22 - Gifted To Serve Series

Romans 12:1-2

1I 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. 2 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.

Having explained in detail in the last 11 chapters, the amazingly wise, and meticulous plan of God, to give the entire world the opportunity to be saved, Paul now makes a humble request to his readers. He asks them (and us) to never forget (to always remember) how merciful God has been to us, when He worked out our salvation for us. He just explained how God has been merciful to both the Jews and the Gentiles alike, and now he reminds us to never forget God’s mercy on our lives.

He goes on to ask that we go beyond merely remembering God’s mercies to us, but to also present our bodies as living sacrifices to God. In fact, it’s only when we consider God’s mercies on our lives that we would want to respond to him in gratitude. When he uses the word, ‘bodies,’ he’s referring to the usage of all of our physical faculties. How we use every member of our body is important, seeing that we have been redeemed from our former sinful way of life. In Romans Chapter 6 he talked about using the members of our body as instruments of righteousness and not as instruments of unrighteousness. We need to use our eyes, ears, mouth, hands, legs and every other member of our body to love, worship and serve God.

When he uses the words, “living sacrifices,” He isn’t asking us to lay down our lives for God as dead sacrifices, as was the custom with all animal or bird sacrifices in the Old Testament. But he’s asking that we present our bodies as living sacrifices to God, where we live each day saying, “Yes,’ to the leading of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and saying “No,” to being led by our sinful desires. We are to live our lives in grateful service to the Lord. We need to love the Lord with all we’ve got, and worship and serve him as long as we live.

Not only does Paul ask us to present our bodies as living sacrifices, but he also exhorts us to offer our bodies as holy sacrifices. The word, ‘holy,’ refers to both being set apart from, and being set apart to. We are to set apart our bodies from sinful ways of living, and instead set them apart to God where we reflect His character in the way we live our lives each day.

Thirdly, he encourages us to use our bodies in ways that are acceptable to God, which means that we use our bodies in ways that please God, and not in ways that displease or dishonour Him. If we use our bodies in ways that are pleasing to God, we can be sure that the world will not applaud us, because we don’t subscribe to their understanding of what bodies were meant for, but that doesn’t matter, because we are done living to please people, and we are now living to please God.

He goes on say that this is our reasonable service, implying that we are not doing God a favour if we choose to use our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to Him, but rather, it should be our natural response after all the Lord has done for us, when He saved us from our sinful ways of living, which would have resulted us going to a lost eternity. To put it differently, since God has been merciful to us, and saved us from the old sinful ways of using our bodies, it’s now time for us to offer up our bodies to God as living sacrifices, in ways that are holy and acceptable to Him in every way, and we need to consider this our reasonable response to God, as an act of worship and service.

Paul had just said at the end of Chapter 11, “In Him, through Him and to Him are all things…” He seems to be reiterating that everything we do, needs to be done as unto God, and not to please ourselves, or other people. We were saved by God, through His Son Jesus Christ, and we need to live our lives to worship and serve Him.

Paul then goes on to remind them again to not live according to the pattern of the world around them, since the ways of the world are so self-gratifying and also instantly gratifying. It is certainly tempting to live according to the pattern of the world, but it does not reflect the character of God in our lives. It would result in us getting back into the sinful ways we lived before we encountered Jesus.