Bringing Ourselves to the Altar

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This morning we’re going to be in Romans chapter 12. Romans chapter 12, we’re going to look at a couple of verses in Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. This week we celebrated Christmas.

We did. You look surprised by this. He’s on such a Christmas coma, he doesn’t even remember all the stuff he got.

We celebrated Christmas. I’m assuming your families did in some way, shape, or form. celebrated Christmas.

Many of you got gifts. Many of you gave gifts. Some of you even bought the gifts that you gave.

One of my favorite things about being married is I don’t have to come up with all the gift ideas for my family anymore. My wife is on top of that. But we got a few gifts.

We gave a few gifts. And one of the challenges of being a parent at Christmas time is getting your children to understand the importance of giving instead of just getting. Because it’s human nature, we like to get stuff, don’t we?

We like to get stuff. And it’s okay to enjoy getting stuff. But I’ve seen children, you know, pout when they didn’t get enough or they didn’t get as much as somebody else.

I thought I was about to have to pull Benjamin’s head off one of the nights we had Christmas with Charlie’s family. We’re going through and we only bought for the children on that side of the family. And we’re going around the circle and letting them open one at a time.

And at one point, Benjamin says, I think he says, they stiffed me. Like he didn’t get anything. And I thought, how does he even know that word?

And what an awful, what an awful attitude to have at Christmas time. And I’m about to lay into, you didn’t even know this was happening. I was about to lay into him and charlotte said no no he said skipped in other words we forgot to let him take his turn so it wasn’t quite as bad as as they stiffed me um but kids like to get stuff we all like to get stuff and one of the challenges is is as a parent is helping your children understand that giving is more important than getting and that’s a challenge in a lot of areas of life not just at Christmas time, even in our spiritual lives, it’s a challenge because a lot of American Christian culture is geared toward getting.

Even when it comes to spiritual things, it’s geared toward getting. It’s focused on getting. What can I get out of church?

What can I get out of worship? How can I do this to get something out of God? A lot of it is focused on getting what we want or what we feel like we deserve.

When you think about it from a biblical standpoint, though, I really don’t want what I deserve from God. I’d much rather have His grace and mercy than what I actually deserve. But a lot of it’s focused on getting.

And if I don’t get what I want out of worship, if I don’t get what I feel like I need out of worship, I’ll do something different. If I’m not getting what I feel I want or need or deserve out of my church, I’ll just go on to the next one. And it’s all focused, well, I shouldn’t say all of it, but a lot of people are focused on getting.

And if we’re not careful, you and I may fall into that same category where we’re focused on getting. I find myself thinking that way sometimes. I have to snap myself out of it and say, wait a minute, that’s not what it’s about.

What we’re going to see in the passage we’re going to look at today in Romans chapter 12 is that our Christian life and our worship is not about getting. It’s about giving. It’s about giving ourselves to God.

We’re going to look at that in Romans chapter 12. And it’s natural to some extent that we think about getting, about worship. You know, that worship is about coming and getting the experience of worship.

And feeling something. We receive something from it. It’s natural to think about it that way, I think, because in one sense we can’t out-give God.

When you think about all that God has given you, When you start with the concept of salvation, we just celebrated Christmas. God gave his son for you. God gave his son to come to earth and live a perfect sinless life and shed his blood and die on the cross for your sins and be buried and rise again from the dead.

He gave his son for that purpose so that you could be saved from your sins. You start there and realize how much God has given you and then you add in all the other things. The Bible says that every good and perfect gift comes from God.

When you think about the fact that your heart’s beating right now, presumably it is because most of you are sitting vertical this morning. If I preach a little long, some of you may slide toward horizontal. I don’t know. But presumably all your hearts are beating, you’re breathing.

That is a gift from God. You’ve had food this week. That was a gift from God.

You’ve had a house to live in this week. That was a gift from God. you may think that I work for all those things who do you think gave you the strength to work who do you think gave you the back and the legs that enabled you to go out and work for those things it’s all a gift from God everything we have every good and perfect gift is a blessing from him from salvation on down to the most mundane aspects of life so when we think about it we really can’t out give God and it would be foolish to even try yet the Christian life is not focused just on the getting God gives us tremendous gifts and tremendous blessings.

Even in the difficult times of life, there’s always some blessing from God that we can find. God gives tremendously to us, but the Christian life is not focused on getting. How can I get more?

How can I get what I feel like I deserve? And it’s not focused on trying to out-give God. It simply needs to be focused on giving, on giving to God in grateful response for what He’s already given us.

In grateful response for what He’s already given us. Now this is not one of those things where somebody bought you a Christmas present and you forgot to go buy them something and then you feel guilty so you have to go try to get something of equal value and give to them to make things even. We will never be able to give God even a fraction of what he’s given us.

And yet worship and the way we live as Christians is about giving ourselves just not to make things even but to show our gratefulness for what he’s given to us. If you haven’t turned with me there already, we’re going to look at Romans chapter 12 verses 1 and 2 to see what this giving looks like. And what we’re going to see there first of all this morning is that worshipers offer themselves to God.

Worshippers offer themselves to God. Again, we think sometimes of worship as being a time we’re going to come in and we’re going to sing songs and maybe the lights are dim and we’re going to try to have an experience and get what we feel like we need. We’re going to try to feel this experience so we can go on and feel better about ourselves throughout the week.

And it’s very focused on getting from God. But really, worship is about giving. And it’s not just laying any offering you have.

It’s about giving your whole self to God. And we’re going to see this in verse 1. In Romans chapter 12, verse 1, Paul wrote, I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.

Now let’s take that verse apart a little bit and get to the meat of what Paul’s talking about here. He says to present our bodies a living sacrifice. He starts out by saying, I beseech you brethren by the mercies of God.

Now Paul, when he says beseech, that’s a word we don’t use very much anymore, but it’s a great word to describe what’s happening. He is pleading with his fellow believers. He’s practically begging them.

This is really important to Paul. He spent the last several chapters of the book of Romans going all the way back to the beginning talking about how little we deserve from God, how little we deserve salvation, and how gracious God is, how kind God is in providing it anyway. And then looking at what God has provided and who God is Paul then turns to his fellow believers and says I beg you I beg you to give yourselves more fully to God because he deserves it he deserves all the worship that we could ever give him and he says I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God see when he said when he’s when he’s reasoning with them about why we should give ourselves more fully to God why we should offer ourselves to God he’s not falling back on fear as the reason.

He’s not falling back on punishment as the reason. You know what, and a lot of people think that about Christianity. You worship God, otherwise he’s going to squash you.

And there are people out there that say, well, I wouldn’t want to worship God like that. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Paul doesn’t say, I beseech you, brethren, by the fear of God, although I think we should fear the Lord.

He says, I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God. It’s not out of a fear of punishment, but it’s appealing to God’s mercy. And he’s taking his fellow believers and he’s pointing them to God’s mercy and saying, because we have a God who is so merciful, because we have a God who is so kind, because we have a God who is so loving and gracious, because we have a God who went to these lengths to provide his Son for your salvation, because we have a God like that, I beseech you, I beg you, Give yourselves to him.

Give yourselves to him. And if we look back at Romans chapter 2, earlier in this book, Romans chapter 2 verse 4, he writes to them and he says, in another context, he says, do you despise the riches of his goodness, forbearance and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance? Now why do I bring that up there?

Because it’s ultimately not a fear of God that leads you to repentance. It’s not being afraid, it’s not being terrified of the punishment that’s going to lead us to repentance. It’s the goodness and it’s the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.

See, when I trusted Christ as my Savior when I was five years old, part of what led me to that point was a fear of hell. I grew up in church from the time I was in the womb pretty much, hearing the stories, hearing the gospel. And it all really clicked for me when I was five years old and I was sitting in children’s church.

And a friend of my parents who happened to be an Oklahoma City police officer, kind of intimidating guy, was talking to us about how one sin is enough to condemn us to hell. And people say you shouldn’t talk about hell to children. It worked for me.

I knew, it clicked in my brain, and I knew at that moment for the first time that if I were to die right then, I would spend eternity in hell separated from God because I had sinned, because I was a sinner. And there was that fear. That was that fear of judgment.

But nothing changed in my heart other than I sat there in fear for several days. Not sat there at children’s church. They didn’t turn the lights out and leave me.

I went home and it bugged me. You know how you get those things that you think about and they just eat you up until you finally find out the answer? And I went home and four days later, I asked my mother one day because it was just driving me nuts.

What do I need to do to be saved? Because he had talked about salvation. He had talked about what Jesus did on the cross.

But I don’t think I fully understood that part. And that’s when my mother sat me down at our kitchen table and began to talk to me about what Jesus did for us on the cross. And how much he loved us that he gave his life to pay for our sins.

And yes, the fear of punishment sort of woke me up, but it was the realization that God loved me enough to send his son, and that his son loved me enough to lay down his life, to take my punishment, to take all the punishment that I deserve. That’s what finally, that’s what I say finally like it had been so long, but that’s what brought me to the point of trusting Christ as my Savior. Yes, the fear woke me up, but it was God’s kindness.

It was God’s goodness. And Paul says that. It’s the goodness.

It’s the kindness of God that brings us to repentance. And that’s what he’s talking about here when he says, I beseech you by the mercies of God. He says, I’m not begging you to offer yourselves more to the Lord because he’s scary because of what’s going to happen if you don’t.

Look at how good he is. Look at how kind he is. Look at how loving he is.

And so we don’t worship him out of a fear of punishment, but out of a sense of awe for his goodness. And he goes on next in verse 1 to say, this is what he begs them to do, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice. You present your bodies a living sacrifice.

Now he’s not specifically speaking of the physical body here. Because this is a picture for us that they would have understood as giving the whole self. It doesn’t mean that we go lay our bodies physically on an altar somewhere.

But see, whoever he was writing to, his whole audience would have understood what this meant. The Jews would have understood the idea of animal sacrifices in the Old Covenant. The pagans, those who had come out of a pagan lifestyle into Christianity, the Romans and Greeks, they would have understood the concept of animal sacrifice to their pagan gods or offering other things.

Everybody he was writing to had some understanding of giving offerings to God, to whatever God you worshipped. They would have understood the idea of sacrifice, that an animal died as an offering. And so Paul is saying we need to make an offering as well, but not a blood sacrifice.

God’s not interested in, it’s a principle taught throughout Scripture, that God is not as interested in the idea of a sacrifice as God is interested in a heart that’s offered up in submission to him. One of the passages we’ve looked at this year talks about Samuel offering a sacrifice. In 1 Samuel 15, it’s where he asks King Saul, Has the Lord as great a delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord?

Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams. He was telling Saul, God doesn’t want your sacrifice as much as he wants your obedience. God doesn’t want this animal on the altar so much as he wants your heart. And so what Paul is painting a picture of here is when he says a living sacrifice, they would have understood that to mean offering themselves, not in the sense that they die on the altar, but in the sense that they would live for him, that they would put their lives on the altar and say, this is yours.

Because what you offered, what you offered on the altar, then belonged to the God that you offered it to. And he’s not saying we have to die to earn God’s favor. Jesus had already done that for us.

Jesus had been the ultimate blood sacrifice. But now out of thanksgiving for what he’d done, out of a sense of gratefulness, we worship him by putting our whole self on the altar. Putting our whole selves on the altar is a living sacrifice.

And saying this belongs to you. He says, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God. Now the offerings that were made in the Old Testament were holy in the sense that they were set aside for God’s purposes and they were unfit for any kind of common use after that.

Now there was nothing magical about the bull or the goat or whatever else, the sheep that was placed on the altar, nothing magical about that animal. But when it was put on the altar, suddenly it belonged to God and it was set apart for God’s use. You know, they would offer the animals, and depending on what kind of offering was made, sometimes there would be a burnt offering and the meat would be roasted over a fire. And folks, they didn’t just have a barbecue with that meat afterwards.

They didn’t just say, well, that smells good. Let’s divide it up amongst everybody. No, you couldn’t just take the meat back off the altar once that burnt offering was done.

Some of it was left on the altar and burnt to, just absolutely burnt to bits and offered to God. Some of it was then given, reserved for the priests, but it couldn’t just be taken back and used for any old purpose. And this is a problem I think we have sometimes with this idea of being a living sacrifice.

I heard a pastor of mine growing up say that the problem with living sacrifices is they often crawl off the altar. And we tend to do that. In a moment of spiritual excitement, we lay ourselves on the altar.

We commit ourselves to God. We say, I belong to you. It’s all yours.

And then we gradually start taking things back, right? God, it’s all yours. Oh, no, I need that $20.

God, I commit my family to you. They’re yours. Do with them what you want.

Oh, God, I don’t want you taking my children and sending them to the mission field. Oh, we’re not doing that. God, it’s all yours.

I’ll do whatever you want. Show me what you want me to do. No, I’m not going into ministry.

I’m not doing that. I’m not taking that job. I’m not moving there.

We start putting conditions on what God wants us to do, and we treat ourselves as though our lives no longer belong to him. We’ve taken them back for our use. For something to be holy means we’ve committed it to God like those sacrifices in the Old Testament.

We’ve committed them to God. they belong to him, and they’re not crawling back off the altar for it to be holy. We are committed to God.

We’re supposed to be committed to God, and we are available for his use, not for the world’s purposes. And then this word translated as acceptable, it doesn’t mean that we can somehow earn God’s favor. We can somehow become acceptable to God by living a holy life because we can’t live a life that’s holy enough for God to accept us.

That’s why Jesus had to pay for our sins. We have to be covered in his righteousness. This word acceptable means pleasing.

One of many ways the word can be used. I think it means pleasing here. And Paul is writing, assuming that his audience is composed of people who’ve already trusted in Christ as their Savior.

Now, you and I are not acceptable before God because we’re good. You and I are acceptable before God because Jesus Christ died for our sins and we’ve trusted him as our Savior. And so that sin is swept away.

The slate is wiped clean and we are covered, instead of in our own filth, we are covered with the righteousness of Christ. So assuming that, then we’ve moved on from what is morally acceptable to talking about what is pleasing to God. Because you and I, even as believers who’ve trusted Christ and been forgiven, we can live in ways that are pleasing to God. We can also do things that are not pleasing to God.

So if you want to talk about what’s pleasing to God, it’s honoring Him by treating our lives as an offering, as something that belongs to Him. We please God when we bring glory to Him by living for Him. So when He says holy and acceptable to God, that’s what He’s talking about.

He’s talking about being totally committed in His service and trying to please Him by bringing Him glory. And then He says at the end of verse 1, which is your reasonable service? Which is your reasonable service?

And I’ve heard some people say that this idea of reasonable service means this is not even a big deal. This is just the bare minimum of what’s expected of you as a Christian. I don’t know that I’d say total commitment is not a big deal. It is a big deal because it’s a hard thing for us to do. When he says reasonable, he’s not saying, oh, this is the bottom line.

This is where you start from. It’s still a big commitment. That word reasonable, in the Greek, he is referring to something that’s rational or logical. So there’s a little bit of a difference here between those two things.

He’s talking about it being a rational decision. It’s the logical thing to do. Why is it logical?

Because Christians surrendering their lives, their whole lives to God, is the only thing that makes sense. In other words, for him to say it’s your reasonable service doesn’t mean, oh, that’s no big deal, that’s just what you’re expected to do. Although I think that’s true.

What he’s actually saying here, what those words actually mean, is that it’s inconceivable. It’s irrational. It doesn’t make sense. It’s the idea of somebody repenting, acknowledging their sin, changing their mind, getting on the same page with God, and realizing their sin and their need for a Savior, and then turning to Jesus Christ, trusting in Christ alone for their salvation, and then to just say, okay, thanks for saving me, see you.

Now, for that change of mind to have taken place, and for the work of the Holy Spirit to now be taking place within us, the logical next step would be to say, now I belong to God, and I’m going to act like it. I belong to Him, and I’m going to totally commit myself to Him. So for Paul, the idea that we would have that change of mind about our sin that we would trust Christ as our Savior, and then we would just go on and continue to embrace a lifestyle of sin and reject what God said that was unthinkable.

It made no sense. You can’t get there from here. Sometimes people do things that don’t make sense, right?

Some of you have had children. They do things that don’t make sense. I could go into examples this morning, but I have a child sitting on the front row, and so I’m going to spare you that and spare them the embarrassment.

But we all know what it looks like when you see somebody who’s been in this situation, and then they make this choice, and you think, how did you get there from here? There’s no rational thought process that leads from this point to this point. That’s what Paul’s saying here.

There’s no rational thought process that leads from saying, I need a Savior. I can’t save myself. I trust Christ. Thank God He saved me.

See you. I’m doing what I want. How do you get there from here?

No, no, he says, offer yourselves as a living sacrifice. Totally commit yourself to God, because that’s the only thing that makes sense from over here. And so we see in verse 1 that the worshiper offers himself to God.

We see in verse 2, though, that it’s God who gives the offering value. Because ultimately, you know, I give God my whole life, still that really doesn’t have much value, because I’m still just a sinner. I still have all my failings.

I still have my problems. If this offering that I’m giving God is going to be worth anything, it’s going to be because he gave it value, because he made it worthwhile. So it says in verse 2, And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Let’s talk about that verse a little bit.

He starts out by saying, do not be conformed to the world. To be conformed means to imitate a pattern that you see somewhere else, to take on a form of something else. Benjamin had some clay over here this morning, and it makes me think of those.

They’ve got all these Play-Doh things that you can buy now. I don’t, but they’ve got them. And the barber shops, and you squeeze on the little person, and hair grows out.

The Play-Doh conforms to the shape of the hole, I guess, and it squeezes out and it becomes hair. They have things where you can make french fries, and they’ve got molds, and you put the Play-Doh in, and it turns into the shape of the little animal. It’s taking on the form. That’s conforming.

So when you hear that word conform, think of Play-Doh being stuffed into some kind of a mold. It takes on that shape. And so he says, don’t be conformed.

Don’t be conformed. Don’t take on the shape of the world around you. God does not want us to become like everything else that we see around us.

We’re not supposed to fit in. I know Christians are worried about how to fit into this society, how to be relevant. Well, here’s the liberating truth.

We were never meant to. The church has always been countercultural. When I say countercultural, the picture in my mind I get is of hippies in the 60s. Didn’t fit into clean-cut America.

Well, that’s the idea. Not that we’re supposed to be the hippies. But you know what?

Who was it who stood against infanticide and slavery and the abuse of women in the Roman Empire? It was the church. It was the church.

Who was it that stood against slavery in the United States? It was the church. Who was it who lived so differently in Roman times that the world around them just didn’t even understand and made up all sorts of rumors.

They said Christians, you know, they didn’t understand the brother-sister relationship of brothers and sisters in Christ, and they claimed all sorts of wicked things about the church. They claimed that we ate blood and we drank blood and ate. They practiced cannibalism because they didn’t understand the concept of the Lord’s Supper.

There was so much about us they didn’t understand. We didn’t fit in. In places today where the prevailing culture is to worship the government or worship some false god, Christians don’t fit in.

It was Christians who stood against slavery in the British Empire and in America. It’s Christians today who stand against the erosion of the sanctity of life and stand against the erosion of God’s definition of marriage and gender and everything. And yet we worry about how we’re supposed to fit in and be relevant.

The secret is we’re not supposed to fit in. We are supposed to be different. We’re supposed to stand out.

He doesn’t want us conformed to the pattern of this world. 1 Peter 2 says, But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people. I like what the King James says, a peculiar people.

Some of us take that really, really literally in being peculiar people. But he says, all those things, you are those things that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of the darkness and into his marvelous light. Why are we supposed to be different?

Why are we supposed to stand out and not be conformed? So that we can glorify him. We’re supposed to stand out the way a candle stands out in a dark room.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now this renewing of your mind takes place as God changes our way of thinking and makes us more like Jesus. This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us.

And if you’ve trusted Christ as your Savior, the Holy Spirit indwelled you perpetually from the moment of conversion. Meaning, He came into your heart, He took up residence in you, and He’s not leaving. And from that moment, the Holy Spirit has been within you working to change your heart, to change your mind, and to make you more like Jesus Christ. And our thinking, our minds are renewed.

Colossians chapter 3 verse 10. says you have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of him who created him. God changes us to bring us more in line with him and he renews us.

And because of this renovation that takes place in our minds and in our spirits under the lordship of Christ and through the work of the Holy Spirit, our whole lives will be transformed. You know, when you change your mind about something, it starts to show up in your behavior. It starts to show up in your behavior.

At one of our family Christmases, somebody was laughing about the fact that I said I was a social drinker of coffee. I saw that look, a social drinker of coffee. Now, yesterday, I went and bought some sparkling grape juice at Walmart for New Year’s Eve, and now that they sell wine at Walmart, the lady came over and said, you might want to double bag your wine.

I was like, I don’t know what to say. Do I correct her? I just, thank you.

So, if any of you were at Walmart yesterday morning. That was grape juice. Now, I told somebody at Christmas, they offered me some coffee.

I said, no thanks. I said, you don’t drink coffee? I said, well, I used to, to try to fit in at church because I was a social drinker.

And they laughed about me being a social drinker. Because everywhere I’ve been at church, everybody just stands around drinking coffee. And at some churches, it’s been worse than here even.

It’s like they wouldn’t let you in the door if you didn’t have a coffee cup in your hand. And so I learned to stand there and drink coffee. But shortly after I came here, I was like, why am I, I hate this stuff.

I just absolutely hate it. And so I quit. My mind changed and I realized I hate this and I always have.

So why am I doing this? And you know what? Because my mind changed, so did my behavior.

I quit drinking it. I went back to tea. And some of y’all look at me like I’m a foreigner for that reason.

My mind changed coffee and so did my behavior. When I do the checkbook and I say, wow, we have a whole lot of no money this week. Guess what?

My behavior changes and my Amazon cart empties out and all sorts of things happen. See, when our minds change, usually our behavior lines up with whatever our mind has changed to. And there are much bigger examples than those, but those just give you an idea.

And so as our minds change, as God renews our minds, then our lives should be transformed as well to be in line with the new mind that he’s given us. Transformation here describes a total change that he makes in us inside and out. And he finishes up verse 2 by saying that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Now this transforming work of God, God uses that to empower us to serve him. He changes us and makes us able to serve him. And one of the things that he does is he gives us discernment.

As the spirit works and renews our mind, he gives us discernment, which a lot of times that word discernment is used when it comes to telling right from wrong and true from untrue. Discernment also can apply to being able to figure out God’s will. What is God’s will for me?

What does God want me to do? What does God expect me to do in this situation? Well, he gives us the ability to discern his will as he