DAILY DEVOTIONAL – March 12, 2020
“A Living Sacrifice”
Prayer: Dear Jesus, You lived a perfectly faithful life toward God; a life you sacrificed so that our life of sin could be atoned for. Help us, Lord, to follow You and live as living sacrifices by the mercy and power of Your Holy Spirit. Amen.
Scripture: Romans 12:1-3
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
Devotional – “A Living Sacrifice”
This first verse from our passage today is an often quoted verse, and also a verse that I think at first glance may seem to be easy to grasp, but when we really think about what Paul is saying, there is a depth of meaning here that even a lifetime’s worth of study couldn’t reach the bottom of. In this text Paul encourages Christians to do something that appears to be contradictory; to live as a sacrifice. By definition a sacrifice is something that is put to death, yet, Paul says that by the mercies of God we should be a living sacrifice. What is Paul communicating here by using apparently contradictory terms, and furthermore, what does a life lived as a sacrifice look like?
To be candid with you, I very often think about this text from Romans 12 and the juxtaposition of living as a sacrifice. Recently, I heard a pastor share a story that I thought really brought this text into the nitty-gritty of real life. For the purposes of this devotional, I’ll refer to the pastor who shared this story with me as “Pastor Adam.”
Pastor Adam had been meeting with a young man in his church who had been very successful in business. Originally from Silicon Valley in California, this young man had climbed the corporate ladder very quickly, but at the cost of working 80 hours per week and sacrificing much of what made life worth living. After some time in conversation with Pastor Adam, the man decided he needed more time with family and more time being involved with the church. He decided to rest in the success he had, take 6 months away from work and refocus. After 6 months Pastor Adam said this man had gotten to a really healthy place personally and spiritually and so he decided to get back in the game and apply for some jobs.
A corporate headhunter helped him find two great jobs pretty quickly. One was with a startup company in a new industry that would pay a lot but also require a lot of hours. A second was with a household-name tech giant that paid less but allowed for a better balance of work, family, and church.
It wasn’t easy for him, and Pastor Adam met with him for several straight weeks as he labored over his decision. Finally the man told Pastor Adam that he was willing to prioritize the right things even if it meant sacrificing money. He knew that money wasn’t necessarily wrong or evil, but that as he had learned before, the money would come with some trade-offs in his life that were no longer worth it.
Pastor Adam complimented the man’s conviction and encouraged him to take the lesser paying job. You can imagine the surprise, then, when Pastor Adam met with the man again the following week and found out he had turned down the job paying less but that offered more balance and took the more lucrative job with the smaller startup.
Pastor Adam said, “When I asked what happened, he hung his head and said that the job title offered by the tech giant was what he couldn’t stomach. He’d gotten himself to a place where taking less money was palatable, but not where a lesser title was palatable.” The tech-giant had offered him a senior manager position when his level of expertise and qualifications should had given him a job title of “Director”.
In explaining to Pastor Adam the decision he made the man said, “It’s pride. I know it’s nothing but pride. But taking the lesser position would negate all the work and progress I’ve made. It would look poorly on me if I were to change jobs later on down the road.”
So, now here this man is again–back in the rat race. He’s working 80-hour weeks and having to leave his family to travel all over the world. He dealt with his temptation to greed, but pride took its place.
What does it mean to be a living sacrifice? As this real-life story I think clearly exemplifies, Paul says being a living sacrifice means, “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.” The heart breaking part of this story is that this man had clearly done what Paul says in verse 2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” In his conversations with Pastor Adam, this man clearly discerned what the best decision was, however, knowing what God wants and even wanting to do what God wants, is not doing what God wants. To realize in our lives the blessings of transformation that God has worked in our hearts and minds through faith, we must be a living sacrifice. We must live dead to ourselves, to our greed, to our pride and to our agenda. In this case, to be a living sacrifice meant that this man had to put to death his ego so that He could be alive toward God and alive toward his family and his church.
The truth is friends, we are all like this young man. We all in our sinfulness go against the very thing we know is true and right in our hearts, because “by the mercies of God” as Paul says, Christ has revealed to us what it means to be a living sacrifice through His own sacrificial death and resurrection from the dead. As Jesus Himself prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane as He was in agony over the hard road to Calvary that lay ahead of Him, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” – Matthew 26:39.
Paul said in verse 1, “By the mercies of God.” “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” We find the strength to die to self and to live as a sacrifice to God when by faith in Christ we remember that we have already been saved by the name that is above every name (and title), the name of Jesus. When by faith in Christ we remember that we have already been given a name more powerful than any title given to us by men, the name “Child of God”, then we are able to relinquish the hold that we by nature have on the approval of others. When we remember by faith in Christ that all of heaven itself, that Christ Himself who is heaven’s treasure, has been given to us for all of eternity, then we are able to let the riches of this world die so that we may truly live. When we by faith in Christ remember that Jesus is the resurrection and the life and that by the mercies of God working in the waters of baptism we have already died and been raised with Christ, and that though we die yet shall we live in Christ, then living as a sacrifice to God becomes possible.
Being a living sacrifice means that all of our living, all of our life, is a sacrifice to the God of mercy who has saved us in the blood of His Son Jesus and who has promised to set us free and give us true life, not just in the eternal day after we die, but today this very day as we walk by faith in Christ.
Thanks for spending time with me today in God’s Word, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
