Romans 12:1-5

A Living Sacrifice
1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship. 2 Do not conform 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.

Humble Service in the Body of Christ
3 For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. 4 For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.


Dig Deeper
I was recently at a website looking at a few reviews of a movie that I was considering going to see. Most of the reviews were not very good and so now I think I’ll save my time and money and not go to those movies. While I was there, however, I decided to look up the past reviews of a Christian movie named “Fireproof.” I had no other reason than that I was curious to see what secular movie reviewers had to say about a decidedly Christian movie that I happened to enjoy. I wasn’t surprised to see that the vast majority of them were very negative and critical but one stuck out to me in particular. He said that the major problem that the movie had was that it’s religious message was completely unrelatable to most audiences. He says that “the film gets all religulous, suggesting that [the lead character’s] devotion to healing means nothing without Jesus, and so Fireproof stops becoming relatable to us all and only to the already, or easily, indoctrinated.” It’s not that he said anything that was particularly surprising. Would you really expect a non-Christian to appreciate a film that is firmly based on the worldview that one must completely surrender their life to Jesus? No, that wasn’t a shock. What did hit me though was another thought. If non-Christians are so offended and so unable to relate to movies that have a Christian worldview, then why aren’t movies that have a non-Christian worldview so equally offensive and unrelatable to Christians?

The answer to that question is the very thing that Paul picks up on in this passage. Yes, Christians really have died to the old Adamic humanity and entered into the covenant family of God and begun the process of becoming the Spirit-led and transformed Messiah shaped humanity. But this isn’t all just lofty religious talk. The theology of the previous eleven chapters has real implications for the lives of individual persons who were once individuals separated from and in rebellion against God but are now part of God’s restored and renewed humanity. But that doesn’t all happen instantly. We are so conditioned by the mindset, worldview, and culture of the Adamic world in which we all grew up that it takes real, concerted effort to no longer be comfortable with that culture. That’s why non-Christians are more offended by Christian movies than vice-versa. The true Christian culture of the age to come is completely foreign and non-sensible to the non-Christian. What Paul calls for here is for Christians to make the values and culture of the present age just as foreign and non-sensible to those in Christ.

Paul begins this passage with “therefore,” signaling that what he is going to say for the next several chapters is the practical outcropping of everything that he has said in the previous eleven chapters. One cannot truly understand the life to which Paul is calling believers without understanding God’s faithfulness and the life out of which he has called us all as well as the reality of the resurrection life that we now have. The incredible mercy that God has shown both Jew and Gentile in justifying them through his grace and creating the covenant family that he always promised informs us and elicits a response. When we take the time it should cause us to embrace the new freedom that God has lavished upon us in Christ. As Paul begins to describe what this will look like and the impact that it will have, he brings together at least six themes that are woven together throughout this book. When put together, we can step back and see the beautiful tapestry of the reality of living in God’s new creation.

The first theme is that of laying down our lives. Paul has said in chapter 6 that we die to our old Adamic humanity as we enter into the life of Christ at our baptism. Now he employs the language of a Temple sacrifice to make that point clear. The way to embrace the resurrection life is to offer your very self as a sacrifice to God. There are three aspects of this sacrifice that Paul delineates. When we sacrifice our entire lives to God, it is a sacrifice that is living, holy, and pleasing. By living, Paul doesn’t so much mean that we are still alive, but that the nature of the sacrifice is one that is living or ongoing and continual. We are called to be like the priests who would present or offer the sacrifice to God. When we do that in an ongoing fashion, God will find it holy, or set apart, and acceptable or pleasing to God.

Second, when we realize that we are to die to ourselves and our old way of doing things on an ongoing basis, then and only then will we find that we are engaging in true worship. As much as people tend to think of worship as something that really happens when we raise our hands, close our eyes, and sing really passionately, true worship happens when we offer every aspect of our lives and will to God. This is “true” worship, says Paul, using the Greek word “logiken,” which carries the meaning of appropriate worship that honors God by giving him what he wants and involves the entire human being, rather than simply going through the motions or offering the depraved self-serving worship of pagans who indulge their own wills.

But the way to truly offer oneself as a sacrifice to God so that we can embrace the life of Christ and offer true worship to God is not some esoteric act of vague spirituality. It is the rigorous and sometimes difficult work of no longer molding ourselves to the pattern of the world through changing the way we think about everything. The only way to present our whole selves to the Lord as a holy and pleasing sacrifice is to not conform to the world but go through the process of renewing our minds. Thus, simply claiming a new status doesn’t do much of anything for a Christian unless it is accompanied by an impassioned desire to change the way we think. We can no longer accept the way the world thinks about things. This involves examining every thought and every area of our lives (2 Cor. 10:5), as well as the implied need to know God’s word voraciously so that we have a new standard by which to judge and base our thoughts. Belonging to the resurrection life in Christ means living by the reality of God’s age to come, by his values and love rather than living as though we were still a living part of the present age.

This transformation, though, challenging and demanding as it may be, does not come through our own effort, it stands firmly on trusting that when we walk according to the leading of the Holy Spirit as Paul has described in chapter 8, that the futile thinking of humankind described in chapter 1 will be reversed. The crux of the futile thinking is in believing that our will is something worthy of listening to and following. Yet, going all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the problem for humans has been in following our own wills rather than God’s. That is a short definition of what sin is. Only in Christ can human beings truly connect with God’s will. It is in dying to self and fully embracing the life of Christ with the kind of attitude that Paul describes in Galatians 2:20 that we can finally come in contact with God’s will. We can finally identify it, recognize it, and realize it in our lives.

A very real part of this mind transformation is the realization that you are no longer an individual, living and thinking for yourself. This, too, is firmly built on the case that Paul has been making that God has welcomed those in Christ into the covenant family. We tend to think of even salvation in Christ as an individual process and event as though we get saved and then choose to attend church with a group of other believers that meet our needs, but this is not the biblical presentation. One should not think of him or herself more highly than you ought as though you are still living by your own will, for your own benefit, according to the values of the self-obsessed present age. The demand of being in Christ is to realize that we have died to ourselves and entered into the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:13).

The new covenant family is not a group of individuals that simply agree to spend some extra time together. In Christ we have truly become the one family that corporately comprises the body of the Messiah. Each part has separate gifts and functions, but together we form the one body of Christ and the body of Christ can no more be separate than a foot can decide to leave the rest of the body. “Each member belongs to all the others,” says Paul. This is truly what a family is. The practical way that one works out being a sacrifice presented to God and living out his will is to realize that once we were not a people and had not connection with one another but now we are a people (1 Pet 2:10) that belongs to each other. This will only make sense when we understand the power of the resurrection in the present reality. Because Christ has risen and defeated death we can lay down our lives and take up the life of God’s resurrection age to come right now. But doing so, means to realize that every part of us, our mind, heart, soul, and body belong to Christ. This is where we must remind ourselves of the theme that Paul has alluded to often in this book. What is true of the Messiah is true of his people. That means, in a very real way, if we belong to Christ, then we belong to his people. We are the covenant family, moving through the world, calling it to reconciliation with God (2 Cor. 5:14-21; Col. 1:21-28), and living together as one entity. If the church were to embrace the true radical nature of the practical reality of the gospel in the lives of believers, God’s church would truly begin to turn the world upside down once again.


Devotional Thought
Could you look at your life right now and rightly say that it is still laid up on the altar in sacrifice to God or have you tried to crawl down from the altar and conform back to the pattern of the world by doing your own will at times? What area of your life is the most difficult to consistently sacrifice to God? What can you specifically do to change that starting right now?