“Scripture Worth Memorizing” Romans 12:1
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Scripture Worth Memorizing—Romans 12:1
May 30, 2010
by Rev. William “Buck” Day
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-this is your spiritual act of worship. Romans 12:1 – NIV
Once again, let’s start out with a word of prayer and ask God to bless our time.
Lord, we do come before you and we ask that you will bless our time around your word. Encourage us, just strengthen us, challenge us, Lord, by the power of your Holy Spirit. We ask that because you are Lord over all.
Well I want to start with a question this morning. The question is: What is a reasonable response when you receive a gift? What is a reasonable response? Maybe it is a “Thank you.” Right? Maybe it is a handshake, maybe it is a pat on the back, what is it? Well that is what I want us to be thinking about today as we begin to look at our text from Romans 12. That is what Paul is trying to answer for the Romans—what is a reasonable response? That is what we want to unpack today, but before we do that, obviously, we want to continue what we have been doing. So we want to look at our Scripture today. It is the second week of memorizing our Scripture, so you know that there are three different versions on the back of your bulletin. You are welcome to use one that you like, cut that up to help you remember it, take it with you; but today we look at Romans 12 and this is again the NIV version. Alright, here we go.
Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Romans 12:1
Alright, very good. O.K. That’s this week’s. How did we do on last week’s?
2 Corinthians 5:17
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
2 Corinthians 5:17
All right!! All right!! Nicely done, Rhonda. Nicely done.
O.K. If you are new and you are going, “What the heck are we talking about?”, we started this summer when I have been speaking, memorizing some Scripture. So, we started last week with 2 Corinthians 5:17 and we started memorizing that; and, today, we are moving on to Romans 12:1. Part of memorizing this Scripture is to continue to review what you have already memorized. So that is part of what we want to be about as we go forward, is now you have a couple weeks off because I won’t speaking for a couple weeks. So you have two verses to memorize and continue to review until we meet again, up here. So Romans 12:1. Do you want to say it again?
Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Romans 12:1
Alright! Very nice. Well, what we have here is right at the beginning obviously because it is verse 1 of Chapter 12 of Romans and at this point in Romans, Paul is making a major transition. He is moving from what the gospel is about, what Jesus is about and what he did, he is moving it now to what do we do, how do we live out this discipleship that God is calling us to in every day life in the context of Christian community? Paul is laying out for us kind of an overview in this verse. So if you want to take notes, if you turn it over, I can give you three little points that you can follow along in your sermon. If you want to write these down, great; if you don’t, you won’t hurt my feelings.
But really what Paul is talking about here in this verse, he is talking and he is beginning with attitude. So the first point would be attitude. Out of that attitude we find our life of action, and that is point two. And that results in adoration, which is point three. I know I don’t usually use alliterations, but it seemed to work in this case. So, here we go.
Paul has just spent the previous eleven chapters of Romans unfolding God’s mercy on all of creation. He has talked about how all of us are guilty before God. He talked about how the Gentiles, which are all of us, are guilty before God. The Jews are guilty. All of creation is guilty, and he brings that to a climax in Romans 3:23, another great verse to memorize, very simple, very short. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So Paul, in that, is making a case that God’s mercy is found only when we put our faith in Christ and Christ alone. When we believe by faith that Jesus was enough, he makes us righteous and God’s mercy gets poured out on us. God’s mercy gets poured out on us and we are saved. We should have received the wages for the result of our sin, which is Romans 6:23, which is another great verse to memorize, which is, “..the wages of sin are death.” That is what we should have received from God. We should have received that separation from God but because of God’s great mercy, because of who he is, we are saved from what we deserve when we put our faith in Christ.
Now my question to all of us is, how does it work? How does that work? Does that change your perspective as you go through life? What is your attitude as a result of God’s mercy that has been shown to you? I think all too often we tend to blow by this idea of God’s mercy to get to the gift, to get to the 2 Corinthians:5-17, to get to salvation, to do life in Christ. That’s a good thing; we want to get there, for sure. It is a good thing; but I think it is also important for us to internalize, to process this idea of God’s mercy and how we receive God’s mercy. What I am thinking about here is not so much how bad our sin is, we like to go there. Really what I am talking about, really, is how good God is. This new gift of life is a result of God’s mercy— God’s mercy being poured out on you, God’s mercy being poured on me. We are the objects of his mercy. We are the recipients of it and that is just part of the picture because God’s mercy also really reveals who God is; or probably a better way to think about it is what is God’s attitude towards you and me? Think about when someone throws himself, or herself, on the mercy of the court, what are they doing? They are asking for unmerited favor, aren’t they? They are asking for some kind of leniency. When you receive mercy, you are experiencing God’s attitude towards you, his generosity, his compassion, his grace that has been poured out on you. So back to our question: What is your attitude towards the mercies that you have received from God? What is it? What is your attitude towards those mercies, which is really the gospel? Whatever your attitude is, that becomes the foundation, or if you will, a springboard, for how you live your life. So, if we are unmindful of God’s mercies, we just haven’t thought about it, we haven’t put that piece together in our heads, or, if we are unappreciative of it, we don’t realize what it is we are asking for, then our conduct will reflect our understanding of the mercy we have received. If it is not a big deal then our conduct will be reflected in that also. And the way that works itself out in our world today, honestly I think in the sense of entitlement: I do this. I earned this. I am supposed to get this. Or, it is the other side which is self-centeredness: I am the center of my universe. Everything that happens in my life has to revolve around me. That is how, I think, when we don’t understand God’s mercy that is kind of how it works itself out in our lives. The other side of that coin, then, is if we do understand that attitude for the mercies we receive, it changes our attitude. When we understand that we have received an undeserved gift, our conduct will reflect that attitude. It is out of that attitude towards God’s mercy that Paul says “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”
Pastor Erwin McManus says “the apex of generosity is sacrifice.” When we understand the mercies we have received and it comes to its point with climax, it results in generosity and that apex of generosity gets itself worked out in sacrifice. And that is a statement of action. Now think about that. God’s attitude towards us is one of generosity. So what did he do? He sent his Son to be sacrificed. When we understand our lives and the mercies that we have received, our attitude is one of generosity. Exactly. Exactly.
And Paul here purposely uses the word bodies, here, as a living sacrifice. He purposely uses that because he is trying to counteract a thought that was going on at that time from the plutonic kind of philosophers of his time that said, basically, the body is an embarrassment that we must live in. So Paul is speaking to them when he says this. Those who had that philosophy actually had a saying, they said, “The body is a tomb. The body is a tomb.” What they are referring to is simply our spirit is encased and imprisoned in this body and the goal is to escape the body. That attitude, I think, continues to filter down through history and finds itself, I think, in lots of ways in our world today. But one of the ways that it shows up is when we typically sometimes use words, even the church, like “give your heart to Jesus,” that can kind of find its roots back there in this idea. So Paul is clear that we need to present our bodies, our bodies as an act of worship.
Theologian John Stott puts it great. He says “No worship is pleasing to God which is purely inward, abstract or mystical.” In other words it has to be something physical about it. It must express itself in concrete acts of service performed by our bodies. Paul understood the dilemma we are in within our bodies. He understood that our bodies are simply an expression, and the way our bodies act, are simply an expression of what is going on in our mind, whether that be good or whether that be evil. I think Romans 1 lays that out for us. So when Paul is using the word body in this text what he is really referring to is he is referring to the wholeness of who we are, of our mind, our bodies and our spirits. Having said that, Paul also understands that human sinfulness expresses itself through its body, through our bodies. We have talked about that here before and listen to the words that Paul quotes from the psalmist from Romans 3. He says,
Their throats are opened graves; they use their tongues to deceive.
The venom of vipers is under their lips.
Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their paths, and the way of peace they have not known.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.
So Paul understands the struggle that we are in within our bodies, how we use it to express our sinfulness, but just a couple chapters after that Paul also said that we are to present our bodies as instruments of righteousness. We are supposed to bring righteousness through our bodies. That is a huge statement. I think the sad reality for many of us is we have walked away from the practicality of that teaching. We forget that the language we use reflects our hearts. It is a simple thing to use plain language in our lives. It is a simple decision not to swear and yet I think for many of us that is an area of our lives where we kind of just go with the flow and just get in line with the rest of the world and use the language that the world uses. We throw in a swear word or cuss word simply almost as a verbal exclamation point, a way to emphasize what we are trying to say by throwing in an inappropriate word. My question is how does that reflect Christ? What does it say about our hearts? What does it say about the mercies that we have received?
I came across a quote this week from the church father, Chrysostom, and I think he is speaking on this verse and he says, “How is the body to become a sacrifice? Let the eye look on no evil thing, and it has already become a sacrifice. Let the tongue say nothing filthy, and it has become an offering. Let your hand do nothing evil, and it has become a full burnt offering. But even this is not enough for we must also have good works. The hand must do alms, the mouth must bless those who curse it, and the ears must find time to listen to the reading of the Scriptures.” See, Paul, I think, is stating that physically serving is an expectable sacrifice, that is a way to honor God, that is a way to sacrifice yourself, to demonstrate the mercies that you have received from God. When we think about serving, we have talked a lot about serving here at Faith in this last year of so, haven’t we, and we will continue to do so. But we are going to continue to talk about it, not just because it is a way to get us out beyond the walls and into our community, but hopefully if you begin to put this together you will also see as we go out and we serve the community, it is a way to offer ourselves to God as a sacrifice, using our bodies for good, for instruments of righteousness. That is why I talked about the announcements we have, because it is a way for us to do something righteous for God.
As we think about serving, I think it is important for us to understand that for Faith to be impactable, to make an impact in our community, it is not going to be because of our service. It’s not. It’s not going to be because of what we do, there are lots of organizations, some governmental, some social, some religious, they are all serving. Everyone is on the serving band wagon now. We are not serving just because we are joining the crowd. We have to get beyond that mindset. We are serving and we will make an impact in our community because of the condition of our hearts, i.e. our attitude; i.e. our gratitude, our graciousness when we serve. That attitude is what will be seen by those that we serve alongside of, whether they be of a religious bent, or not. That is why we serve. We are taking the attitude that God has created in us and we are sharing it with the world. As people see the transformation that is taking place in our lives, that heart of gratitude, they will be drawn to the source of that transformation, namely Jesus, and the mercies of God, come through. So transformation begins with sacrificing ourselves to Christ. If you will, another phrase is “we are to die to ourselves,” we are to die to ourselves, sacrifice to Christ.
C. S. Lewis puts it this way. He says “Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.” I love that. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.
Alright, so where are we in this is process? Paul has exhorted us to action, hasn’t he? He has exhorted us to sacrifice all that we are, including, our physical bodies, because of the gratitude that we have because of the mercies we have received from God. Then he concludes simply by saying, “This is worship. This is worship, or adoration, when you do these things you are worshipping God,” Paul is saying. He says that that “worship is to be spiritual.” When he says the word spiritual he is not talking about a style of worship or a way of worship. What he is saying here, really, the word spiritual is to be translated as reasonable or rational. So what Paul is saying here is our worship is only reasonable, it is only rational, it is the only reasonable and rational response to the mercies we have received from God. That is the only thing we should be doing. That is what he is saying about spiritual worship. Because the only reasonable response is worship, it is praise to God.
So the stoic philosopher, Epictetus, put it this way: “If I were a nightingale I would do what is proper to a nightingale. If I were a swan, what is proper to a swan, in fact, I am a rational being, so I must praise God.” Offering our bodies, our minds, and our spiritis to Paul’s way of thinking is the only reasonable response to what we have received from God. So it brings us all the way back to where we started. What is a reasonable response to the gift you have received from God? What is your reasonable response, for the mercies that you have, that you have received?
Lord, thank you for this chance to gather around your word and ask you to bless us, use us in a mighty way that we might be your witnesses in this world. We ask that because of Jesus. Amen.