The Sacrifice of Spiritual Worship

Introduction

Douglas Moo writes:

Romans Original Meaning

All theology is practical, and all practice, if it is truly Christian, is theological. Paul’s gospel is deeply theological, but it is also eminently practical. The good news of Jesus Christ is intended to transform a person’s life. Until individual Christians own and live out the theology, the gospel has not accomplished its purpose.

The Danger of theology without application. 2 Tim 3:16-17

2 Timothy 3:16–17 (ESV)

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Paul has not spent 11 chapter of theological exposition simply to be studied in leather chairs in a seminary library, and here we see that the Scriptures, both Old and New, have great application for our lives. This is now what Paul enters into in the second majour section of his letter to the Romans. All he is about to speak of in the following chapters is summed up in this text; here is his thesis for applying the theology we have just worked through. In it, we have a positive and negative command, followed by a command to test and discern the will of God through wisdom that is guided by what God has revealed to be true in his Word.

The Positive Application: The Sacrifice of Spiritual Worship

The command: present your bodies as living sacrifices.

Present your bodies:

There is a clear link here to Romans 6. There, we are told that the believer has died to the flesh with Christ and is spiritually alive in the power of Christ’s resurrection. There Paul said in Romans 6:12-13

Romans 6:12–13 ESV

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

There, were Paul uses the illustration of being instruments here the same idea is applied to the concept of sacrifice.

Our bodies are not our whole selves, as we understand the existence of a soul; the spiritual aspect of man. Our bodies are a part of us, and they are tools that we have the ability to control, though at times with great difficulty.

The Gospel is humanizing. The world encourages people to follow their instincts and is taken aback at the idea of denying your bodily desires. This is animalistic, in that it tells people to behave as animals, letting their urges and passions control them. Dogs can commit homosexual acts, and it is not evil or sin because they are dogs. They are bound to their nature and are not image-bearers, and so the way they use their bodies is morally neutral because they are animals. But when a human engages in homosexual acts, or fulfills any other fleshly passion, they reduce themselves to the level of animals, doing what they feel like doing rather than what they know to be good and holy. Slavery to sin means giving up your humanity, but the Gospels calls people to rediscover it in Christ and to live in such a way so as their body becomes a tool to be controlled, rather than a master to be obeyed. This is what Paul meant when he said in 1 Cor 9:27

1 Corinthians 9:27 ESV

But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

The body is not evil, but it is to be controlled and mastered to be in service to Christ. Sexuality is good when mastered into the loving and tender relationship of a married couple. The desire for pleasure is good when controlled in such a way so that pleasures are not indulged in excess and they are enjoyed in thanksgiving and praise to God, the giver of good things. So we see Paul tell us to present our bodies, meaning we are given the power by the Spirit to control what our bodies do so that we are able to present them to God.

Living Sacrifice - This is a very curious phrase,

What’s a living sacrifice? It’s weirder than it looks, because the word sacrifice in Greek is actually the word for killing. Therefore, what it’s saying is, “Make your life a living killing.” It’s deliberately paradoxical.

Timothy Keller

How are we to understand this? What we see in the Scriptures is that the sacrifices Israel offered to God were not pleasing to him because they were done in a hypocritical and merely ritualistic fashion. Hos 9:4

Hosea 9:4 ESV

They shall not pour drink offerings of wine to the Lord, and their sacrifices shall not please him. It shall be like mourners’ bread to them; all who eat of it shall be defiled; for their bread shall be for their hunger only; it shall not come to the house of the Lord.

What Paul is telling us is that the kind of sacrifice that God approves of is the sacrifice of a life devoted to God. A living sacrifice is better than a dead sacrifice, for the living sacrifice is a continual aroma to God while the dead sacrifice is over as soon as the body is consumed. To be in Christ means to be connected to the fountain of life, and so as we sacrifice our lives to God, rather than being made dead we are being made more alive in God. The death of Christ was a sacrifice that continued into the life of the resurrection, and so it is with us.

What, however, is this living sacrifice, this rational, spiritual worship? It is not to be offered in the temple courts or in the church building, but rather in home life and in the market-place. It is the presentation of our bodies to God.

John Stott

So we see that the living sacrifice of worship is to employ our bodies for use in accord with God’s will, rather than passions inspired by sin which dehumanize us. In the Spirit, we can make our bodies our slaves to serve the purpose of the glory of Christ. This is what Paul means by telling us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. This is how we worship God, not merely with outward rituals or religious duties, but in faith submitting our bodies to the will of God.

Paul calls this worship spiritual which translates a difficult greek word that usually means reasonable or informed. This is a sacrifice made on the basis of theological knowledge. The reason we need to know and study theology is because it impacts and produces a true form of worship. So this concludes by realizing that Christian worship is a giving of our bodies to God’s service in accordance to what we know to be true.

The Negative Command: Do Not Be Conformed to the World

On the contrary, to be conformed to this world is to live life according to our fleshly desires. The bondage of sin is a bondage to self-actualization. It is to follow the interests and pursuits of the animal rather than rise up in the Spirit to use our bodies for what they were made for.

The counter to this is to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. Paul explains that this is done by testing.

The transformation means we are thinking in a way that is consistent with the Gospel and how it changes our lives. Through knowledge of the truth, we are transformed to live according to that truth rather than according to the old ways of the flesh.

This is the renewal of the mind, and leads to testing.

To “test” and “discern” the will of God is not to act based on feelings or a sense of God’s will, but to take the truth we know about our union with Christ and, with biblical wisdom, parse it out into how it affects our behaviour. In the rest of Romans, Paul will focus on issues that are specific to the Roman Church, and not every issue we could wish to be addressed is addressed in Scripture. The Bible never clearly tells us how strict we should be about obeying the speed limit, what we should think about surrogate parents, how we should approach AI, what we should think about the social and political issues of our day, what our response to COVID should be, and so on. What we are given instead in the NT are various instructions given to specific churches that are examples to us of how the Gospel plays out in our lives. These show us what this testing and discernment looks like, taking every action and putting it in subjection to the Lordship of Christ and interpreting it in the context of our spiritual worship.

Conclusion: Discerning the Will of God

Only the redeemed can present a living sacrifice to God, because only the redeemed have spiritual life. And only believers are priests who can come before God with an offering.

John F. MacArthur

Discerning the will of God means to be fully submitted to Christ by faith, a faith which brings us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices with genuine desire to offer a pleasing sacrifice to God. This is done when, from that position of faithful submission, we seek to bring the revealed will of God into our lives by studying the Scriptures and praying for wisdom so that we may be better equipped to offer this sacrifice to God as people made priests under our great high priest.