the witness to people of God's Word and what it says. They can close their minds, their hearts, and their lives. But if you hold on to that promise, you will never quit. When I teach or proclaim the Word of God, it goes out, and it always accomplishes its purpose. How can you quit when that's true? You see, this is the hope that we have, and the joy we have in the middle of our agony is that God has made a promise to us. If you proclaim My Word, it will have an impact on the world that you will know you've made a difference. Whatever it is that you're trying to do for God, whether it's you're witnessing to someone and they constantly refuse to listen to you, whether you're trying to guide your family and it seems like they're not listening to you and they're not paying any attention to what you've taught them as they grow up, all those things cause us at some point in time in our life to feel hopeless about it. And we feel hopeless because we look at that circumstance, and in our mind, we cannot imagine a turnaround because we see the attitude that people have, we see the resistance they have, and we see it just continuing. And sometimes it gets worse and worse and worse and worse, and we keep saying, well, the more I try, the worse this gets, and we give up. And that giving up causes us to be discouraged, defeated, and depressed. Now, what Paul's advice to us was, like Jeremiah, you give your body as a living sacrifice. And when you prepare to go in and teach these children or young people or teenagers or adults, you're sacrificing your time. Whenever you go out to call on people and try to encourage them or support them, you're sacrificing your life. Your life is just made up of units of time, you see, and you're sacrificing your time and you're sacrificing your life. And when you do that, you're doing what Paul said, present your body as a living sacrifice. I don't know if any of you remember when we started the visitation program, the Grove Visitation Program, we had more people than this that would come on those Monday nights, you know, lined up to get ready to go, but you know, three or four times out, nobody saved yet, and the church is not full yet, and down to nothing. You give your life as a living sacrifice daily to God with the hope that what I've done will mean something, based on the promise of God. And the promise of God is the hope that we have. Is my God reliable? If he is, then every promise that he said in this book, I can count on. And in the middle of Jeremiah's telling how miserable his life is, he breaks out into this song about praising God. Why does he have such joy in the middle of this suffering? It wasn't over, but he had joy because he had a promise. God said, I have a job for you, and when you do this job, you will find my approval of your life. What Paul is calling us to do is to give ourselves an obedience to him, regardless of the apparent consequences, because God has made us a promise. The promise could be, if you will pray, I want you to pray for this person, and your words will be heard by me. The promise can be simply, this is what I want you to say today with this friend that you're with. And you don't see any change, but you know that you're risking saying that, risking them thinking you're stupid or foolish or whatever. That is your living sacrifice. Now when you do this, you see, he says you will learn what is the good and perfect will of God. You will learn this, because in this experience of obedience to God, you will see the affirmation that comes from God that you have done the right thing. That way you will know that it was indeed God's will. So give your bodies a living sacrifice, because you now have hope, regardless of the circumstances in your life. You have hope because of the promises of God. He's promised to guide you so you have hope you'll make the right choices. He's promised to provide for you so your hope is that you will have everything you need. He's promised to protect you so you know that nothing's going to crush you. He's promised that your life will mean something in the end. And that hope drives you forward to be faithful in what he's asked you to do. But Paul always follows this admonition to be obedient to God by reminding us over and over again, in the very next sentence he does this, in the very next phrase he does this, be patient in affliction. The hope that you have does not come without affliction. That's what Paul is trying to say. You're going to go into this job trying to do what God wants you to do, but it's not going to happen overnight and it's not going to happen easily. Not only do we have Jeremiah to look at this, but we also have, in the history of mission work, one of the first missionaries to go from England to India and Burma worked hard to be able to reach these people in Burma with the gospel message. His message to them was in a culture he didn't even know the language when he went. His name was Adoniram Judson. And Adoniram went over there as a 24-year-old man. He worked seven years before he had one convert. He married the day he shipped off to go over there, and the time he was in India and Burma, he had three wives. His wives died in that terribly difficult place to live. By the time he'd been there 12 years, he had 18 converts. The disease had taken the life of his wives. His children died in that country, and there was very little that he could see that made a difference. Eighteen people. He lived his whole life in Burma, doing what he thought God called him to do. It wasn't like missionaries today, where every four years they got to come back. He came back one time in the whole time he was a missionary over there. Very little to show for this. Patience in the middle of suffering and difficulty. This is what Paul asked us to do. Patience in affliction. What God asked us to do is to wait on him. I sent you on this mission, and I want you to be faithful to do it, but I want you to wait until I actually bring it to pass. I don't know of anybody that gets started in the work of God that doesn't have to wait patiently for God to really make things happen. We are impatient. We want to see things happen sooner than maybe God is prepared or ready to do it. I remember one time when I first came here and was in Larned. We tried everything to reach that community. We tried to have child care. We tried to have all kinds of programs. Finally I just had kind of given up on figuring out how to be able to get some kind of outreach in that community. So I called the state office, and they had a guy that was a specialist that would come out and say, look over the community and tell you things that you could do to attract people to your church, or to open doors for your church. So he came to the Thursday night service, and some of the members came. We had a family over there. Both of them were illiterate, and they were nice people, but their education level was very low. They had one woman that came that night. There were three of them there, and I did the Bible study. After it was over, I went out and sat in his car, and I said, okay, you've seen our congregation, our people, and the town we're in. What's your suggestion? It was a long pause, and he said, have you considered closing this church down? Well, I wasn't discouraged by that, because I thought God had put me there, and that there was a reason I was there. Now that church is self-supporting, full-time pastor, with a good, successful ministry. I never got to see all that take place while I was there, but God asked us to believe that whatever he asked us to do, we stay with it. We're patient. We wait on God. The Bible is filled with those phrases, wait on the Lord. Wait on the Lord. I know it's been discouraging in new life, because things haven't unfolded as the way we thought they would. I know it's been difficult here in this church, because we've seen attendance that went up, and we've seen it go back down, but God has a word for us. Be faithful in what I ask you to do, and I will bless you. Be patient. It doesn't matter what happens around you. You listen to me. Be patient in what I've asked you to do, and you will find that I will be faithful to you. The affliction part of this is the suffering that you go through trying to be patient. You keep doing your job, and doing your job, and doing your job, and doing your job, and bad things happen, and things don't go the way you want them to. You need to be patient, because you're waiting on God to fulfill the hope that he gave you. God asks us in every situation that we're in to remember that if we have been given a responsibility, it is not going to be easy. There will be affliction, and there will be suffering. You're to have joy in the hope of victory that he promises. You're to have patience in the face that the victory hasn't come yet. And you keep on doing what God has asked you to do. This is the living sacrifice. That's what it means. You put your own feelings aside of all this, and you say, if you've asked me to do it, I am going to do it. As long as it takes, as much as it costs, and as difficult as it is. And the final thing he says, be faithful in prayer. See, the key ingredient is making sure that the message Jeremiah had was really a message from God. There are all kinds of prophets in the world who deserve to be killed, because they're not prophets of God. There are all kinds of people who undertake the stupidest kind of things in the name of God, but they're really not of God. Be faithful in prayer, asking God what you ought to do, bringing to him the difficulties that face, asking him to assure you that this is your message, this is your mission, this is the task you've given me, is this the place you want me to be in, is this the job you want me to do? And when you're received from God the assurance in prayer, then you continue to be faithful. When you receive from God a change of instruction, you do it. You make sure that you're listening to God and what he asks you to do, and you're prepared to pay the price for whatever he asks, and then you know what it means to give your life as a living sacrifice. What do you want me to do today, God? I will give you how much ever time it takes to do it. I will do it regardless of how little help I get or how much help I get. I will do it regardless of how much success I see or how much failure I see. But I need to know that you really want me here in this job doing this thing. And when you're sure of that, God will unfold for you, step by step, his will, so that you know what the good and perfect will of God is. I think maybe a good illustration of this is Ros's experience with the Stone family. She tried to visit with Mrs. Stone several times and called, and she never would get a call. She said to me, I don't know, maybe I'm just being a pest to her. See what Satan says to her, well, you can't keep doing this, she's not going to like you if you keep doing this. And that's what happens to us, we start thinking like that. But as she talked to God, she felt convicted that she should do it again. All of a sudden, the lady said, hey, yeah, why don't you come over to my house? They've been here two Sundays in a row, three Sundays in a row, and a Wednesday night. And he said to me, we have found our church. Prayer is an essential ingredient in this. You can suffer all kind of affliction and be a masochist. And you can be wrong. You can count on hopes that God never promised. But if you call on God and ask him to tell you what promises he has to fit in your situation, he will give them to you. And then you can have the joy and that hope. If you talk to him and he says to you, this is your assignment, then you can keep at it regardless of the affliction it brings, because you know God has put you here. The most important thing we do here in our church is to make sure that everybody working in a position knows that God has put them there. If you don't know that, you're not going to succeed. He'll not empower you, and you won't be able to find joy in any hope, and you won't be able to persevere through any kind of affliction that might come to you. So prayer, conversation with God, is this where you want me? Is this what I'm supposed to do? Listening to him and acting in obedience is the living sacrifice that comes when the Spirit of God is in your life guiding and directing who you are. No church can succeed unless the people in the church give themselves as living sacrifices. It will give you hope in the worst of situations, it will allow you to keep on going regardless of how dark it is, and you'll be able to find the will of God through your life in prayer and his support for you. Let's pray. All of us want to know why you've placed us in this world and what our jobs are. Many people here are doing things for you because they think this is what God has told me to do. For every one of us, help is never to work and live in hopelessness. And in the affliction that comes with serving you, give us the confidence that in patiently waiting and serving, the end result will be victory for you and your kingdom. Father, as we talk to you, make clear what our calling is, make clear what our task is, make clear what our message is, that we might be able to give everything to you just as you want it. In the name of Christ we ask it, amen. Amen.