Romans 12: 1-2
SERMON - Living sacrifices
We know what it means to be alive and to live;
what does ‘sacrifice’ mean?
My dictionary defines a sacrifice as ‘a surrender of something of value as a means of gaining something more desirable’; and as a ‘ritual’; ‘a loss entailed’; ‘a propitiation to appease anger’; and as ‘an offering to obtain favour’.
We can see that most of these have a religious connotation.
People who lived in ancient times believed in lots of gods
such as Mars and Venus, Woden and Thor,
and believed sacrifices had to made to them, to keep them happy.
The Romans sacrificed fruit, the Vikings sacrificed horses,
and the Aztecs sacrificed humans so the sun would go on shining every day.
The word ‘sacrifice’ appears 26 times in the Bible according to one Concordance that I use; 14 in the OT and 12 in the NT.
In Leviticus 19:5 we can read about ‘sacrifice of praise’;
in Psalm 116:17 about ‘sacrifice of thanksgiving’;
and in Psalm 141:2 about ‘the evening sacrifice’.
In Hebrews 10:12 and 26 we read about ‘sacrifice for sins’;
in Hebrews 13:15 about ‘sacrifice of praise’;
and Romans 12:1 about our bodies, our lives, as ‘living sacrifices’
which I want us to look at today.
In Leviticus God told the Jews to sacrifice animals such as bulls
so that their sins would be forgiven,
and in Hebrews 9:22 we find the rule
‘Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness of sin’.
Christians believe this is why Jesus allowed himself to be killed on the cross.
He was a sacrifice, a living sacrifice, to take away God’s anger at human sin.
He, the innocent, shed his blood and died
so that we, the guilty,
could be forgiven, and allowed to enter into an eternal relationship with God.
What does God want from us in return?
According to St Paul in our NT reading, He wants everything.
He wants us to present our bodies as living sacrifices to Him,
not to earn His grace and love,
but to show to the world around us that we already possess it.
God does not give us grace in payment for our goodness or works;
if so, many of would qualify for very little.
Grace is just what it sounds like,
a free gift from God to those who do not, could not, deserve it.
But because God’s grace is free,
it does not mean that it didn’t have a price.
Grace was actually the most expensive gift ever given,
for it cost God the life of His only begotten Son,
and it often has a cost for humans too.
Millions of Christians down the centuries have suffered and died for their faith.
The first Christians were Jews
and when they put Jesus before Moses and the Law
they were expelled from the synagogues,
at best; at worst they were put to death as Stephen was in Acts chapter 7.
When Christianity spread through the Roman Empire,
those who refused to put Caesar first were killed by gladiators
or by lions in the arena,
as was, for example, St Valentine on 14th February 270,
during the reign of the Emperor Claudius.
In the years following the Communist Revolution in Russia
and in Cold War Europe,
people behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ who put Christ before Marx and atheism
were often tortured and killed,
and in many Middle Eastern countries today, such as Pakistan,
where fundamentalist Muslims think they are pleasing Allah,
those who put Jesus before Muhammad face death by stoning.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Protestant minister in the 1930’s
and he learned how costly it could be to be a Christian
after Adolf Hitler came to power.
On 23rd July 1933 the Lutheran Church in Germany held its elections
and 70% of the clergy and lay members who were elected to its ruling council were sympathetic to the Nazis.
They called for a special German Christianity
that included as its creed the teachings of Hitler in his book ‘Mein Kampf’.
The official slogan of the German State Church was
‘Ein folk, Ein reich, Ein fuehrer, Ein kirche’:
‘One people, one empire, one leader and one church’.
The minority of pastors and lay people who opposed Hitler,
about 2,000 Christians, formed their own Synod at Barmen in 1934
under the leadership of Martin Niemoller.
This became known as the ‘Confessing Church’
and their official statement included the words
‘We stand against the false teaching that there are areas of our life
in which we belong not to Jesus Christ, but to another lord’.
They were convinced that because Jesus gave his all for us,
we should give our all to him.
Because of his public stand against Hitler,
Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was banned from preaching in 1942,
and on 5th April 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo
and imprisoned in the Tagel prison in Berlin,
where he was frequently tortured until 9th April 1945
when he was hanged and his body was cremated.
So God’s free gift of grace was extremely expensive for Dietrich Bonhoeffer;
it cost him his life.
He had to make a choice: follow God or follow Hitler;
obey the Bible or obey the Nazis,
and he chose God.
While in prison he wrote a book called ‘The Cost of Discipleship’
and in it he says ‘too many people want forgiveness, which is free,
but are not willing to pay the cost, which is living morally, serving others,
putting God first, and putting ourselves last’.
He said too many people want ‘Cheap Grace’,
which means calling themselves Christians
but without even trying to live more morally and selflessly
than the people around them.
‘Cheap Grace’ makes for the attitude
‘I can do what I like, yet still rely on God to forgive me and bless me’,
and ‘I can live like a heathen, but expect the rewards of a Christian’,
and Dietrich Bonhoeffer said to those who took this attitude, “This is wrong!”.
A battle has been going on ever since the beginning of time;
the battle between the Spirit and the flesh;
the kingdom of darkness against the kingdom of light.
Adam and Eve lost the battle when they ate the forbidden fruit.
The Hebrews lost it when they made their golden cow to worship.
Samson lost it when he allowed Delilah to cut his hair.
David lost it when he had Uriah the Hittite killed
so he could have his wife Bathsheba,
but Jesus did not lose it
when he resisted the three temptations of the devil.
Every day, in our homes, our job situations, in the shops, as we drive,
we are faced with choices:
Do we do what a child of God should do, or do what everyone else is doing?
Do we follow the Spirit or give in to the flesh?
Do we fight for the Kingdom of light or give in to the Kingdom of darkness?
God’s grace is given to us as a free gift because of our faith in Jesus,
but there is a cost, and we pay it every time
we fight the world, the flesh and the devil,
and take up our cross and follow Jesus;
in other words, be ‘living sacrifices’.
Jesus said, in today's Gospel: ‘If anyone would come after me,
he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for me will save it’.
What Jesus is saying is this:
if we want to be his disciples, we must die to our human natures and ambitions, we must crucify our self-centred-ness; our ‘flesh’.
We must be like Bonhoeffer, willing to suffer
rather than compromise on matters of faith or our moral standards.
St Paul told the Christians living in Rome, and he is telling us,
to offer our bodies, our minds, our ambitions, our feelings,
our time, our money, our skills,
as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God’.
That, says Paul, is our spiritual act of worship,
which means much more to God
than just coming to church for one hour a week.
We may agree with the theory, the sentiments, involved,
but what does it mean in practice
to offer ourselves to God as living sacrifices’ ?
In other words, how do we do it?
St Augustine, a theologian in the early Church,
said Christian living could be summed up in one sentence:
‘If we love God, we can do whatever we like’.
The catch is, of course, that if we really love God
we should only want to do the things that please Him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it was not human bravery or courage
that helped him stand against Hitler and face torture and death;
It was God’s grace, God’s free grace.
In his book he wrote ‘Grace is free but it is expensive
because it cost Jesus his life,
it is costly for us because it calls us to follow Jesus;
to be a disciple in our workplace, in our community, in our homes, everywhere.
In last week’s Bible Study, where we are working through the Westminster Confession of Faith, we looked at ‘Saving Faith’,
and that is much more important than faith in our politicians or doctors.
The Bible speaks nowhere about ‘Saving Works’
because there are no such things.
No amount of good deeds can make any difference to where we will spend eternity, but this does NOT mean that there is no place for good works.
Good works are good, and we should all be doing more of them,
but too many people think that becoming a Christian,
making a decision, getting saved,
is like getting a ‘Get out of hell’ card,
and that Christians can live and work and behave
just like everyone else,
except for going to church for an hour every week or so.
God the Holy Spirit calls us to examine our habits and attitudes,
our thoughts, words and deeds,
and sacrifice, kill, those which do not please God,
and every day, with the help of the Holy Spirit, try to be more like Jesus.
The aim, as St Paul put it in Galatians 2:20,
is for all of us to be able to say one day: ‘I have been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I that liveth, but Christ that liveth in me'.
God is not asking us to die on a cross,
but He is asking us to die to sin, and to anything that does not please Him.
He wants us to fully offer ourselves as living sacrifices;
be 100% dead to sin and self;
and 100% consecrated, set part, surrendered to God,
giving Him all of our ambitions, our finances, our time
This seems hard, challenging, and possibly even frightening
but the message of Romans 12 verses1and 2
is that God loves us, forgives our sins
and promises us His presence, His peace and His strength,
in this life,
and promises us eternal life with Him in the next,
if we persevere in the faith to which we have been called.
Amen
