A Living Sacrifice

Please stand as you are able as we read God’s word:

Romans 12:1–2 NRSV

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, 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 renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Pray...

I want to tell you a story about two friends...

The first is someone I went to church with in a previous town. He was instrumental in my journey toward a charismatic form of Christianity. Godly man. Helped lead worship. His marriage was cold. Began working out of town. After several weeks began buying porn magazines at airport. Escalated to renting pornographic movies in hotel room. Finally, resulted in calling an “escort service” for sex. Felt so ashamed afterward. But the coldness at home and travel meant he eventually gave in again, repeating the same pattern but only faster. However, this time when he called the escort service - it was a police sting operation. Arrested, booked, ultimately only fined. But had to tell wife, kids, church. How did this happen to a man who loved Jesus.

Another friend - loving husband and father. Befriended a woman at work - I don’t think we shouldn’t have opposite sex friends, just telling what happened. Both married. Began sharing their frustrations with marriage and home life. Became emotionally entangled. Eventually led to an affair. He eventually confessed to his wife. Told his adult kids. Drug his family through hell.

No doubt that they were saved. Yet both of them found themselves in a dark place they wouldn’t have believed they’d ever be in. How could this happen?

I can’t look at my friends with any sense of religious superiority. It’s true that I’ve never had a physical affair, but I spent years trapped in the affair of porn abuse. I’ve found myself looking up from a deep hole that I had dug wonder how I had fallen so far.

How about you? You probably know people who’ve you’ve watched fall from grace - ppl you would have once described as good. You can also probably think of moments and events where you were not your “best self”. Where you gave in to things you shouldn’t have. Looked at and lusted for things you shouldn’t. And all the while knowing it was wrong and being in relationship with God.

How do we get ourselves in such obvious messes. The answer might surprise you.

In our passage this morning, Paul gives us both the answer to “why” we behave in ways inconsistent with our calling - ways that are wrong, unhelpful, or even destructive - and offers the solution for getting back on the right track. Both the answer and solution are summed up in the word - worship. Worship is how we end up where we never thought we’d be; worship is how we end up where we always wanted to be.

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Romans 12:1 “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

If worship is the answer and solution, we need to begin by rethinking what it means to worship. When it comes to worship, I think we often have a very limited view of it. If we hear someone say they spent time in worship, that typically means they listened/sang along to some music. Or we talk about attending a “worship service” meaning I went to church and participated in some worship activities. Obviously, singing praise to God, reading and hearing the scriptures, praying, giving - all these things are included worship. But when we think this is ALL there is to worship, our worship of God becomes constrained to a short period of time on Sundays and during our devotions. Is that all worship is?

Paul offers us a much more comprehensive understanding of worship. He says it is actually the presenting of our whole embodied selves in devotion to God. That includes our working, eating, sleeping, and playing. All of it is either oriented toward or away from God as an act of worship.

Paul compares true worship to a sacrifice. Just an a whole animal was killed and placed on an alter, so our worship is the sacrifice of our whole self to God. Yet, not a sacrifice that leads to death, but one that leads to true living. That encompasses a LOT more than just singing some songs!

Worship is directed by our affections. By our loves. The reformer, Martin Luther, wrote, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god.” James K. A. Smith, in his book You are What you Love, observes, “Your deepest desire is the one manifested by your daily life and habits.” The affections of our heart directs our worship to one god or another.

It’s actually pretty easy to tell what someone worships as supreme. Give me three screenshots of your life and I’ll tell you what you worship. Show me:

Your calendar. How do you spend your time? Who do you spend it with? What are you doing?

Your bank account. How do you spend your money? How much do you give?

Your browser history. The man surfing porn sites is really looking for God. The woman browsing Temu is often in search of the same thing. I’m stereotyping a little, but our browser history is a silent journal of what has our affections.

In the end, your worship shows where your affections lie. It is how you become a living sacrifice. Make no mistake: you WILL put your life on some alter. You will offer yourself to something. We are worshippers - we can’t help it. We will worship something. The question is, what will we worship? Will we present our embodied self to God or to something else?

Paul tells us an inescapable truth. You are going to worship something. Worship is how we end up where we never thought we’d be; worship is how we end up where we always wanted to be.

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Paul confronts us with two realities. The first is that, when directed in false ways, Worship will conform you.

Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world…”

To be conformed literally means to take on the pattern of this world, to be pressed into its mold. To let something from the outside press us into its shape. When we give ourselves to the pursuit of money, sex, popularity, or pleasure - in other words, when we worship these things - they form us after themselves. We become like what we worship.

Have you ever made a sand castle with various shaped buckets? What do you do? You press sand into that mold so that it takes on the shape - at least temporarily. Paul says this is exactly what the world is doing to you and what happens when you go along with it. “Going with the flow/Don’t rock the boat” is just another way of saying “conform”.

How does the world conform us - deform us? We listen to the lie of the secular story. It usually sounds something like, “If you will do _____ then you will be happy/popular/in a relationship/rich. And so we are conformed by a thousand compromises until we find ourselves somewhere we never thought we’d be.

This is exactly how good, God-fearing men - and women - can find themselves embroiled in a physical or emotional affair. It’s how otherwise godly people find themselves in crushing debt, in addiction, or a slave to the opinion of others. We worship ourselves there, slowly being pressed into that shape.

Worship is how we end up where we never thought we’d be.

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But if worship can form us in false, disfiguring ways, worship also has the power to transform us into the kind of people we’ve always wanted to be. When directed toward God, Worship will transform you.

Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

“Transformed” is the Greek word metamorphoo, where we get our English word metamorphosis. We probably all know an example from nature of metamorphosis - a caterpillar to a butterfly. The caterpillar is not simply pressed into another shape - it becomes something altogether different.

This is the effect on us when our worship is directed the right way. When we worship, long for, crave, the things of the world, we become like the world. When we worship the things of God - daily orienting our life around the sacred story he is whispering to us - we become increasingly like him . This is what Paul means by renewing our minds. This kind of worship includes our religious life - our praying and singing and giving. But it also includes our mundane life - our working and sleeping and eating.

And as we do this, we begin to experience life as it was meant to be. We find ourselves becoming something completely new. In fact, Paul writes to the church in Corinth that 2 Corinthians 5:17 “… if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

The worship of our life can completely disfigure us. But the worship of our life can also completely transform us. Again, James K. A. Smith, writes, “Worship works from the top down… In worship we don’t just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes … us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.”

Worship is how we end up where we never thought we’d be; worship is how we end up where we always wanted to be.

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How we are transformed, then, is through a life of re-directed worship - a living, embodied sacrifice. We worshiped our way into slavery and sin and conformity to the world; we must therefore worship our way out of it. It’s not too far-fetched to say that worship sets the tone for your entire life. Your worship will decide if you will have a glorious future of ever increasing light and life, or a downward-spiraling descent into futility and death.

My favorite theologian, N. T. Wright, says there are

“Two … rules at the heart of spirituality. [First,] You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship. Those who worship money become, eventually, human calculating machines. Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess. Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.

So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain? The answer comes in the second … rule: because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.

Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn’t, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the Creator himself—in other words, when you worship an idol—you may well feel a brief “high.” But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry.”

Worship is how we end up where we never thought we’d be; worship is how we end up where we always wanted to be.

Both of these stories turned out to have happy endings. They are still married - strong marriages today. They are reconciled with their kids. They’ve experience the forgiveness of God and their family. But both had to renew their minds by rejecting the false, secular story and reorient the worship of their lives away from the world - and their own desires - to God. They had to choose to become living, embodied sacrifices.

You may be here this morning or listening online and realize that there are aspects of your worshipping life that are misdirected. That your affections are for the wrong things, or they are in the wrong order. The good news is that your life - regardless of what’s in the past - can be a beautiful act of worship to God now. Jesus has made this possible...

Worship may have gotten you where you never thought you’d be; but re-newed worship is how your life can end up where you always wanted it to be.

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Communion

Every week in Communion we are reminded of a living sacrifice. Certainly the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins, taking our place so that we can be forgiven and set free. But it looks beyond just the cross to a what a whole life offered to God looks like. Everything Jesus did was worship. The stuff we expect like going to synagogue, praying, and fasting. But all the other stuff too. Eating with sinners, befriending the lonely and outcasts, going to parties, taking up for the oppressed - all of it shows us the goodness of life as a living sacrifice. A life we are invited to. A life we celebrate and participate in through Communion.

On the night that he was betrayed...

Come Holy Spirit and overshadow these elements. Let them be for us your body and blood so that we can participate in your redemptive work for us. May we find mercy, healing and salvation through the finished work of the cross. Amen.