Therefore, I urge you,
brothers and sisters,
in view of God's mercy, to offer
your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and pleasing to God
– this is true worship.
Bible Rank: 17
The problem with living sacrifices, it has been said, is that they can get off the table and run away.
Such is our human nature.
We "offer" ourselves. Then we pull back. We offer ourselves again. Then shrink back another time. Often our Christian life is like the hokey-pokey. "We put our left foot in, we put our left foot out." And it's our love, joy, and peace that keeps getting shaken all about. Hence the call to crucify our selfish self. Dead desires can't run!
Wait. Notice what I just said. Did you here the invitation to discover "love, joy, peace" (and several other fruitful blessings)? These are part of the famous fruits of the Spirit passage -- Galatians 5:22-23. They are absolutely gifts from God-the-Holy-Spirit. But ... look at the call in the very next verse. How do we open ourselves to these gifts? The Apostle Paul says, "Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires" (Galatians 5:24). Dead desires, indeed, can't run away from that sacrificial altar.
Which leaves us with only one problem. If it's only dead sacrifices that can't run, why does the same Apostle, Paul, encourage us to be "living sacrifice" rather than "crucified and dead offerings"?
Why? Because this world matters! God wants to bless your daily life. And he wants you to bless others. God wants to fill you and a rebellious world with love, joy, and peace. We're the barrier to receiving these blessings, of course, and not him. But he wants us to be living to receive them. So what needs crucified is not our living bodies, but our deadly desires.
And it's an everyday sacrifice. Moment by moment, my love, joy, and peace blossom as a die to self and live for him. I kill it when I compromise. But hope blossoms as I trust.
God doesn't want you dead. He wants yourself in. And rather than pulling your whole self out, he wants to joyfully shake you all about.
In Christ's Love,
a guy who's trying to
get to the joyful end
of the hokey-pokey
(whole self in!)
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