Reasonable Sacrifices
Romans 12.1-8
Last week we did an overview of the first eleven chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. These chapters are almost entirely dedicated to explaining the incredible work of God for us.
To put it simply, Romans 1-11 explain the gospel to us, more deeply and more fully than perhaps anywhere else in the Bible. The gospel, as we saw, is the revelation of God’s righteousness, and Paul highlights four essential things that God’s righteousness accomplishes.
God’s righteousness judges and punishes man’s rebellion against him—man’s sin. At the same time, God’s righteousness saves sinners, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us: he takes our place, he takes our sin, and gives us his perfect righteousness. In this way, God’s righteousness gives us hope: it reminds us that God’s saving work in Christ is unbreakable, and that nothing can separate us from his love for us in Christ. Lastly, we saw that God’s righteousness applies to all peoples—not only God’s chosen people under the old covenant, in the Old Testament, the people of Israel, but the Gentiles as well. His righteousness now applies to people from all nations, all tribes, all backgrounds, all cultures, all the world.
To put it a little more simply: we are all in the same situation; we all deserve the same condemnation for our rebellion against God; but even so, all those who place their faith in Christ have received the same grace.
Logical Sacrifices (v. 1-2)
This is a letter; it wasn’t meant to be cut up into little pieces the way we have to do if we preach it. It was meant to be read all at once, and that’s the only way to really feel the weight of the truths Paul laid out in the first eleven chapters. He just piles on good news after good news after good news, and by the time we arrive at chapter 12, our heads are almost spinning by the beauty and the immensity of God’s plan.
And that feeling of being overwhelmed by God’s grace and the genius of his plan is essential for everything that follows, because he’s going to ask a lot of us in response to this grace. But if we know all that God has done for us, it doesn’t feel like a lot; it feels like the only response that makes any sense. That’s the actual meaning behind the word “spiritual” in v. 1—in Greek it’s the word “logikos,” from which we obviously get our word “logical”: there is only one reasonable, logical response to God’s grace. V. 1:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
What is the only proper response to the incredible grace Paul’s just spilled so much ink describing? It is that we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. We may have a hard time with this word “sacrifice”—it’s an Old Testament image that may not speak to us as much today. A “sacrifice” is something that is given to God as an act of worship, or dedicated to his service. The idea of sacrifice always implies loss (because you are letting go of something that is personally costly to you), and always implies thankfulness (because you are giving something to God in recognition of something he has done or will do, like forgiveness of sin).
Now, when Paul says this, he gives a few qualifiers. First, he says, I appeal to you therefore brothers, by the mercies of God. We offer ourselves as a sacrifice to God because of the mercies we have received from God.
Secondly, he describes this sacrifice: living, holy and acceptable to God. Because we have been made alive by the Spirit, we will learn what he expects of his people (which is the whole point, as he said in 8.29: God predestined us to be conformed to the image of Christ), and we actually do become conformed to Christ’s image.
Thirdly—and here’s the most surprising part of this—he doesn’t call us to present our hearts as a sacrifice, or our souls, but our bodies. We often tend to separate our lives into two quadrants: “my Christian life,” and “everything else”. The “everything else” is often mundane and ordinary, things like shopping and eating and watching Netflix—stuff we do with our bodies—while the “Christian life” stuff is more spiritual: things like meditation and prayer and Scripture reading.
What Paul says here is that there is no spiritual worship without bodily worship. There is no spiritual holiness without bodily holiness. To put it another way, if what we say in our prayers, if what we sing in our songs, does not correspond to the things we do with our bodies, there’s a problem.
Now, we shouldn’t absolutize what I just said—Paul knows we’re not perfect, he knows we’re still struggling to live for God, he said it really clearly in chapter 7—but this should be the trajectory of our lives.
This is what worship is—it’s not what just what happens on Sunday morning. Worship is what we do with our lives in response to God’s grace to us: it is giving ourselves wholly to him, because after all he’s done for us, how could we possibly do anything else?
Now, what does it mean? What does this sacrifice look like? Paul gives a kind of summary statement in v. 2:
2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Do not be conformed to this world—again, we are to be conformed to the image of Christ, not the world around us—but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Again, this is surprising. Because he doesn’t say to be transformed by the renewal of your heart, or your soul, but your mind. This is not spiritual language, but “body” language. It’s what happens in our brains, the way we think about things, the way we see things.
The point is that the transformation that takes place in the Christian is holistic—it is not compartmentalized. When we give ourselves to God, we give everything to him—all of ourselves, warts and all. When we realize that we belong wholly to God—everything we are—we learn to see things differently.
We need to be careful with this verse, because we can fall into the trap of waiting for the Holy Spirit to come and give us a kind of mind-transfusion, like Neo in The Matrix learning kung fu in five seconds because a guy pushed a button. We tend to hyper-spiritualize what Paul is saying here, when in fact I think he’s getting at something very simple and logical.
Let me give you a very un-spiritual example. I’ve been a coffee drinker since I was 15. At least three a day—often two in the morning, one in the afternoon. I love coffee.
But experience has taught me that it’s hard on my stomach. So this summer, I decided to try an experiment. I switched to tea for a week. No coffee, for a week. Now, I drank a lot of tea that first week to compensate for the low caffeine. But although I did miss the taste of coffee, I very quickly realized that I felt better when I didn’t drink it. So I kept going.
It’s been about a month now, and I’ve had the occasional coffee here and there (maybe four or five in the last month). But in general, I’ve been drinking almost nothing but tea for a month.
And to my great surprise, I love it. I feel better. Through experience, I’ve learned that it’s better for me.
It sounds silly, but this is how we are progressively transformed. God brings us from death to life by his Spirit, he gives us saving faith in him, and we place our faith in Christ. In response to the gospel, we commit ourselves to God, completely. We learn from his Word and from our brothers and sisters what he expects of us, and we do it, even if it’s difficult. And over time, we come to experience that God actually knows what he’s talking about. So we start seeing things differently: we start seeing sin as something that is undesirable, and holiness as something we want. (And obedience is far easier when we want it.)
By testing (Gk. δοκιμάζω, to test, to scrutinize) we learn to recognize God’s will—what is good and acceptable and perfect. Not primarily his will for our professions or for our choice of spouse or for where we live, but his will for his people—his will for our character.
Now, do you see what is happening in this commandment? Remember what Paul said in chapter 1? Starting at the end of v. 20:
So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools… 28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
The renewal of the mind that Paul describes here in chapter 12 is a reversal of what characterized our minds and hearts before God saved us. Those who have been saved by God are transformed by the renewal of their minds, to become able to see what God’s will is, and to walk in step with God’s will.
The crazy thing about all of this is that Paul is taking terms which are usually used in the context of the regular gathering of God’s people, either in the temple or in church (sacrifice, worship, etc.), and applying these terms to all of life. In other words, the Christian’s true worship doesn’t happen here, in church—or at least, not only here. It happens everywhere, every day, every moment, in every situation.
Because you have received this grace, give yourself wholly to God, and be transformed.
Okay, very good—what does that mean? What does it look like for Christians to give their bodies as sacrifices to God, and to be transformed into the image of Christ?
This is what we’ll be exploring for the next several weeks. And we’ll see the first two areas to which it applies after the break.
Humble Sacrifices (v. 3)
So because of God’s incredible grace and mercy to us, we are called to present our bodies as living sacrifices to him—everything we have, everything we are. Transformed progressively from top to bottom, we give ourselves wholly to him. What does that look like?
The first mark of God’s salvation in the life of the believer—not chronologically, but the first that Paul mentions here—is a realistic and humble estimation of ourselves.
V. 3:
3 For by the grace given to me—
(Again, we shouldn’t miss the “for” here—it’s sort of like the “therefore” in v. 1: he’s linking what he’s saying now to what he just said in v. 1-2.)
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.
We mustn’t miss that his first commandment here concerns the way we think about ourselves, which is of course directly related to what he said just before, in v. 2, about our transformation by the renewal of our minds, our discernment. When we are transformed by God’s grace, the first thing to change is the way that we think of ourselves.
Now, it might help to remember the context here. The church in Rome is a multi-ethnic church: there are Christians of Jewish origin, and Christians of non-Jewish origin. And while we have no indication that there was conflict in this church, there were certainly some areas of tension, as we saw a lot in the earlier chapters. The Jews might have a tendency to look down on the Gentiles, and vice versa, because of what they do or don’t think is necessary to be acceptable to God.
So Paul calls them to see themselves rightly, with humility, to realize that they are all individual members of a single, unified body. Knowing that they belong to a body, that they are not self-sufficient, should give them the humility to recognize that they need the other members of the body.
Paul’s going to apply this to the gifts we bring to bear on the body in a minute, but first he says something that can sometimes be scary: he tells us to think with humility, with sober judgment about ourselves, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. What does this mean?
Simply put, it means that even though God has given us faith in Christ, the faith that saved us, that faith isn’t static. It grows over time. How many times did Jesus call his disciples “O you of little faith” (cf. Matthew 8.26, for example)? And to the woman who came to him asking to be healed, who persisted even though Jesus initially seemed to brush her off, he said, “Woman, your faith is great!” (Matthew 15.28).
Paul tells the Romans to think of themselves with humility, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned, because he knows we all naturally have a tendency to measure our worth according to our gifts—if we’re good at what we’re do, we think we’re valuable. If we don’t think we’re good at anything, we feel worthless.
But Paul flips this tendency on its head, by telling us to measure ourselves, not according to our gifts, but according to our faith. It might seem like we could fall into the same trap, but that’s not the case. Why? Because if we measure ourselves according to the faith God has assigned us, we will immediately recognize that whatever faith we have didn’t come from us, but from God.
If we measure ourselves according to our faith, pride will disappear, because our measure of faith has nothing to do with our worth, but rather with what God wishes to do through us TODAY. Certain acts of obedience require massive faith, while others require less. And God gives us exactly what we need, at exactly the right time. The measure of faith God has given us has nothing to do with our worth, and everything to do with what God wishes to do through us today.
And thank God that tomorrow, our faith will be greater than it is today. When we are faithful over the little he has given us today, he gives us more to do tomorrow—and he gives us the faith necessary to do it. All he calls us to do is dedicate ourselves wholly to what he has given me today, and trust that he has given us the faith we need to do it.
Equipped Sacrifices (v. 3-8)
Which brings us to the next command. Presenting our bodies as living sacrifices to God will manifest itself in a whole-hearted dedication to serving the body of Christ, through the gifts God has given us.
4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.
So this isn’t hard to understand, but it’s often hard to rightly put into practice.
Paul gives this image of "one body” in v. 4-5: we are like a body with many members, each member serving its own specific purpose. He fleshes this image out more in 1 Corinthians 12, with a similar goal in mind: each member of the body serves its particular function, for the good of the whole.
Then in v. 6-8, Paul gives a list of a few particular gifts and how we should go about using them to serve the body.
Some speak the Word of God for the good of the body. Paul mentions prophecy first, and I won’t get into all the different opinions on what this means, because his point isn’t what prophecy is, but how it’s used. The point is, some bring the Bible to bear on the body: prophecy, teaching, exhortation—these all fall under this category.
Some serve in concrete and very practical ways: giving, or serving—the root of this word is the same as for “deacon”.
Some lead—they direct the body; this would be one function of the elders, for example.
And some perform acts of mercy (these can vary wildly: something as simple as spending time with someone who’s going through a hard time, listening to them and praying with them, is an act of mercy).
I won’t analyze these gifts, because this list isn’t exhaustive, and because the specific gifts he mentions here isn’t the point. He gives seven examples to represent all the possible gifts. He makes no judgment of importance in talking about these gifts, even though some of them are high-profile, very visible (like teaching or leading) and others might go totally unnoticed (like serving). Paul makes no distinction in terms of importance between what the pastor does and what the person who helps set up tables before lunch does. They are both exercising a gift—even if that gift is simple willingness to do something no one else wants to do—and their service is valuable to the body.
Now we need to be honest: any talk of “gifts” or “spiritual gifts” very often becomes self-centered. We examine ourselves and our gifts and start to compare ourselves to others, finding ourselves more or less useful to the body of Christ than others. It’s what we saw earlier: one of the most damaging traps a Christian can fall into—and one of the most common—is to determine their value by their gifts.
Paul wants us to see that one way we present our bodies as a living, holy and acceptable sacrifice to God is by using whatever gifts he has given us, to the absolute best of our ability, in the service of the body of Christ. That’s the point he’s trying to make here; it’s not about any particular gift—it’s about how we’re using that gift, and why.
We have gifts to serve the body, not to serve ourselves. So the number or flashiness of our gifts means absolutely nothing in relation to who we are as children of God. This command counters the tendency to be puffed up with pride because we have a gift that’s more visible than others, and the tendency to be filled with despair because we feel our gifts are pitiful. This is a command that calls us to a realistic estimation of what we bring to the table: “See how you in particular can serve, and do it.”
So how might we do that? How do we know what we bring to the table?
In the past several people have asked me when we’ll give a teaching on how to discover your gifts. My answer is simple: probably never.
There are a couple of reasons why we won’t go in that direction, unless we come across an exceptional reason to do so. The first is that there is absolutely no biblical foundation for how to “discover” your gifts. You’ll never find instructions on that in a single passage of the Bible. So while those seminars on “discovering your spiritual gifts” are not necessarily bad, they’re not biblical either.
The second reason is a lot simpler: it assumes that a so-called “spiritual gift” is inherently different from any other gift we have. What is a gift, in the context of this conversation? It is something that our Creator has enabled us to do well. How do we, as ordinary human beings, figure out what we’re good at? We do stuff. We play when we’re kids, we try things, we get interested in something and we find out—sometimes to our surprise—that we’re actually good at that thing.
Now, you may not know exactly what you’re good at, what gifts you have that would serve the church. So how do you find out?
You look around and see what needs there are, and you work to fill that need. They need help on the welcome team? Offer to help. People are setting up tables? Give them a hand. You see someone sitting alone? Go talk to them. Someone’s discouraged? Pray with them.
You won’t be good at everything you put your hand to, but I promise you, if you allow your focus to become how you can serve your brothers and sisters, instead of “What is my gift?”, you will find out what your gifts are. Or others will see it, and they’ll tell you.
There’s no big mystery here. Paul is saying is, whatever God has enabled you to do, do it to the best of your ability, according to the grace and the opportunities God has given you, and do it humbly, willingly, diligently, generously and joyfully.
You don’t need to be exactly like anyone else in order to usefully serve the church. God put you where you are for a reason, and he is calling you to use the person you are to serve the church in a way that only you can.
If you feel like your gifts are exceptional today, and vital to the church, think of yourself soberly. Don’t just examine your gifts; examine your faith, and serve wisely. Don’t think highly of yourself, but recognize that your gifts and your faith come from God, not from you. It’s not about you; it’s about the church. So by God’s grace, do the best you can with what he’s given you, and trust him to build his church.
If you feel like your faith is small today, if you feel like your gifts are small today, don’t be discouraged. Don’t just examine your gifts, examine your faith, and serve wisely: by God’s grace, do the best you can with what he’s given you, and trust him to make you grow, and to build his church through you.
Conclusion
Think of what it must have been like for the church in Rome: Phoebe (to whom we’ll be formally introduced in chapter 16) shows up with this letter from Paul. The entire church gathers to find out what it says. Someone—likely Phoebe herself, since it was often the courier who did this—reads the letter aloud. The Jewish and the Gentile Christians begin hearing who they were, what God has made of them, who they are now. It’s like a series of waves, each one bigger than the last: You thought God was good? He’s even better than you thought. Oh, and you think that’s good? Yeah, he’s even better than that.
Over and over, for an hour, the cumulative effect of all these implications of God’s grace—this breathtaking realization of the abundance of God’s riches to them in Christ—must have been overwhelming.
Then they begin this passage, and a shift occurs:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
This is a very high command—perhaps even the ultimate command. God calls his people to give everything they are to him, as an act of worship.
But after the abundance of God’s grace to them, what possible response could they have had, other than: “Of course!”?
This is why our obedience is often flawed: because a lot of Christians today obey from a mindset that assumes their resources are limited. If we feel like our resources are limited, we will naturally try to keep what we have: we will be stingy with our time, with our finances, with our gifts, and even with our love. Sacrifice will seem impossible, because if I give this up, what else do I have?
But if we truly believe God’s grace is what Paul says it is, if we believe his grace flows from an unending spring, that his grace really is that abundant, sacrifice—even the sacrifice of everything we are—not only feels possible, but reasonable. If we believe that God’s grace to us is truly this abundant, we will serve freely, we will sacrifice freely, because there’s always more to spare: in the long run, in the light of eternity, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Paul is going to continue, and give us more examples of how we do this. But he starts where the church in Rome would have been—where we are today. He starts with the brothers and sisters to whom we have been united in Christ into one body, and he tells us to give everything we are to God, and to dedicate ourselves to the service of that body.
So what do we have to bring to the table? Not only in terms of ability and talents, but in terms of faith and willingness? Do we want to love each other well? There are as many needs in this church as there are people, and most of those needs are profoundly personal and relational. The only way to meet them is to be present, to keep our eyes open, and to use whatever God has given us, whoever God has made us, to serve one another.
It’s a sacrifice, for sure—but compared to the riches of God’s grace to us, it’s nothing. The sacrifice of all we are is a sacrifice we can spare, because Christ is more than enough for us.