A Living Sacrifice
I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. (Romans 12:1)
These words reveal the secret to a powerful and fruitful life of discipleship. Therefore it is vital for a Christian who is seeking God’s highest for his life to understand them. The importance of these words cannot be stressed enough. Therefore heed them by the mercies of God. Consider the mercy of God who sent His Son to die for you to save you from death and hell.
Present Your Bodies A Living Sacrifice
In the light of such mercy and love, what are you to do? “PRESENT YOUR BODIES A LIVING SACRIFICE.” To present here means to consecrate, to set apart as belonging wholly to God. Therefore, in order to present yourself to God, you must forfeit your right to yourself. This means your body, your soul, everything. As Timothy Dwight, a renowned early president of Yale University, said: “Christ is the only, the true, the living way of access to God. Give up yourselves therefore to Him with a cordial confidence, and the great work of life is done.”
How often Christians ask, “What can I give to God?” or “What do I have that the Lord wants?” The Scripture plainly shows that you have precisely what He wants: you—your body, your soul, your life.
Presenting yourself to God is the first step in the life of a disciple. Anything less than that is doomed to fall short of the high calling of God.
How important it is to be a disciple, especially in our day! Now, as always, God will only use fully surrendered believers in the working out of His perfect will on earth. Consider the early church. Through whom did Christ build His church? Who became the vital functioning members of the church? Those who followed Him wholly and unreservedly. They established the church, evangelized nations, worked miracles. They “turned the world upside down.”
The glorious record of the early disciples still shines bright today and we can read about their exploits in the Acts of the Apostles. Thousands of Jews accepted Jesus as Messiah through the powerful and supernatural ministry of Peter and the disciples in Jerusalem. Gentiles were saved and churches established through the mighty laboring of Paul. Revivals sprang up in the paths of evangelists such as Philip. The lame, the blind, and the deaf were healed; and the dead were brought back to life. Mysteries, revelation, and future events were unveiled by God to early disciples such as Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, Agabus, the prophet in Jerusalem, and John the apostle on the isle of Patmos. Why were they able to do the will of God? Because they were “living sacrifices.”
They denied their own aspirations so that their full potential could be consumed in doing the will of God. This is the whole secret of their success.
If you are to be a vital participant in the sovereign plan of God for your generation, you have no alternative but to present yourself to God a living sacrifice.
How is This Done?
How is this done? Notice first of all who must offer the sacrifice, and, secondly, what it consists of. The answer to both of these questions is you! You must present your body to God. Nobody else can do this for you. The matter of discipleship involves your being, and hinges on your will. Are you willing to demolish any hopes you have of realizing your soul’s ambitions?
In the Old Testament, the lambs and bullocks that were sacrificed to God had to be without spot or blemish. They were the prize animals of the flock, not the weaklings or the deformed. It would have been natural for the owner to desire to preserve these lambs because of their beauty, but these were the very lambs which God demanded for sacrifice.
Every man possesses certain qualities, abilities, and potentialities which he cherishes and is especially fond of. These are the very aspects of ourselves which God requires us to sacrifice to Him.
A Death Blow
In order to please God you must deal a death blow to the desire to preserve these parts to yourself for your own purposes. God’s fire of approval will only consume a sacrifice which consists of the best a person is capable of offering. You cannot out-give God. If you give the very best you have to Him, He will put within you His own life. “He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). As this death works within you, so His life will well up within you, producing fruit.
Jesus has clearly shown us the way of surrender. He chose His Father’s will, and “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” Because Jesus became a sacrifice out of love for us, He has the right to ask us to echo this love with the same quality of response when He calls, “Come and follow Me.” This is why He has said: “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24).
Many Christians, facing this decision, skirt death to self and find it convenient to involve themselves in some sort of Christian work to which they have called themselves. This is because a Christian who comprehends what God wants of him will either present himself as a living sacrifice to God or after catching a glimpse of what this would mean will decide: “this is not for me,” and draw back from God’s perfect way. Then, in order to escape painful self-condemnation, he will strive to make up for his unwillingness to die to self by “working” for the Lord.
Such people avoid the issue of death to self by clouding it over with activity and fervor. This only leads to a dilatory and useless Christian life. Not dilatory in terms of sweat and busyness. Not useless to the machinery of institutions and programs which such Christians serve. But utterly dilatory and useless in terms of spiritual reality—in terms of fighting the supernatural warfare with power versus principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. And in terms of preparing the way for Jesus’ return.
There comes a great divide in the life of every Christian when he must decide to take the way of the Cross, the way of death to self, or the way of compensation, substitution, and self-deception.
God, through His Scriptures and by His Spirit, will point out those things within you, one by one, which are not of Him and will say: “This must go—are you willing?” An affirmative and instantaneous reply to the promptings of the Holy Spirit are the earmarks of a disciple. He cheerfully obeys God no matter what the cost.
This is Only Your Reasonable Service
AND THIS IS ONLY YOUR REASONABLE SERVICE. Jesus bought us back from sin. He paid for us with His blood on Calvary. We are His purchased possession, owned by God, not by ourselves, nor by the world, nor by the powers of darkness which work in the world. If the way of discipleship is taken, it becomes a door into a powerful and fruitful Christian life. The richness of the glory of the way of the cross outshines all other ways. It is a life which follows upon the same path which Jesus walked upon. No matter what hills and valleys it leads you through, it is a life of oneness with God, with triumph and glory at every step.