A Life Of Worship

Transcript

Romans chapter 12. If you are able, I would love to invite you to stand for the reading of the Word of God.

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. 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. 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. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and

— Romans 12

(ESV)

individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. If prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness. Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal. Be fervent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope. Be patient in tribulation. Be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with

— Romans 12

(ESV)

one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. For it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For by so doing, you will keep burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

— Romans 12

(ESV)

This is the Word of the Lord. Please be seated. This is a phenomenal text. Like a truly, truly beautiful text. In it we find a lot of different themes. We find sacrifice, we

The Call to Sacrifice

find worship, we find transformation, we find ministry, gifting, unity, love, engagement with the world, enemies, friends, brotherhood, hospitality, and you just keep going. And it’s a lot. There’s a lot to glean, there’s a lot to reflect upon, there’s a lot that we need to grow in, right? I mean, I’ve read this text, you know, several dozen times this week, but even as I’m reading it right now, my heart starts beating a little bit faster. And it’s just this reminder that there’s this expectation of how I ought to live as a Christian. How drastically short I fall, but there’s a lot here. But today, like I said, we’ll just be looking at the first two verses. We’ll look at them one at a time. Our text calls us in these first two verses to present ourselves as living sacrifices. And when we think about what those words mean, it sounds pretty intense. Paul tells

us that we, Christians, individually, every single one of us, are to give ourselves up as sacrifices. And if you’re like me, this is not how I think about my day-to-day Christian life. This is not how I’m thinking about how I’m going about Monday, and how I’m trying to pay my bills, and how I’m working, and engaging with my spouse, and engaging with my friends, and thinking about ministry. I’m not really thinking about it as I am sacrificing myself. I’m giving myself up as a sacrifice. We talk about ministry. We talk about serving others. We talk about worship. We talk about studying our Bibles and evangelism. But sacrifice? This is something that I believe each of us, we really need to delve into a little bit more, and we need to explore. And so, in an effort to do that, I want to ask each of you, if you’re a Christian, if you consider

yourself to be a born-again person, if you believe yourself to be right with God, I want to ask you, what is your life worth? What is your life worth? What do you cling to? What do you long for? What are you building towards in your life? What are you investing into? What are you willing to give up? And what are the non-negotiables for who you are, and how you function? What are you living for, Christian? The book of Romans is, it’s really a beautiful, beautiful letter. It’s written by the Apostle Paul to help the believers living in Rome at that time. These were people that he himself had not yet met, and he’s writing to a people that are living in a very hostile and antagonistic culture, a culture that hates them, that mocks them, that doesn’t have room for them. And he’s telling these people how not only they are to survive in a culture that is set against

them, that wants their failure, their demise, and really their death, but he’s telling these people how they are to thrive in that culture. He does this primarily by focusing them broadly on the theme of righteousness, a person’s need to be made right in God’s eyes, God’s gracious gift of righteousness to a people that don’t deserve it, and what it looks like then to live as a people made right by the atoning work of Jesus. Not only to be made right, not only to understand righteousness doctrinally, but to live in light of that righteousness. And it’s in this last section that we find ourselves. It can be argued in the beginning of our text, as we as we start to dig into these two verses, that the therefore in the beginning of the verse follows Paul’s entire argumentation throughout the gospel. This isn’t just the preceding verses in chapter 11, but it can be argued that

Sacrificial Worship

what he’s saying is he’s he’s wrapping up the whole of the first 11 chapters, the whole epistle up until this point, and then therefore. Here what he does is he transitions from the doctrine in the beginning to the application, and he’s saying with all that’s been said, we land here. We land at this practical conclusion. So with that in mind, let’s look at these two verses one at a time. The first verse we’ll look at will tell us about sacrificial worship. Sacrificial worship. Let’s reread verse 1. 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. Friends, how do we understand worship? How do we how do we think about this aspect of worship that is to define our Christian lives? Paul begins here when he’s speaking about

this application portion, when he takes all of that doctrine and he says here’s how we are to live. He begins by pleading with his reader. This is fascinating. He’s essentially saying I plead with you in light of the mercies of God that I’ve just explained to you, that I’ve just taken a majority of this letter explained to you. I’m pleading with you by the mercies of God. What’s that all about? Why is he pleading based upon the mercies of God? We are forgiven by the mercy of God. We are justified by the mercy of God. We are brought into the family of God by his mercy and he works all things, yes even that thing, for good. Not because he wants you to suffer but because he’s merciful. And we don’t think about suffering and we don’t think about loss and sacrifice and all of

these things in our lives in that way. But Paul is saying everything that you’re going through. In chapter 7, that very struggle with your own flesh of why do I do what I don’t want to do and why don’t I do what I want to do. And that innate desire to live very differently but seemingly having the inability to do so on a regular basis. And the wrestling with loss and pain and confusion. Paul is saying all of this speaks to us about the mercy of God. The book of Romans is all about God being gracious and merciful. It’s all about grace that pours freely out upon sinners from a merciful and a kind God. The Christian is a person well acquainted with mercy and it’s this understanding of mercy and this understanding of grace and love and forgiveness that guides our worship. And if we miss this and if we start to

compartmentalize our lives into all the different machinations and all the different workings of this is going on here and that’s kind of separate from my thing here and this is my escape from this part of my life here and this is where I find solace and this is where I kind of reorient myself and we start to kind of divide our lives up and all of these neat little boxes and we forget that God is working all things for one purpose to make us more like Jesus and to use us for his glory so that men might be made right with God by our testimony and by our faithfulness as being a people of God in like the Romans an antagonistic culture that wants nothing to do with us and hates us. If we miss that this is happening by the hand of a merciful God who loves us, we miss

worship, we miss what it means to worship God with the whole of who we are and live lives that are wholly given over to him. So Paul appealing to God’s mercy takes the conversation in the direction of sacrifice and we can’t really separate this out from who the author is, right? Paul, a former religious Jew, a teacher, says this and so this should take us back to the old covenant system of worship. In mind are the various kinds of sacrifices that would have been at the forefront of Paul’s mind and in his memory and on his lips as he recites the Word of God to people. In mind would have been the expectation of burnt offerings and sin offerings and guilt offerings and peace offerings and meal offerings and animals and grains and oil and wine being given over to God, the first fruits and the unblemished animals. This was a constant and a

comprehensive aspect of the old covenant Israelites life and worship. It’s meant to be ever on the mind of the man or woman of God. This was inseparable from how people navigated. They would travel and they would think, how am I going to offer sacrifices to God? They would go to new places and they would find other believers with whom they can interact so that they can worship. And we tend to think a little bit differently about sacrifice and about offering and about giving ourselves up and about being intentional with giving our first and our best. And Paul is saying if we’re going to be faithful Christians, we can’t divorce these things. We can’t just have our faith here and then have this aspect of worship and sacrifice and everything else kind of as a separate entity on its own. The idea behind sacrifice or offering being presented here is not

that we should just lose something. It’s not like, okay, what can I give up? What do I get rid of? It’s not just giving something up. It’s not losing something. But the idea here is that sacrificing for God, bringing an offering to God, we express something. We bring something. In sacrifice, a person gives something to God as worship. And so we read, present an animal, your money, your stuff. Present yourself. Present yourself as a living sacrifice. How we respond to the gospel, beloved, is a complete and total and comprehensive act of worship. We give ourselves. Charles Spurgeon, commenting on this text, said, I scarcely like this word, sacrifice, because it involves nothing more than a reasonable service. If we gave up all we had and became beggars for Christ, it would display no such chivalrous spirit or magnanimous conduct after all. We would be gainers by

the surrender. What we miss when we think about what do I have to give up is what do I gain? What do I gain by living holy and completely given over to God? Is what we’re doing here on Sunday, is that worship? Yes, definitely. But what Paul is telling us is that for the Christian, your whole life is worship. We gather here to sit under the preaching of the Word of God, to be encouraged, to engage, to serve people, to find out the needs of the saints around us, to live these lives that we are meant to live in unity as a body. But the whole life of the Christian is worship, beloved. The way you drive your car to work on Monday morning, you can worship, or you can divert your mind away from God. The way that you engage with your neighbors, the way that you use your money, the way that

you engage with your spouse or your children, the way you wait for a spouse or children is worship. And if we start to separate it all out and have a time of worship and a time of me doing life, moving ahead, living for something, building something, and then coming to worship as kind of another segmented part of my life, we’re missing it. We’re missing the whole thing. By presenting your body for worship as sacrifice, you present your whole being. Why? Because God wants you. God doesn’t need your stuff. God wants you. Christ gave himself for you, and we give ourselves for him. These are very different in terms of how and why he gave himself and why we give ourselves. He gave himself to save us, to make us right in God’s eyes. We give ourselves to thank him. We give ourselves because we are blown away that I am right in the eyes of a holy and a just

and a righteous God that has every right in the world to crush me and to punish me for the sin that I’ve done and do and will continue to do. But he loves me and he accepts me and he embraces me as his own and he doesn’t see me defined by that. He sees me defined by Jesus, and so I worship. What else can I do? Be a little better? Give my money? We should be trying to be better, but not because we want to be loved and accepted by God. That’s done. We should be giving our money and our time and our energy, but not because we want to be better in the eyes of God or be more loved by God. There’s no way to do that. And so we worship and we cry and we laugh and we encourage others. Can you believe that we don’t have to do

Holy and Acceptable

anything to earn this thing? And we encourage each other with that. We live in light of that. This, friends, is a regular. It’s a daily life. It’s a daily sacrifice. This is a living, a constant, a complete act of worship. This is the living sacrifice. More than being a living sacrifice, Paul uses another word to describe it. Holy. This is a holy sacrifice. Remember, the animals offered to God in the Old Testament under the Old Covenant were to be without blemish. They were the best of the best. They were the cleanest. They were the purest. The sacrifice had to be without blemish. It had to be the right kind. In other words, what we’re seeing here, also acceptable. It couldn’t just be anything. And this is not just because God wanted to make things difficult. What he was trying to communicate is the expectation of perfection. What he was

trying to communicate is his otherness, his holiness, how different he is from us. Again, don’t miss just how much Paul’s understanding of this is informed by the Old Testament. God cares about the heart of the matter. God cares about the heart of the matter. Yes, he’s our Father. Yes, he is love. We can’t forget that. But we also can’t forget that we stand before a holy and a righteous and a perfect God who spoke all things into existence, who holds together the very atoms of everything and everyone in this room at this present moment. And I think that we are in danger of minimizing that about God when we veer to one extreme or the other. It’s like, oh, God is just my buddy. And it’s just he loves me. It doesn’t matter. Like, it’s whatever. Or on the other extreme, we’re constantly just freaked out and just, oh my gosh, I hope he doesn’t crush me. And both of those

are extremes. But we should live in the middle of this tension of being pulled in both ways. Like, how can he love me? How does this work? Why would he love me? And he is holy and he’s awesome. And you stand in front of the ocean and you’re just overwhelmed with emotion because you see the vastness of it. And you know how he created it? Like that. This should just send chills down our spines. We should be in awe of this God. And so what Paul is saying is that don’t just come with like, whatever. Holy and acceptable. Why? Because God is holy. Don’t forget that, saints. Don’t move past it. Don’t just gloss over it. Like, I’m alright. Jesus made things okay. Yes, he did. And praise God. And that’s why we worship. But you come before a holy God. He’s perfect. Do we know what perfection looks like? Can

you imagine? Perfect. Completely perfect. Without fault. Without error. We ought to guard our hearts from a cavalier attitude toward God. We ought to run from apathy and indifference. We must never allow for awe of him to be far from us. And Paul says this is your spiritual worship. Some translations would say reasonable. Another translation would say true and proper worship. The Greek word here is the word that’s translated as logic in English. And so you could say this is your logical worship. This is your logical worship. This is the way that it makes sense to relate to God. This is logical. This is reasonable. This is what is true and right in terms of a relationship with him. And Paul is saying that logical engages your mind. And we’re gonna see a little bit of that in the next verse. But Paul is saying that this is not a disengaged worship. We ought to be

intentional, not thoughtless in the way that we worship. Your time ministering to others, your time being in the Word, your time growing as a man or woman of the Word, this takes intentionality. Again, we shouldn’t be cavalier with how we approach these things. Just as a by the way, I mean, how often do we think about I want to live a holy life so that I can be a bigger blessing to others? Do we think about our holiness and our walk with God like that? Do we think about what it means to maybe give up something that I prefer but I think might pull me further away from the people of God and might pull me further away from the Word of God and my time with the Lord? Do we think about giving some of those things up? Because I want to be a better brother to all of you. I

want to be a better sister to all of you. I want to be a better Christian here. I want to serve better. I want to love better. I want to be a better friend. Do we think about that? This is your spiritual worship. This is your logical worship. This takes thoughtfulness. This takes intentionality. Now, it’s important for us to, as we’re thinking about these things, to note that what Paul is saying here, this isn’t something that Christians can’t do. This isn’t something that is like far from us. This isn’t something that was just out of reach for us. This most definitely is something that a spirit-filled person is capable of doing in their lives. Why does Scripture call the Christian a saint? It’s not that we’re perfect, but that in Christ we’re made right before God and free to live for Him, free to live in a way that honors Him, free to live in a way

that blesses other people. Yes, sin can and does bog you down. It beats you up. It discourages you. You look in the mirror, you’re like, not again, man. Why? It’s been years. Why? It beats us up. It discourages us. It makes us feel small. It makes us lose hope. But Jesus, my dear brother and sister, is a much better Savior than I am a sinner. And His work is so much greater than my weakness and my failure. If I start to see my failure and my sin as bigger than Jesus, this is exactly what the devil wants. If you’re a Christian, you’re not going to lose your salvation. You’re not going to lose God’s love. But man, you can lose your hope. And man, you can lose your peace. It can mess you up. And it can throw you into a spiral where you’re just discouraged and lost. And so what we see is not something that’s

beyond us. It’s something that’s within reach, not because we’re great, but because He’s great. And because as He promised the apostles that were with Him at the time, it’s better that I leave so that this helper will come. We have the helper. We have the Spirit. We have the Word. We have Jesus. We have one another. This is possible. It’s possible to live this way. It’s possible to enjoy this kind of life. It’s possible to cling to Him because He loves us despite our failure. Do you need to hear that today? I do. I really do. And so Christian, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. R.C. Sproul, speaking of the Christian life, said that the Christian life is a throwaway life. It’s fascinating. It’s a throwaway life. Our lives are to be given over, body and soul, to the

service of God. To be a Christian is to present ourselves as living sacrifices. I contemplated naming my sermon, A Throwaway Life. There’s a story told of a Chinese Christian named Liu Afuk, who was born in 1841. He heard the gospel from a Southern Baptist missionary as a young man. He was saved, radically transformed, and became a zealous evangelist, so much so that his job was in danger because he couldn’t stop talking to people at work about Jesus. His aunt, who he was living with, wanted to kick him out. Nobody really wanted to be around the guy because he just kept talking about Jesus all the time. He just wanted people to get saved. And then he just, he heard about these Chinese laborers that were moving to South America, the northern part of South America, a country called Guyana, and he just became just zealous for these people. He wanted to see these

people getting saved, and he starts thinking, who’s gonna bring the gospel? Yeah, there are people there that might be Christians, but who speaks Mandarin? Who speaks Cantonese? Who’s gonna bring the gospel to these people? And so his heart was just tearing in two, and he starts racking his brain trying to figure out, how do I get the gospel to them? But he didn’t have the money to just travel all on his own. He couldn’t figure it out, and there’s just no way to reach these people. He’s limited in resources. He’s limited in what he can and can’t do. And then it clicks, and he finds a way. He would sell himself into slavery to where these people were going to work, so that he can be shipped off as a slave to live among them and preach the gospel to them. And he started on

this ship being sent to China, where he instantly developed friendships and saw people coming to faith. He would live the rest of his life in a foreign land as a slave. He would die there, but he preached the gospel to these Chinese laborers, pleading with them to put their trust in Jesus, and ultimately dying there, but not before he saw several hundred people get saved in a Chinese Baptist Church open in Guyana. And this is a fascinating thing. I read the other day, or yesterday, just about this. It’s that after he died, his legacy kind of dwindled, and things, you know, kind of faded, and that church ultimately closed. A lot of the Chinese laborers would move on, and everyone’s like, well, it was cool. A couple hundred people got saved. But then in the 50s or 60s, a Southern Baptist missionary went down there to try to preach the gospel, and he realized that Lou actually

registered his church, and so there was a church already registered in Guyana. So this missionary was able to reopen this church and start working with the people there because of the work of this faithful young man who decided to sell himself, offer himself as a sacrifice, because he wanted people to get saved. Surely not all of us are going to think about going off to foreign lands and preaching the gospel, but maybe some of us should. Maybe some of us ought to rethink about how we’re spending our lives, and what we’re doing with our time, and what we’re chasing after. And so this goes back to the question I asked in the beginning, what are we living for? Maybe some of us need to start thinking about what it means to sacrifice for Christ, what worship actually looks like. And Paul goes on in our text to show us how a heart that lives like this is developed.

Conformity and Transformation

And now we look at verse 2. I’ve titled this point, Conformity and Transformation. Read the verse with me one more time. 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. The second verse gives us something that we ought not to do, be conformed to this world. And then it gives us something that we ought to do, be transformed by the renewal of your mind. And so again, I want to pose a question to you. Dear Christian, how much like this world are we? How shaped are we by what’s happening around us? How informed are we by what’s happening just immediately around us? The shifts and the changes, do we go with them? Do we just flow with whatever’s happening in

Portland or the greater area? And I’m not talking here about outward appearance, I’m not talking about hobbies, interests, although we should regularly be analyzing our hearts and our motives to those things as well. We should analyze everything in our lives. We should be a people that are constantly looking through, why am I drawn this way? Why am I drawn this way? Why am I interested in that or this? But this isn’t merely speaking about the external. This isn’t merely speaking about kind of the easy, the immediate stuff. God is after our hearts, our desires, our loves, our convictions. God is not after the external. God’s not after just, you know, the shirt that you choose to wear, what’s on your dinner table. In an attempt to be different from the world, it’s so easy to simply change my appearance. It’s so easy to change my diet. So easy to change the

radio station. But does that actually do anything for my holiness? If mere outward changes are what God is after, if mere outward changes are what counts, I want to say there’s a lot of people in a lot of other religions and there’s a lot of movements that call themselves Christian that are changing a lot more in their day-to-day lives than you and I would ever. I mean, go check out our Mennonite friends. Go check out our Amish friends. Go check out friends in other religions and see how much they sacrifice and how much they give up and how different they look. And so if it’s merely about the external, if it’s merely about this measurable thing that’s in front of me and that other people can see, that seems kind of cheap. That seems kind of hollow. But scripture repeatedly tells us that God is not looking at the external. God is looking at the heart. God is not just

after what other people can see. God is after the motive behind it. God is not after where you go or don’t go. God is after the desire that pulls you away from something. He wants you to want Him. He wants you to love what He loves. He wants you, the whole of you, to be a living sacrifice. And I got to tell you, changing your outfit is not going to do that. God is after real change. God is after real transformation. God is after a different person. Not merely transformation into an obscure, better you, but the you that is Jesus. But into Christ—the you that becomes more and more in every aspect of who you are, like Christ. The mind that’s transformed into the mind of Christ. The desires that are transformed into what He wants for His people. For you and I to be Him to a

world that desperately needs Him. For you and I to be Him to a brother or sister that’s losing hope or has fallen into sin. For you and I to be the encouragement and the love and the holy conduct in a church that needs you to lovingly serve and give yourself for the good of others and for their edification. And this happens, friends, when a person is transformed by the gospel. And they understand deeply what it means to receive the mercy of God. And so in light of that, I plead with you, beloved saints of Trinity Church, by the mercies of the One who loves you and calls you His own, to not be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewal of your mind as it is more and more and more aligned with the mind of Christ and as you grow up into Him who is your head.

When Jesus calls us to Himself, when Jesus reveals Himself to us, when He shows us our sin, He opens our minds and He makes them new. All of this isn’t to say that as long as you know and believe the right things, you’re good. But if you don’t know and believe the right things, you can’t live as you should. And so what Paul is telling us is that your mind needs to be aligned with the mind of Christ. And how do we get to know the mind of Christ? This book that we often gloss over, that we have multiple copies of, but that so many people have died to make sure that you and I have. And so many people in earlier church history would have done anything and given anything to have access to. We get to see the mind of Christ. We get to hear the words of Christ. We get to know God’s

will for our lives. This process of the renewal of the mind, it’s a beautiful process. It’s a beautiful process where we grow into thinking like Jesus as we’re informed by the people around us and by the Word in front of us. Where we grow in love for Jesus. Where we grow in loving what He loves and loving who He loves. And this process is one that transforms us more and more away from the ways of this world and into the one to whom we belong. This is what it means to grow and to come to see and understand the will of God. And so when Paul tells us that this is the will of God, the will of God is for you to be sanctified. 1st Thessalonians 4.3, for this is the will of God, your sanctification. When Paul is writing this, he’s thinking that same thing. And he’s saying, we are transformed

and we are changed and we become more like Jesus and we give ourselves over for the good of others and we live in a way that’s not just focused on me and my plans and my goals, but for all of you and for the building up of this body and for people outside of these walls through each of us to hear the gospel and to hear about the love of God and the hope of forgiveness in Jesus Christ. And that happens by us being sanctified. We often wonder what God wants for us. What’s God’s will for my life? Is it this job or is it this job? Is it this spouse or this spouse or whatever else? God wants you to be more like Jesus. That’s God’s will. If we’re not growing in our sanctification, our financial investments and our career choices, they don’t matter. They don’t matter. Yeah, your

life might be harder, but if you’re not growing in sanctification, your life will be way harder. To be a Christian who doesn’t conform to the world around us while challenging, it’s relatively easy in the grand scheme of things. So what we need is not merely to be non-conformists, but what we need is transformation. What we need is a renewal of the mind, as our text tells us. We need hearts, desires, and dreams shaped and formed by the mind of Christ, which is what we read about in 1 Corinthians 2 16. This happens when we are a people of the word, friends, and this happens when we are spirit-filled, spirit-led people. Friends, we need one another to grow in this. This isn’t just something that happens in a vacuum. This isn’t just something that happens when I’m alone in my Bible at home, although that’s important. But this happens here, and we need one another for that. But more on

Beloved by the Father

that next week. Holy and acceptable sacrifices. Having been transformed with a renewed mind, being different, being set apart, it sounds a bit daunting. And I think often when we hear things like this, our minds kind of start going to the way that I don’t do this as well as I need to. And yes, beloved, we fall short. You and I, we fall short. We are imperfect, yes. Our attempts at holiness can be clunky and awkward and not quite right, and things don’t quite fit and doesn’t work out in the way that I want it to. But I want to remind you that on top of all the things that we need to be doing and how we need to be living, that our Heavenly Father loves us very, very much. Your God loves you very, very much. And what kind of earthly father or earthly mother would look at their child and

their attempt to do something good or their attempt to do something right and look at them and be like, nope, not good enough. We don’t do that. That’s cruel. That’s harsh. And can you imagine the perfect love of our Heavenly Father and how he looks at us and he loves us and he cares for us. And if your child seeking to do something right stirs up your heart and your affections and makes you proud and makes you filled with joy. So it is with our Heavenly Father when we are living sacrifices and when we truly seek to give ourselves over for the good of others and to honor him and we love him and we live for him and we’re trying and we fall and we can’t quite figure this out, but we’re working and we’re moving in the right direction. He’s pleased with us and he’s

glorified by our lives when we make the effort, trusting in him, not because of some strength that we think we have or don’t have, but because we love him. What else am I going to do but live for him and give myself over to him after everything that he’s done. He’s kind and he’s gracious and he loves us. And here’s the thing, saints, we’re not capable of just doing this in and of ourselves. Hard as we might try, this side of heaven will always seek to hold on to something, will always seek to justify holding on to something. But being a person who is redeemed by Jesus, being filled with the Spirit, we do have what we need to be obedient. And so be encouraged, saints. We do have what we need. We have the Word of God, we have the Spirit of God, and we’re called to

live lives that represent the one to whom our heart belongs, albeit imperfectly. And so when we cling to the mercies of God, when we remind ourselves of them regularly, and we surround ourselves with the people of God, when we get out of our own heads long enough to look at the beauty of what God is doing here, and how he’s bringing people up, and how he’s saving people, and how he’s making people love him more, then we run to those opportunities to live lives as we give ourselves up for the good of the people of God and for the glory of God. And this is a life well lived. It seems like sacrifice is this thing that it’s just so painful and so awkward and takes so much away, but we weren’t designed to live for self. We weren’t designed to just get stuff and accumulate

wealth and just live as comfortably as possible until, you know, I reach my 77.9 years and get called home peacefully in my sleep. We’re designed as living sacrifices. And we honor God and we enjoy life when we live like that. Amen? Amen. Would you pray with me?