What is your life worth? I don’t mean what would you give to save your life. I guess most of us would say you can’t put a value on human life and especially on my life. But if you were in a position where you had to put a value on your life how would you do it. For example, what do you think would be an appropriate, a reasonable, response to someone who saved your life? Someone who risked their life perhaps to save yours; or someone who did something that gave you a new lease of life. In some cultures if you save someone’s life they’re expected to become your servant. But what would you do?
You may remember back in 1990, Kerry Packer was playing polo in the Western suburbs of Sydney when he collapsed with a heart attack. His heart stopped beating for something like 6 minutes before the ambulance arrived. But fortunately for Kerry, the ambulance had a heart defibrillator which meant that the paramedics were able to get his heart going again. Well, what do you think would be a reasonable response on Kerry Packer’s part to his life being saved like that? I guess he could have rewarded the Ambulance Officers, not to mention the bystander who kept him alive with CPR while the ambulance was on its way and perhaps he did, but the more significant response and perhaps the most fitting response was that he decided to pay for every ambulance in NSW to be fitted with a defibrillator. He wanted to make sure that anyone else who suffered a heart attack as he had, had the same chance of survival.
Well, today we’re going to be thinking about what might be an appropriate response, not to us being revived after a heart attack, but to us having our hearts renewed so we can live forever.
But first let’s refresh our memories of where we’ve got to so far in Romans. Remember I’ve said a couple of times that when we come across that word "Therefore" we need to stop and go back to see what the therefore is referring to. Well, here it is again. "I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God ..." What are these mercies of God that he’s told us about in the first 11 chapters?
Well, he’s begun with the basic plight of all humanity: that is, that all people have suppressed the truth about God and substituted something of their own making. All people are under God’s judgement because they fail to live up to his standards. Yet God in his great love for us has done something to help us. He’s sent his only Son to save us from the punishment we all deserve, to save us from the death that’s the inevitable consequence of people’s rebellion against God and to give us new life. And he’s done it, not because any of us deserve it, but simply because he loves us. In fact we were reminded in ch5, if you remember, that it was while we were his enemies, while we were still in active opposition to his rule, that Jesus came and died for us.
That fact has profound implications for us. First it means that now that we’re reconciled to God we can have confidence that he’ll continue to cleanse us from the sin into which we seem to fall at a regular rate. But it also means that we mustn’t take his great love for granted. And for the Jews it means that if God’s love has been shown to the Gentiles through Jesus’ death on the cross, it’s even more available to them, if they’ll come to God through faith in Jesus Christ.
But the most profound implication is in the practical outworking in our lives as we find it described here in this passage. He says, "I appeal to you by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual (or your reasonable) worship." In other words, if you think about what God has done for you, if you can even begin to comprehend the way, in his mercy, God has brought you new life, it’ll have a deep impact on the way you live from now on. If Kerry Packer could respond to his life being saved, as temporary as that rescue may be, by giving a few hundred thousand dollars worth of medical equipment to the ambulance service, what sort of response should we have when we consider how much God has done for us out of his great mercy?
Well, what sort of response do you think would be reasonable? Giving more money to church? Well, we’ll come to that later in the passage, but that isn’t his conclusion. Loving other people the way God loves? Well, again we’ll come to that, but that isn’t sufficient either. Being nice even to those who wrong us? Well, that would be an appropriate response, but it doesn’t go far enough.
No, the only appropriate response is to give God everything. He says, "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice." That is, give up your whole life to God’s service, knowing that even before you’ve given it up God has already given it back to you. That’s why he says this is your reasonable service. The word that we have translated as spiritual there in v1 is actually the word reasonable, or logical. It’s the appropriate response to the knowledge that our life is now caught up in Jesus Christ and his resurrection.
But we have to be careful, because this is such a familiar phrase for many of us that the words just roll off our tongue and then we move on to the next familiar phrase before we have time to reflect on just what a spiritual sacrifice might actually entail. If you think about it, for someone to be sacrificed isn’t a very pleasant idea is it? Let’s stop and close our eyes and try to picture what a human sacrifice might mean to the person being sacrificed. I’d like you to think about the implications for you if you were the object of such a sacrifice. What would it mean for your relationships? Your plans for your family? What would it mean in terms of your career plans? Or your retirement? Or your house renovations? Or your efforts to deal with childhood trauma?
If you’re the person being sacrificed, none of those things are particularly important any more are they? There is no career. There won’t be any retirement. Your difficulties with house renovations will become a bit trivial won’t they? You may still have concerns about your family or your other relationships but they’ll be different concerns. If you thought your childhood traumas were bad, just wait a few hours until the sacrifice begins.
I think in our modern world we’ve lost some of the startling character of this image that Paul portrays here. It’s the image of us giving up all our rights. Although it’s a living sacrifice and we haven’t died physically we’re called to live as though we had. As though all our rights are lost, taken away by a premature death.
Now can I just say that I grew up in the 60s, so I know all about rights. I remember when I was about 17 our youth group protesting because we wanted to have a constitution that spelt out what was expected of us and what our rights were as members of the youth group. And of course that belief in the importance of personal rights has dominated the thinking of our western world for the past 30 or so years. So when we read v2 we discover an idea that’s very relevant to us. We mightn’t have any experience of sacrifices in a temple but we do understand when he says "don’t be conformed to this world." And when we read that in the context of us dying, giving up our rights it makes good sense doesn’t it? This world will tell us "never give up your rights." In fact it’ll tell us to insist on them; to take whatever we can get from the world, or from those around us. [Insur’ce crisis] But God tells us here "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God -- what is good and acceptable and perfect." And so we begin to see what it means to be a living sacrifice, to have given up our rights in response to God’s mercy and grace. It has to do with discerning the will of God. It has to do with what is good and acceptable and perfect in God’s eyes. And in the context of the previous chapters of Romans, it has to do with living out the grace and mercy of God in the way we live, in the way we deal with other people.
In fact he begins here to flesh out what it might mean to be living sacrifices. Look at the sorts of attitudes and behaviour that he suggests would reflect this new way of seeing our lives.
The first difference it makes is the way we think about ourselves. He says "For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned." Now it seems to me that in our culture we’re often encouraged to think of ourselves more highly than we should. The concept of "No.1" is fairly strongly ingrained in most of us. It’s all part of this ’rights’ idea. It’s the thing that makes our economic system work. We think we deserve more so we work and borrow to have everything we can get. It affects the way we look at how people perform. You know there was a time when high achievers were applauded and became an example, an incentive for others to work hard towards excellence, but nowadays we seem to fall into one of two errors. One error is tall poppy syndrome where we play down the success of others. The other side of the coin is that we see high achievers and we think it isn’t fair. We think we’ve been cheated because we haven’t had that sort of success.
But instead we should think with sober judgment about the things that people achieve. We’ve spent the first 11 chapters of this letter coming to the realisation that human achievement won’t help us in our efforts to please God. But we forget that as soon as we look at other people. We instantly start to compare ourselves with them. But instead of comparing ourselves with them we need to turn back to God’s grace again and again. Then we’ll realise that the things we’re able to do all depend on the grace of God. And then we need to remember that
God’s grace isn’t monochrome.
God shows his grace to us in a thousand different forms. He uses the analogy here, of the body. Look at how God has made our bodies. There’s lots of different parts of the body. They’re all equally parts of the body. They’re all equally important. But they all have different functions. So in the church, there are a variety of different members each with different functions. Each member has received various gifts for the benefit of the body and each gift is a gift of God’s grace. So whether the gift happens to be prophecy or teaching or exhortation or generosity or compassion or leadership, it doesn’t matter, they all come by the grace of God. So if you have a particular gift what credit can you claim for it? If God happens to have given me a gift - say preaching or leadership, can I claim any credit for that? Can I stand up and pretend to be any more virtuous or deserving than someone who’s, say, really good at caring for people who are housebound but whose ministry goes largely unnoticed? Or more valuable than that person who regularly gives 15% of their income to God’s work, but nobody knows about it except God? No. If my gifts come by grace there’s no credit to me. Nor should I be comparing my gifts to others. There are plenty of people around who are better preachers than me. Does that mean I should give up preaching? No. All I can do is to use the gifts I have as well as I can. All I can do is to live as though I no longer had any rights over my life and use the gifts I have to serve others as well as I can. So if I’m a teacher then let me use my gift by teaching. If my gift is compassion, let me carry out my pastoral care duties with cheerfulness. If I’m giving to God’s work, let me do it with generosity.
But not only should I think soberly about myself. I should also look at others the way God does. Now we actually skipped over a very important phrase back in v2. That was this phrase "be transformed by the renewing of your minds." You see there’s a mindset issue here that we’ll never overcome until we have something radical done to the way we think. We’ll never overcome the conditioning of the world unless we go through some sort of transformation of our minds. We actually need our minds turned upside down. And no more so than here with the issue of how we love others. You see, it seems to me that the way we love in normal circumstances is somewhat self centred. We tend to love those who do something for us, those we find pleasant to be with or who are good for our egos or who are good to us. We love our spouses because something about them appeals to us. It’d be pretty strange if you asked someone what they liked about their husband or wife and they said nothing. And even with our children or our grandchildren there’s a sense that they’re actually an extension of ourselves so loving them is a natural extension to loving myself. But the sort of love that God shows towards us, and that he’s calling us to here, is a love that depends not on the object but on the giver of the love. It’s a love that comes out of the nature of God.
When we read "Let love be genuine;" the word that’s used is agape love; i.e. divine love for an undeserving person. And when we’re told to "love one another with mutual affection;" it means everyone in the church. Not just those we feel comfortable with, but all our Christian brothers and sisters. When it says "outdo one another in showing honor" it actually means give preference to others. Now can you see that there’s a back to front nature to all this? It goes against everything we’ve been brought up to think.
In vestry this year we’ve been looking at characteristics of healthy churches and examining our own performance against a range of health indicators and the area where we scored the lowest was in the area of loving relationships. Now we were surprised by that because we have a self image of being a loving and caring church, but obviously, at least among those who filled out the questionnaire, the experience doesn’t match the perception. Now vestry have spent some time thinking about where we might have fallen down and how we might improve this, but I couldn’t help but think as I was preparing this passage last week, that the first place to begin is with our minds. That is, are we allowing the truth of the gospel so to transform our minds that we begin to love one another with passion, with mutual affection? So that the mercy and grace of God shines through in our relationships in a way that goes beyond our natural inclinations to love, to love the way God loves.
And of course if we are being transformed in that way our love will show itself in these other ways that are listed here: in ardent zeal in serving God; in joy, patience and perseverance; in being generous with our wealth and with our homes as we offer hospitality to others. And of course if we’re showing that sort of transformed mindset in our love for others then it’ll mean that we’re doing everything we can to share the gospel with them, to bring them to a place where they too can share the benefits of being in God’s kingdom.
Let’s ask God to transform our minds so that we might present our bodies to him as a living sacrifice, not being conformed to the world, but going against it as we demonstrate the mercy and grace of God in our relationships with others and let’s pray that we too might love with a sacrificial love, the way he first loved us.
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