A RADICAL CALL TO TOTAL COMMITMENT
God’s Invitation to Grace ❧ Part 52
Romans 12:1 ❧ Pastor, Dr. John Denney
Without exception every serious-minded believer sooner or later finds their spiritual life to be a great struggle. Why is my walk with God so hard? I just can’t seem to live the Christian life the way I should. I feel so empty, so defeated. I’ve done everything God wants me to do and yet my spiritual life feels so unsatisfying. Discouraged but not quite defeated, we drag ourselves to another church service, we read another book, we offer yet another prayer, we seek the counsel of a trusted believer only to find ourselves feeling more frustrated than we were before. What we want is more of God but God seems indifferent, aloof, uncaring. How many of us have felt this way in our relationship with God? I want you to know you’re not alone! Every serious-minded believer in the pages of Scripture and in history has been where you’re at. If you say, “Yah, that’s me!” Would you raise your hand?
If that’s you, then you need to hear Romans 12:1. Would you read these verses with me in your notes? (Read Romans 12:1, NAS Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship (Romans 12:1). It is easy for us to read these words and forget about the one whom God penned them through – the Apostle Paul. I’m convinced Paul is probably writing here from the memory of his own painful struggles in pursuing God. Somewhere along the way God showed Paul what he is now telling us: The key to the Christian life is not getting more from God but giving all to God. Paul says the greatest, the most supreme act of worship is offering ourselves wholly, unreservedly as living sacrifices to God.
Unfortunately that is not what many of us hear today when it comes to living the fulfilled Christian life. we are told we need more from God. Yet, the Bible tells us just the opposite. It tells us that God has already blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Eph. 1:3). And in Christ we have all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3). And Peter, one who clearly struggled as well, tells us, By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life (2 Peter 1:3, NLT). The reason many of us go to church and leave empty or read our Bibles and aren’t fed is because we don’t realize we already have everything we need and more! In the truest and most profound sense, we cannot have more of God than we do right now. So why do we feel so empty? Here’s why: Because the joy and satisfaction we long for in God can only be found through greater surrender to God, not greater filling from God. Romans 12:1-2 are A radical call to total commitment. Four keys to understanding the kind of commitment God wants from us. We’re going to look at two of them this morning: The foundation and the quality of our commitment.
- The foundation for our commitment. Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God (Romans 12:1a). He is saying, “Consider all that God has done for us out of His great mercy.” Paul has carefully spelled out God’s great mercy toward believers in the past eleven chapters of Romans. When we first came to God, we had absolutely nothing to offer Him but our broken and pain ridden lives. We were broken from within and broken from without. We were broken by others and broken by ourselves. Our lives were beyond repair and beyond hope. But God reached down and in His great love healed us and made us right with Him through our faith in Christ. Though we were far from deserving, He forgave all our sin and removed sin’s penalty. But God didn’t just forgive us, He adopted us as His own children giving us His own Spirit in our hearts. We now have His assurance that He will never waste our pain. He promises He will use the good, the bad, and the ugly for our good. Nothing can separate us from God’s eternal love and continued faithfulness. These are but a small handful of reminders of God’s great mercy seen in the first elven chapters of Romans.
What is Paul’s purpose looking back on God’s great mercies He’s lavished on us? Simply this, the greater our comprehension of what God has done for us, the deeper our love for Him and our commitment to Him will be.
Years ago I was asked to do a memorial service for one of our men at the Veterans Hospital in Walla Walla, WA. It was late Summer and the chapel I was to do the service in was no real escape from the sweltering heat. Since I was about forty-five minutes early, I tried to find a cool place to wait. About that time, a man well in his eighties stepped out of a nearby office. With a welcoming smile introduced himself as Chaplain Ben Vegors. We immediately hit it off. He invited me into his office where there was air-conditioning, which I welcomed. As I got to know Ben, he told me his story. He was a World War II veteran from the European theater. Serving in the 715th Squadron in a B-24 as a Tail Gunner, Vegors flew 30 combat missions. In the four years he flew, he only missed three missions. It just so happened all three of those airplanes crashed and burned. That God had spared him his life, not once, but three times, didn’t lose its effect on Ben. In his gratitude, Ben told God he would serve Him for the rest of his life – and that is exactly what he did. After graduating Multnomah School of the Bible, the same school I would attend many years later, Vegors faithfully served God as a pastor and chaplain for the next sixty plus years. What impressed me was Ben’s genuine gratitude for God’s mercy. It burned just as brightly that day in his office as it had sixty years before.
Ben reminds me of the Apostle Paul. Paul not only never forgot God’s lavish mercy in his life, he made it a point to recall it to mind on a regular basis. It refreshed and deepened Paul’s love for God and commitment to Hod. God’s overwhelming mercies form the solid foundation of our commitment to Him. This is what Isaac Watts meant when he penned the great hymn, “When I Survey the Wonderous Cross” Love so amazing, so divine demands my soul, my life, my all.
- The quality of our commitment. to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship (Romans 12:1b). The word present refers to the offering a priest would make in the OT sacrifices. Every priest knew whenever he made an offering it had to be first-rate. No exceptions. When an Israelite offered one of his lambs, it had to be a Blue-Ribbon lamb. No second-rate lamb with blemish or defect would do. When an Israelite offered some of his harvest, no bruised or rotting produce would do. God required the best of the best. Paul is saying what was true then is still true now – God doesn’t want the leftovers of your life. Oh, I’ll serve God when I have some spare time. I’ll serve God after I retire. That’s not what Paul is talking about here. He’s talking about your whole life, the best of your life, right here and now. We’re to present our bodies as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God.
How does this work? Before there can be a sacrifice there has to be a death. Before the animal was placed on the altar, it had to be put to death. Before you offer yourself to God there needs to be a death. What death? Death to self. A death to self-will. Jesus said it plainly when He said the greatest commandment of them all is to love the Lord your God with ALL your heart, and with ALL your soul, and with ALL your mind (Matt. 22:37). That means there has to be death to my will and a total surrender to God’s will.
In his classic work: The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer gets to the heart of the matter. He writes: Before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first prepared for him by creating a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and delight. In the Gensis account of the creation, these are simply called things. They were made for man’s uses, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. in the deep heart of man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him….Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and “things” were allowed to enter. Within the human heart “things” have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer… God’s gifts now take the place of God. Then Tozer shifts his gaze to an OT illustration of our dilemma. He points to the patriarch Abraham and his promised son Isaac. To Abraham Isaac represented everything sacred in Abraham’s heart – God’s promises, God’s plans. And as Isaac grew the heart of Abraham grew closer and closer to the life of his son. Then the day came when God told Abraham to sacrifice his only son (Gen. 22). This seems so strange to us, even wrong. How could God have asked Abraham to kill his only son? Why? Tozer insightfully points out Abraham’s love for his son took the place of his love for God. God allowed Abraham to reach the point of lifting his knife to slay his son before God stopped him. God did not intend for Abraham to kill his son. Speaking for God, Tozer writes, I only wanted to remove (Isaac) from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there. I wanted to correct the perversion of that existed in your love. Tozer then adds, We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not committed (Tozer, pp. 30-35).
Here’s the point – the life we really long for in God does not consist of the gifts He gives us (our loved ones, our plans, our desires, our wants, our will). The life we really long for is God Himself. He is both the source and gifts of our life that makes life satisfying.
When we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice to God, we are in effect restoring God’s rightful place on the throne of our hearts. Paul says this is your spiritual (logical – reasonable) service of worship.
