Note: I have developed a few simple slides in PowerPoint that I used in delivering this sermon. They're not fancy, but if anyone is interested in them I will send them to you directly by Email. Send your request to sam@srmccormick.net with the word Slides in the subject.
A LIVING SACRIFICE
I. Introduce subject by reading Rom 11:33 – 12:3
II. Sacrificing to God has always been part of the man-God relationship.
• Abel and Cain made sacrifices. There was an issue of acceptability of the sacrifice. Abel’s was acceptable by faith, the Hebrew writer tells us.
• Upon emerging from the ark, Noah offered a sacrifice of every clean animal and bird, apparently from the 7 pairs of clean animals he had been directed to take into the ark (Gen 7:2-3).
• Abraham, obeying the bone-chilling command of God, took his son Isaac to a mountain and made every preparation to kill him as a burnt offering. At the last moment, “the angel of the Lord” stopped him, saying “now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”
• Sacrifices in the Levitical system. (Summarize briefly)
1. Burnt offering – Lev 1 & 6 – Voluntary, signifying complete surrender, devotion, and commitment to God. A bull, ram, male goat, male dove, or pigeon was sacrificed.
2. Grain offering – Lev 2 & 6 – Voluntary, signifying thanksgiving for first fruits. Flour, bread, or grain, always unleavened, were used.
3. Fellowship, or Peace offering – Lev 3, 7, & 22 - Voluntary, signifying thankfulness to God. Any animal without blemish was sacrificed.
4. Sin offering – Lev 4, 5, 6, & 12 – Mandatory, made by one who had sinned unintentionally or was ceremonially unclean.
5. Guilt offering – Lev 5, 6, 7 & 14 – Mandatory, made by a person who had either deprived another of his rights or desecrated something holy.
6. Annual day of atonement – one goat was symbolically loaded with the people’s sins and released to the desert, and another was slain and its blood offered as atonement for sin.
• At the huge brazen altar, morning and evening sacrifices, etc. went on day after day including the Sabbath.
• While still in Babylon, Daniel foresaw the end of the Levitical system – prophesied by Daniel (9:27), done in AD70.
III. It is part of our nature to bring gifts to God
Your baby wants you to eat part of his baby food. It’s a game, but it’s also giving back to the giver.
School age children bring gifts they have made. Those gifts delight us and our children are overjoyed at our appreciation of their gifts. Years later, those gifts are still precious.
What sacrifice is ours to give to the one who created the mountains, valleys, rivers and oceans, and the stars, galaxies, and undiscovered worlds beyond?
• Psa 24:1 “The earth is the LORD's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein…”
• 1 Cor 6:19 “You are not our own; you were bought with a price.”
• Rom 11:35 “…who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?"
There is something God wants very much, and only you can give it.
Rom 12:1-2 Present your body as a living sacrifice…do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed”
(It is our choice to be transformed, or not)
The transformation rests on the renewing of the mind.
How fervently does God want you to undergo this transformation?
Though you have nothing that isn’t already God’s, you are worth more than all the wealth in the world. You are worth Jesus dying for.
Only you have the power to grant or deny God HIS HIGHEST WISH CONCERNING YOU!
Your church contribution is not your “living sacrifice.”
God wants ALL of you. If your heart belongs to him, he also has the rest.
IV. Death, Burial, and Resurrection
1. To be a living sacrifice, we must first die.
In the Levitical system of sacrifices, the animals were slain in order to be sacrificed.
Death – we put self to death when we give ourselves to Jesus.
Rom 6:4 “We were buried with him by baptism into death”
What can that death possibly mean?
We die to pride, self-will, and sin.
Burial – we are buried with Christ in baptism and our sins are washed away, reconciling us to God; pure, unstained, and holy (Acts 22:16).
In baptism the believer signifies that he dies to sin.
In the literal sense, we bury the dead.
So it is in the spiritual.
Not only is the reign of sin dead. It is buried. The reign of sin in his mortal body is deceased. We are dead to our former way of life. We may sin in the future, but if we do, our sins are covered.
Resurrection – We are raised from the water to a new life in which our lives, while we are still flesh and blood, are “hid in Christ with God.” Col 3:3
Rom 6:4b-6
…just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin;
The “newness of life” in vs 4 is the same as the “living sacrifice” in Rom 12. Its claims upon us are the same. They are two forms of speech expressing the same idea.
2. It is our bodies that are a “living” sacrifice. Our physical bodies are not what must die to open the way for “newness of life.” Instead, are to “die” to those fleshly, rebellious urges that cause us to sin.
What does that mean? That our past sins are not remembered and laid to our charge?
Yes, but it means more. It means sin no longer has dominion over us.
3. It requires that we allow Jesus to pull the stickery, stubborn weed of SELF out of our hearts by its deeply entwined roots.
• Rom 12:3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himSELF more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
• SELF, as it formerly existed, is put to death and removed with its impulses and appetites.
• The believer at the moment of his baptism signifies to the world that he is dead to sin and a new life is entered into; a life unto God through Jesus Christ his Lord.
4. How does that transformation bear out in the sacrificed life?
The sacrificed person looks like Jesus.
Jesus led a completely sacrificed life. He did not live for himself, but gave everything in his life to God. He demonstrated the living sacrifice.
Having been risen with Christ, our values are changed:
• Our affections are on things above, not things of the earth. Col 3:2
• We are like Paul - Gal 2:20 “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God”
Philippians 3:10-12 – Paul counted everything as rubbish:
“…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.
The animals presented upon the altar were dead sacrifices.
But we must present to God our living, vital energies – dead only to sin.
• These bodies we live in are not ours. They belong to God, and are put in service for his use through us, the ones who inhabit them.
• We daily put to death the things of our past lives.
Col 3:5 - “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”
• The body’s lusts are no longer obeyed.
• The eyes and ears, feet, hands, and that most rebellious of all the members, the tongue, formerly “instruments of unrighteousness,” cooperate in acts of goodness, kindness, and service to God and others, to the glory of God and the happiness of fellow men.
• Some of our songs say it as well as it can be expressed:
Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to thee,
Take my moments and my days
Let them flow in ceaseless praise.
Take my hands and let them move
At the impulse of thy love
Take my feet and let them be
Swift and beautiful for thee.
Take my voice and let me sing
Always, only, for my king
Take my lips and let them be
Filled with messages from thee.
My heart, my life, my body, my soul
Lord take control, take control
I give my body a living sacrifice
Lord, take control, take control
• To be a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God we have to deal with sin in our lives.
Under this formula, men and women in every age have offered themselves to God as persons alive from the dead, their bodies being living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God.
Through this avenue, self-sacrificed persons receive the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Spirit. Thus it is that Christians have fellowship with one another; with the apostles and prophets, and with God and his Son.
V. Manifestations of living sacrifice:
Look at the first Christians’ living sacrifices – sacrificed lives of security and comfort to please God and secure their salvation. .
Heb 11:35b – 38 “Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated--of whom the world was not worthy--wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”
And the Lord calls on you and me to be a living sacrifice.
Paul starts his detailed explanation of the sacrificed life this way:
• Rom 12:3 “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.”
• He goes further into a description of the living sacrifice in vs. 9-21 (read)
• Heb 13:15 “Let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God; that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.”
• Heb 13:16 “Do not neglect to do good and share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
• 1 Peter 2:5 “…you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
VI. But alas! Some who have yielded to the promptings of this formula failed to feel, or to continue to feel, the effects of its gracious effects.
The evidences of living as a sacrifice are not evident. They yet live unto themselves. Instead of God now controlling the operation of their hands, feet, eyes, ears, intellect, and tongues, the members of their bodies control them with their appetites.
They didn’t really give up that deadly enemy – SELF. SELF has to die for us to give all of ourselves to God. God and SELF mixed equals SELF.
A Christian has no assurance from the scriptures that the body which his spirit now inhabits shall ever experience a glorious change at the resurrection, unless his constant desire - and his concomitant actions - are to present his body as a living sacrifice to God, in view of the gracious gift of eternal life.
If the grace of God, as exhibited in God’s beloved Son, fails to energize such a desire and maintain such action in a professing Christian, it is because he has neglected the means of grace to fit him for that outcome.
And his profession in the end will be revealed to be false.
VII. What about you?
It sounds simple, doesn’t it?
What is so hard about it?
It’s the feeling that there is something for “me” - that is “SELF” to lose.
But we don’t really have something to lose - at least nothing of value, and everything to gain.
Paul counted any gain to himself as loss:
Philippians 3:7-8 “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. (8) Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”
Have you “lost” (counted as loss) the things that have no value and in fact are a detriment to you?
Are you the living sacrifice that God desires?
