To begin 2025 we’re hitting some random topics from the Word of God, as we do at the start of every year. But random doesn’t mean of slighter importance…actually this January we’re focusing on the heavies. We began with talking about our communication, and Death and life are in the power of the tongue. Last week in Proverbs 9 we considered one of the great difference makers in all of life: how we respond to critique and correction.
This week we’re looking to the passage that contains what John Calvin called the “leading principle” in living as a Christian. Meaning, for the believer nothing is more important than grasping this. Everything else facing a Christian is downstream from this idea. Let’s turn to Romans 12 and read the first two verses that contain this “leading principle.”
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, 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.
To unearth that “leading principle,” let me quote from Calvin (which you’ll find in the back of your bulletin): “O how great the proficiency of him who, taught that he is not his own, has withdrawn the dominion and government of himself from his own reason that he may give them to God! For as the surest source of destruction to men is to obey themselves, so the only haven of safety is to have no other will, no other wisdom, than to follow the Lord wherever he leads. Let this then be the first step, to abandon ourselves, and devote the whole energy of our minds to the service of God.”
Well, that was pretty heady…Let’s see if we can boil down that leading principle to something more manageable: You are not your own; you are God’s. Give up on trying to run your own life, apart from God. Don’t do what you want; find out what God wants and do that. Go all in with God.
Paul appeals to his readers to present themselves to God. He does not demand, because he couldn’t. This is not something that can be forcibly compelled. You can make your kids go to church, and a Christian father/mother should make their kids go to church, but going to church isn’t the same thing as the kid presenting himself to God. That happens internally, in his mind. Yes, it’s in your mind you are struggling with God…resisting Him or submitting to Him.
Paul grounds his appeal for these Roman Christians to present themselves to God in the mercies of God. I appeal to you…by the mercies of God. Mercies, plural. In the wake of the many times and ways that God has been merciful to you….present yourself to God.
Mercy. The old definition isn’t bad: not getting the judgment we deserve. Have you ever escaped from a bad consequence that you really had coming to you?
Thanksgiving week we were driving on a one-lane road in VT in the early evening – I was the driver and the car was full with everyone in my family except Kai and Libby. We had been stuck behind this truck for awhile, and I kept waiting for an opportunity – in conjunction with the dashed stripes on the road – to pass the truck. Eventually I took the opportunity, entered the oncoming lane and floored the car, but with all those people my car didn’t accelerate that much. I was now alongside the truck, inching past it, and I noticed the lane lines had became solid. But I felt committed – even though I could have given up and meekly returned behind the truck. Well, we’re slowly passing the truck, but now we’re on a slight downhill, which means the truck is going faster and we’re gaining ground slower than before. Then, looking up at the crest of the hill, I can see lights…a car must be oncoming. Now I really should have given up trying to pass the truck… but I’ve always struggled with patience. And I didn’t want my family to see me back down. So I maintained my course, barely overtook the truck, and squeezed in front of him just before the oncoming car gets up to us. The End.
But for a long time after, my heart was pounding and my mind was racing. Or my heart was racing and my conscience was pounding me with accusations: how could I be so cocky with a car full of my family! Surely, I dodged a bullet of my foolhardiness. Or, better put: God was merciful.
Can you recall mercies in your own life? Momentary mercies. Inexplicable mercies, such as being entangled in a bad habit, continually trying to escape from it, and then one day – and you can’t explain it – you just stop. Instead of your life falling apart, as it could have in your weakness, you’re mysteriously delivered!
Or, maybe God’s mercy that came in the form of a person. Your spouse might be God’s mercy to you – I watched a podcast with Shawn Ryan about his being delivered from drink and depression and saw someone wrote this in the comments: I served in the infantry in Iraq from 2004-2005. I did those things. I came home and ended up living hotels drinking my life away 5 years ago. Until I met a woman…
The mercies of God keep streaming down to us. Jeremiah the Prophet has a great line in Lamentations: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Lamentations 3:22, 23. Every day is a reset. We awake and somehow the slate is blank again.
Presenting our bodies to God as a living sacrifice makes sense as we open our eyes to God’s repeated, unending, various mercies. Step 1: notice the various mercies of God. Step 2: don’t lose track of the fact that they’re mercies. There’s this despicable human tendency to take God’s mercies for granted – of course God kept me and my family safe…I’m too important to lose. And then even – actually that bold, confident driving of mine is something special…. And we find ourselves being arrogant about our foolishness and sin.
Did you notice the word “therefore”? I appeal to you, therefore…by the mercies of God….Why does someone use the word therefore?
Because he wants to relate what he’s about to say to something he’s already said. I grew up in Denver…therefore I have mountains in my blood.
I appeal to you therefore by the mercies of God. Meaning, what Paul has written previous to this sentence – in the first eleven chapters – had much to do with God’s mercies. Therefore, on the basis of those mercies…I appeal to you to present your bodies to God. And so a whole layer of God’s mercies detailed in Romans 1-11 come to mind: the mercies of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Today I don’t want to spend time unpacking those mercies connected directly to the gospel of Jesus, because next week we’re going to finish these random messages with a message on that gospel. Today we’ll just say that God’s response to our many sins is: atonement at great cost to himself, forgiveness, peace, the gift of the Spirit, commitment to us, training us for glory. After our sin, mercies. Mercies. Mercies. Second chances. Fortieth chances. Transformation, a changed heart. Gathered into a community of grace. The gift of knowing God. Mercies, mercies, mercies.
Ok, so we’re immersed in God’s mercies in the gospel and otherwise. We’re convinced by God’s mercies. And in response we present our bodies to God. All of our embodied life – vocational, leisure, family, free time, intellectual pursuits, sexual, political, social, social media, aspirational, relations, personality, music, daydreaming, day trading, pets, hobbies, physical fitness, marriage, speech, endeavors, direction – in light of God’s mercies all we’re involved with as we live in this body is to be offered up to the Lord.
When Paul says “our bodies,” he means to resist our ongoing tendency to divide our lives between the so-called “spiritual” and the “non-spiritual,” and then offer to God our “spiritual” life. God, I’m giving you Sundays…or at least Sunday mornings…or a lot of Sunday mornings. But Mon-Sat are mine…especially Fri nights!
No, present your bodies – all of our life…presented to God.
I can’t overstate how relevant and important this is. We tend to keep segments of our life away from God. In our current course of Christianity 101 I’ve said this both weeks: Sometimes when people become interested in God it’s because they’re dissatisfied or dismayed with their life (or some part of it). It’s a win to start looking to God no matter the reason, but we’ll have to guard against this: TRYING TO GET G0D’S HELP IN FIXING US…SO THAT WE CAN GET BACK TO HOW WE WERE BEFORE.
We make deals with God. Do this for me and I’ll do this for you. Help me with my stuff and I’ll help you with your stuff. I’ll go to church if you find me a spouse. I’ll volunteer in these months but then you need to leave me alone in these months. Behind all of these “deals” lies the assumption that our life – or at least the bulk of it – is…ours.
Someone struggles with porn. And they fail again. And in the wake of shameful feelings, they say I’m going to church and Sunday school this week! Not realizing that their root problem wasn’t that they weren’t going to enough church, and neither was it the pornography, but rather that they thought some of their life could be successfully lived without reference to God.
Nothing makes sense…nothing works… except total abandonment to God!
There is so much segmentation. Parsing out God’s space and my space. Making trades with Heaven. We talk about striking a spiritual balance: something for God and something for me.
And God says, It’s all mine. You’re mine. You’re for me. No, really.
And we reply: Hey, wait! I’m not so sure about that! I value my freedom too much.
Here we need to insert some quick philosophy. There are two basic understandings of “freedom.” The first one is the popular one: freedom is being able to do whatever I want. I remember when the boys were young, we’d go into CVS and walk by the bags of candy, and I’d say to them: Guys, someday you’ll be able to buy as much candy as you want. The prospect of having that freedom was staggering to them!
The second basic freedom is to be able to do what you’re supposed to, what you were intended for, what makes you successful at what you are.
Many times freedom #1 has to be given up for the sake of the more substantial freedom of #2. For example, if I’m a basketball player, I’ll need to practice, practice, practice – to push myself even on those days when I’d rather be doing something else – so I can dribble and shoot the ball. So that I become the full basketball player I could be.
Who are we? What are we for? What would it look like to be free to be fully human? Well, we are image bearers of God – made to live toward God and reflect him into the world. Humans are made for God. Our sin has separated us from God, so that we no longer see Him, we no longer see the need for Him, we no longer want Him. In other words, sin is slavery. It’s not necessarily keeping us from doing what we want, but sin is confining us from acting as who we actually are – children of God, in the image of the Father, reflecting him into the world. Sin is keeping us from that.
It’s confusing because in some ways and for some time sin feels like freedom. And from a distance, presenting ourselves to God, binding our whole embodied life to him, appears like restriction. But sin keeps us from God and is thus fundamentally an enslaver. Even though, for a while, sin feels like freedom. But eventually sin strips us of all freedom – not only are we not free to live toward God but our desires eventually become taskmasters that make us work harder and harder for less and less.
In the mercy of God we’re delivered from sin so that we can become fully human and present our entire selves to God. Jesus Christ paid the penalty for our sin, and by his death we’re freed from the guilt of sin. He gives us his own Spirit – the Holy Spirit of the Resurrected Christ – who with new creation life transforms our hearts so that we are free from the old enslaving power of the 1st Adam’s sin.
We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Romans 6: 6-11
In our passage today, the Spirit exhorts us with an oxymoron, seeming opposites next to each other. An oxymoron is a figure of speech designed to give us pause, make us think. Paul says, present yourselves to God as a living sacrifice. We could and should keep turning that over in our minds. Living sacrifice. Living sacrifice.
We are alive – though always and only toward God. That’s what we’ve just talked about.
Alive….living, and yet a sacrifice. What’s the difference between sacrificially and sacrifice? The adverb modifies, to some extent describes, qualifies. But the noun is a state of being. It is a totality, a thing. You are to be a sacrifice. This is total. No half-measures.
And a sacrifice, of course, is dead. In what sense are we to be dead? I think the words of our Lord help here:
Calling the crowd along with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me and the gospel will save it…” Mark 8: 34, 35
The old world that is fading away has been shaped by the sin of Adam. At the root of Adam’s sin is a distrust of God. Remember the serpent’s conversation with Eve, how he insinuated that God was a petty tyrant who was trying to keep humans from being all they could be. The claim was: God erodes life. There’s a path going away from God that will enhance your life.
Those are still the worries as we consider abandoning ourselves to God. If I live toward God he’ll work me into ugliness. He’ll make me one dimensional. He’ll turn me into one of those people from the Handmaid’s Tale. He’ll not let me have babies. I’ll have to become bookish. I won’t get time on the boat.
The sacrifice aspect is that you’re willing to shut down all these doubts about how exactly things will turn out, and simply trust your Father who is in heaven. You put to death your doublemindedness. I’m coming to you, giving you everything…make of me what you want.
You’re not different for difference’s sake, or because you’re temperamentally a contrarian, but because you’ve expended the time and energy to submit every part of yourself to God. Let me give an example that is close to home: Last month Tess ran a marathon in Maine. It was cold – maxed out at 21 degrees. Of course, when you sign up to run a marathon you’re not just signing up for that day but for months of daily training. Many hours.
I don’t know why Tess signed up for the marathon…I should ask her. I do perceive that, since the early 2000s, it’s become trendier to run road races. And this was a piece of a societal general turn toward the outdoors, exploration and adventure – and all the gear and music and vibe that goes along with it. In other words, there is this pull in the world towards this kind of stuff.
Someone who presents herself to God doesn’t just go along with these trends. But then neither does she reject them at the outset. So then – what makes her holy? She thinks! She thinks: is this in agreement with the commandments? Is this activity, at this time, within the will of God? Will this in some way serve others, especially doing good to the people of God? Am I able to without reservation trust and enjoy God while going about this? Will this strengthen my walk with God? What does this have to do with image bearing?
If Tess addressed the race with these questions, on the day of the race she looks like everyone else. “Seven” is God’s number, but her bib doesn’t necessarily read “777.” Neither does a halo spin above her as she makes her way through the course. But she runs a holy race! She has presented her whole self to God. Because she is someone who has steeped herself in God’s mercies. Hallelujah, the life of God is warming up that cold race.
- Your life belongs to God absolutely and to you as a stewardship in behalf of God. You are not your own but are for God.
- The beginning and end of your decisions are never: do I want this? Or, will this contribute to my legacy? Rather, how can I please God?
- In answering how can I please God, your first recourse is not to your instincts or society’s opinion, but to the Word of God.
- Work for God. For instance, think through the details of how the quality control of trains can be placed under the Lord’s direction.
- Enjoy leisure according to God. Stop thoughtlessly scrolling, browsing, lying about…and deliberately bring all these activities and inactivities under the Lord.
- Be abounding in the work of the Lord – the proclamation and spread of the gospel. Dream big…work hard.
- In all this, think and live like freedmen – have fun!
AMEN.
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