A Living Sacrifice

Quite the introduction. I told, or I mentioned last time that happened, I said I'll let your own pastor address that, and he addressed it right now, three months later, or however long it's been. So, good evening.

It's good to be with you all. Greetings from Bethany Baptist Church in Stockton. It's good, again, to be with you all, and we pray for your church. We're thankful for your church, and pray that the Lord continues to grow all of you together and add more to your number.

I invite you to turn with me to Romans chapter 12. We will be considering verses 1 and 2. Romans chapter 12, and when you turn there and find it, let us stand together for the reading of God's Word. Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2.

I'll be reading and doing my exposition from the New King James Version. Let us hear the Word of God. 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. 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.

Amen. Let's be seated, and let's unite our hearts in prayer. Father, as we've sung, we now make explicit in our prayers that you would break open for us the bread of life. Your Word is bread to our souls.

Man does not live by bread alone, but upon every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Your Word is life, and your Spirit, the author of it, gives life to your people through it, nourishes our faith, strengthens our spirit.

And so, Father, we ask that you would strengthen and give grace to your people. Help us to be faithful. We thank you for Christ, who is the faithful one, the perfect one who stood in our stead, who lived and died and rose again in our behalf.

And we thank you that in Him and by your Holy Spirit, we now are able to follow in His footsteps, by His grace, to live lives of committed sacrifice for your glory. We pray, Father, let your Word go deep in our hearts to take root.

We pray that you would, by your Holy Spirit, give us humbled wills. We pray that you would give us hands and feet that are quick to do your will. We pray, Father, that we would do all that we do in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, for His glory, that our lives would truly be a pleasing sacrifice to you through Him.

We ask these things in Christ's name. Amen. We are, in Romans chapter 12 here, at a big transition in Scripture, probably one of the biggest therefores we have in Scripture. The whole first 11 chapters of Romans is the most thorough explanation, doctrinal explanation of the gospel that we have, of God's free grace in Christ to forgive our sins, to justify us freely through faith alone, the promise of a renewed heart that can now serve God, the promise of the Holy Spirit in chapter 8, the comforts of election in chapters 9 through 11.

Paul.

Essentially covers all the main aspects of the grace of God, and now he turns to the practical. Matthew Henry says, the Apostle, having confirmed the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, now stresses Christian duties.

You know this, but Christianity is a system of belief that has a therefore. It is practical. It has to be practical. Not only in the mind and the understanding, but in the heart, and it has to extend also to our hands and our feet in obeying and doing the will of God.

Indeed, if it does not lead one to lead a different life, it shows that we have not truly comprehended the grace of God that He has shown us in Jesus Christ. So, how would we begin to apply the first 11 chapters?

Well, Paul begins with a very broad plea. He says, I beseech you, or I urge, I exhort 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.

Paul does not begin by simply going after a part of our obedience. He does not begin by going after a certain aspect of the Christian life. He begins by going after all of us, and he essentially says, my brothers, this gospel of grace is so incredible that it demands all of what you are and what you have.

Everything.

If we obeyed this perfectly, we would keep the first commandment. We would keep the whole law of God. We would love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. He draws on the picture of Old Testament sacrifice.

I want to note just three things briefly. First of all, he says, brethren, present your bodies. That denotes a voluntary service to God. Brothers and sisters, God deserves more, the gospel deserves more, than merely for servitude.

But it rather calls and demands a free will offering from the people saved by the grace of God. We are a people liberated by grace to now serve a new king, a new husband. We present our bodies willingly to God.

Here I am, Lord. Send me. How can I do your will, O God? Because God has done everything for you. Right? Children, I don't know if you guys have the same catechism. Why ought you to glorify God? You don't have that question?

Okay. Our kids have that question. Why ought you to glorify God? Because he made me and he takes care of me. And if you're in Christ, he's redeemed you. He saved you by the blood of his Son. If you're in Christ, you don't have to fear life, you don't have to fear death.

You have hope in your heart, you have comfort in life's afflictions. God has been gracious to you. And what that does is it presents a willingness and a gratitude to serve God. Secondly, he calls it a living sacrifice.

In the Old Testament, you offered another as a token of your service to God. In the New Covenant, our bodies are offered as a continual living sacrifice. We don't offer something else to God. We ourselves, as it were, get on the altar of God, everything that we are, and we stay on the altar all of our lives.

John Calvin said that in this imagery, we play both the part of the victim and the priest. We offer ourselves as a sacrifice, but we live so that we can serve as priests. David said, shall I sacrifice to the Lord that which costs me nothing?

We give to the Lord by offering ourselves, our wills, our hearts, our affections, our hands and our feet. The third and last thing to note is he calls it a holy sacrifice. Our lives offered to God are regarded by Him as holy.

They are the lives of His children, His redeemed, His beloved. We offer our lives to God through Jesus Christ, and through Christ, God the Father is pleased with us. He smiles upon us because we are holy unto the Lord.

But then note, Paul gives arguments of persuasion, if you will, for why we should do this. He doesn't just say do it. He gives compelling motivations. I want to draw your attention to three of them. Number one, he appeals to the mercies of God.

Christian, are not the mercies of God the banner that flies and has flown over your entire life? That God has not dealt with you as your sins deserve. You're here tonight in a sound, Bible-believing church, worshiping Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You love the Lord, you love His Word, because God is merciful to you. There are trials in life, there are sicknesses, there are afflictions, there are hardships. But in all of them, God is merciful. Count His mercies.

They are more than you can number. They are more than the hairs of your head, more than your concerns. And therefore, Paul says, brothers, let us offer ourselves as living sacrifices. Every day we receive the fruits of His mercy.

Christ is in your homes, He's in your church. You've got children here, love the Lord, being catechized to know the Lord. You've got a church family who loves you and cares for you. God hears your prayers, He answers graciously.

Thing after thing after thing, blessing after blessing, mercy after mercy. Secondly, Paul draws our attention to the acceptability of it to God. The great end to which we labor as Christians is to be acceptable to the Lord.

The sacrifices of the wicked, no matter how fat or costly, are an abomination to the Lord. But the sacrifices of His children are pleasing to Him, acceptable to Him. God delights in the reciprocal obedience of His children who love Him as Father.

Who don't want to displease such a Father who has been so gracious and kind. Just like earthly fathers, we delight when our children, when we have their hearts, and they want to live in such a way as to bring us pleasure and our smiles.

So God delights and accepts our obedience through Christ. And then thirdly, He appeals to the reasonableness of it. I know if you have the ESV it says, which is your spiritual worship. The NKJV translates it, which is your reasonable service.

Which means God is not imposing anything hard or difficult or extraordinary on His children. This is not God calling for something that's way above and beyond. Our whole lives offered as a sacrifice in praise to God is simply our reasonable response to Him.

For the grace He's shown to us. Now let's turn to our doctrine and application here. I'm going to consider verse 2 more so in our doctrine here and then move into our application. I want to just be very simple, mostly because the text is pretty plain and simple here too.

For doctrine and application, or doctrine, excuse me. I want to just stress this. This life, offering our bodies as a living sacrifice to God, is impossible without divine renewal. It's impossible without divine renewal.

Paul says, 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. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

As he thinks about God, as he thinks about the world, as he thinks about grace and the gospel. And what that means, first of all, for some of you in this room, is that you need to turn to the Lord and be converted.

You still need to be transformed for the first time by the Spirit of God to know Jesus Christ. To become a new creature. It's interesting the way Paul phrases it here. It's a passive verb. Be transformed.

He doesn't say transform yourself. Be transformed, that is, by another. You can't do this yourself, and yet it is a command addressed to your will. Be ye transformed. Meaning, we have a responsibility to seek the Lord to be changed.

To seek the Lord to be made new. Seek the Lord while He may be found. If you're here, I don't know you like I know my people. I typically know who in my congregation know the Lord and who don't. If you're here and you're not a Christian, honestly, with just judgment day honesty, do you feel lost?

Do you feel beat up by sin? Like you've tried to fix yourself again and again. You've tried to change yourself. Like resolution after resolution. You've tried to turn over a new leaf, whatever it is. And you find that no matter what you do, again and again, you find yourself in a pit of misery.

Even deeper than the last one because sin always gains the upper hand. God has given you the solution for that. It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Romans 8. What the law could not do, weakened by the flesh, what we could not do, God has done by sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.

He condemned sin in the flesh. We cannot kill sin. We cannot change ourselves. And so God the Father in His grace and in His love, He sent Christ Jesus His Son. The perfect one. God in the flesh. To lay down His perfect sinless life.

To kill sin once for all. To die for sin. So that when He died to sin, we who believe in Him also died. He died to sin's punishment. He killed its power so that when we believe in Christ, all of our debt and our guilty record is cleared.

And the power of sin over us is definitively broken. And God begins to transform us. If you're here and you don't yet have Christ, my friend, this very moment, this evening, you can close with Christ.

You can walk out of here a new creature in Jesus Christ. Christ is the light of the world. Apart from Him, we walk in darkness and He says to us, walk while you have the light and believe in the light so that you may become sons of light.

Seek the Lord. Seek Christ and you will be found by Him. You will be accepted by Him. And you will be given this new transformation that Paul speaks of here. Secondly, that's the first group, those who don't yet have Christ.

But secondly, Christian, guess what you also need to live a life, to be a living sacrifice unto God. You need the same thing, to not be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

You, Christian, like me, are in need of change and transformation. This is basically Paul's shorthand for the process of sanctification. Resist sin. Do not be conformed to this world. Be made holy through the Word of God, the renewal of your mind, that leads to heart change, that leads to hands and feet that obey the commands of God which leads us to prove what is that good and perfect and acceptable will of God.

I want to just open up this briefly for us, Christian, and then we're going to turn to application. This is Paul's simple prescription for you, and there's plenty of other texts we could elaborate on.

This is his simple prescription to us for our growth. First step, be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Christian, do you read and meditate daily upon the Word of God? If you don't, you need to start.

John 17, 17, Sanctify them in the truth. Your Word is truth. Love the Word of God. Be in the Word of God. If you don't feel like being in the Word of God, read the Word of God anyway and pray that God would forgive you and give you a heart that desires His testimonies more than silver and gold.

Read it with your wife, your children. Deuteronomy 6, God's command to Old Covenant Israel, speak of these things with your children when you walk with them by the way, when you lie down, all the time.

Christian, meditate on the Word. It's not enough to just read and then walk away and forget what you've read. Settle it in your mind. Pick a command, pick a verse, pick a parable, a passage, like this one, and turn it into constant prayer to God throughout the day.

Father, how can I today be a better, more resolute, devoted, living sacrifice for Your glory? What that does is that leads to a heart that is set on meditating on the Word and hands and feet that are ready to do the will of God and prove that it is the perfect and acceptable will of God.

I want to talk about that last half of the verse here just for a moment. I think we might miss the significance of what Paul means by proved what is that perfect and acceptable will of God. To prove the will of God in this context doesn't mean to make it true, obviously, as though our obedience somehow makes it true.

To prove the will of God in this context means to do the will of God and therefore experience its goodness and perfection experientially and to prove it to ourselves. To know the excellency of the will of God by the experience of our conformity to it.

That's a real and a really important aspect of Christian obedience. Psalm 119, I have more understanding than my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation. Jesus says in John 7, 17, If any man will do God's will, he will know of the doctrine.

Jesus says, you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. A big part of the reason for why we don't present our lives to God as a living sacrifice the way we ought is because we don't believe that to do so is always the way of blessedness.

We need to be honest about that. We fall for the same lie Eve fell for in the garden. We look at a certain command that God gives to us and we think, I don't know about that one. That one seems like God's trying to keep something good from me.

When in fact, the will of God is always the way of happiness. The way of holiness is always the way of happiness. Obedience leads to joy. Obedience leads to assurance. Leads to a closer walk with God, more blessedness in our soul, more calm, more peace.

I'll give you an example. You can hear, and I'm sure you've heard sermons. You can hear sermon after sermon on the blessedness of devoting the entire Lord's Day to the Lord. Because it is the Lord's Day.

And you can hear someone tell you again and again, it is not your day. It is not for kids' sports. It's not for you name it. It is all of it to be devoted to the Lord and his worship and being with his people.

You can hear those sermons. You can read books about that. But you will only experience what is that good and perfect will of God when you actually obey the command to keep the Sabbath holy. You prove the will of God that it is excellent and perfect and acceptable.

Same thing, I mean we could do this, go through every form of obedience. Same thing with hospitality and giving. Paul says it's more blessed to give than to receive. And that might sound to us like, that doesn't seem like it can work.

How is it more blessed to give than receive? But I promise you, you actually in faith obey God and start giving and start being hospitable. You will learn a hundred different ways why God says it is more blessed to give than to receive.

And you will know that perfect and acceptable will of God. Brothers and sisters, as we are transitioning here to application. What areas of your life need to be surrendered on the altar? It's not enough to just walk out of here tonight generically thinking I need to obey God better.

But specifically, Lord, what areas of my life, what idols are here that I need to smash as I offer myself a living sacrifice? Your family, your spouse, maybe self-control, selfishness, anger, covetousness, jealousies, discontentment.

We could go many directions. I'm going to offer you five areas that I reflected on. These are five areas from me as a pastor. I preached the same thing to my people a few weeks ago. These are my reflections of areas of my life that I, by God's grace and help, want to do better to offer on the altar as a living sacrifice.

And I trust they will ring a bell with you and spur you on as well to do better and want to do better to please the Lord in these things. So five things. Number one. Are we offering our physical bodies on the altar of the Lord?

And when I say physical bodies, I'm talking here about our physical health and strength. How we care for the body that God has given to us matters to God. I think it's a shame to the Christian church that there are worldly people who take way better care of their bodies than some Christians do.

That ought not to be the case. Let me put it this way, and I mean this seriously, though I say it tongue-in-cheek. We will not be living sacrifices if we die. Paul says to Timothy, bodily exercise is of some value in this life.

It's certainly not everything. And without Christ, it's worth very little. It's often just done for vanity's sake. But, how we steward this body God has given us is certainly a matter that God is concerned about.

It's a matter of how we serve God. I pray regularly that the Lord would spare my life for the sake of three main things. My wife, my kids, and my church. And underneath all three of those prayers is that I pray the Lord would spare me so that I can serve the Lord in all those realms.

And I can't do that without a body. You can't serve the Lord in this life without a body. Robert Murray McChain, as he was dying at the age of 29, he compared his body to a horse that a messenger rides.

And he said, God gave me a message to deliver and a horse to ride. Meaning his body. Alas, I have killed the horse and now I cannot deliver the message. He regretted how he had treated his physical body because it cut his ministry short.

From a human perspective. Christian, self-control in what we eat. God's Word says a lot about gluttony. What we drink. How much we drink. All these things matter. Self-control. Laziness. Are we just letting this body waste away by being lazy and in trivial pursuits instead of being busy at work in the Lord's work?

So, we should preserve our bodies as something that is offered daily to God as a sacrifice. Secondly, our time. This is self-control also. We don't want to waste our life. Time is something we will never get back.

Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon on time and the right use of time. Redeeming the time for the days are evil. If you find and read that sermon, you will throw your phone away. And I know we chuckle at that, but I think about it.

Just judgment day honesty, I'm going to have to give an account. You are too. How many countless hours have I wasted on just trivial useless stuff? Just precious time God gave me and it's just gone. Never to be recovered.

Scrolling useless stuff instead of spending, investing quality time with the kids God has given me. The wife God has given me. The church members God has entrusted into my care. I told my church, I recently put a 20 minute cap on my phone for all social media.

Just total, everything combined. At first, when I went on, I realized I've got only 20 minutes. And so I need to find the important stuff. And what it taught me is there really isn't hardly anything important.

There's not even 20 minutes worth of stuff. Maybe for some of you it's watching the news. I don't know, I think younger people tend to not watch the news as much. Older people still watch the news and some watch it a lot.

Hours of it. And would it not be better to just shut the TV off and read something that's going to help you help someone. Or call a brother or a sister and encourage them in the Lord. Or better yet, pray.

John Piper said that one thing social media is going to prove on the day of judgment is that prayerlessness was not due to lack of time. Third thing, marriage. For those of you who are married. Are there things, major or minor, or somewhere in between where you are just not making progress towards a godly marriage.

Because there are things that you just refuse to put on the altar and sacrifice. Maybe for years that's the kind of marriage you've had. Wives, maybe a tendency to be naggy, busy bodies, discontent, stressed all the time.

Husbands, maybe being overbearing, maybe being passive. Could be either of those. Not appreciating your wife as a fellow heir of the grace of life. Maybe you're angry, you're discontent with your wife.

And you've just been in this place of, yeah, we're either fighting or we're just doing okay. But we are never just thriving and happy in the Lord. It's because you refuse to sacrifice those things on the altar and glorify God.

Guys, life is short. Our days are limited. Build the best marriage you can for the glory of God and your own happiness. And put to test whether His will and His commands, God's commands, might actually lead to happiness and blessing the way He says they will.

Fourth thing, your kids, our kids. Or if you are Lord-willing to be married soon, then Lord-willing children to come. Or if you're recently married, Lord-willing children to come. It's the same thing.

Life is short. Time is short. What sins are we refusing to put on the altar to let God deal with them that are keeping us from being better parents? More godly parents. Is it busyness? Selfishness? Fixation on other things?

Always thinking about tomorrow so that we never think about today and we neglect today? Dads, are you reading the Scriptures and praying with your kids? Think about the end of your life. What kind of a parent will you want to say you were?

Try to be that.

Will you hit it?

No, probably not. Not perfectly. But if you strive for nothing, you'll hit nothing. Strive for God's glory, your happiness, your children's happiness, their good. John G. Patton was a missionary to the New Hebrides.

Scottish pastor, became missionary. And the last time he laid eyes on his earthly father, he had a godly, earthly father. He couldn't even keep it together, obviously. And he wrote in his autobiography that as he parted ways for the last time with his dad, he said, I vowed right then and there to live in such a way as to never dishonor such a good father as God had given me.

Let's try to be those kinds of parents. Last thing, and we'll be done.

Joy.

I want to be more joyful in the Lord. I assume you want to be more joyful in the Lord. I want to put discontentment and frustration and anger and bitterness and poor me attitudes on the altar and say, Lord, take them from me.

Give me grace to fight them and to fight for joy. I think I'm a joyful person until I get busy. Or I get sick, or I get interrupted, or whatever it might be. Overwhelmed. We've had bouts of sickness recently.

And it's just, honestly, that's the reason this made it in the manuscript, is because a few weeks ago I was sick and reflecting on it. Lord, those were basically wasted days. I'm not a good sick person and I just kind of, Lord, I'm going to bed and I'll pick up when I feel better.

But that's time lost. I still could have been better with my kids and my wife and cheerful and rejoicing in the Lord. Paul went through a million times worse than anything I've ever been through. And he said, sorrowful yet always rejoicing.

Brothers and sisters, we have the same Spirit of God within us. We can and we ought to rejoice. God is our Father. Christ Jesus is our elder brother. The Holy Spirit is our helper. The Gospel is ours by the grace of God.

We believe it. We trust it. We're obeying Christ. The Spirit's helping us. That's worth rejoicing in. And so let's, by the help of God, be marked by joy. Let us try, by grace-fueled effort, to be holy and acceptable sacrifices to the Lord our God.

Amen?

Let's pray.

Father, we pray, place your Word now deep within our hearts. We pray that we would be transformed by the renewing of our minds. That we would prove that which is that good and perfect and acceptable will of God.

We pray, bless your people. Cause us to grow from one degree of glory to the next. Make us more into the image of your Son. Chisel away remaining sin and corruption. Things that hinder our communion with you.

Cause us to be filled with joy in the Holy Spirit. As we walk with you, Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord. We pray for your blessing and your help. Only by your Spirit will these things be done. And so we pray that He would write your Word indelibly with power on our hearts.

And apply it. And work it out from us in our obedience. We ask in Christ's name.

Amen.