Living Sacrifice

“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.” – Romans 12:1-2

If you think about it, Paul speaks in oxymoron here: by all Old Testament standards, a living thing only becomes a sacrifice once it stops living. We just read in 2 Chronicles about Hezekiah supplying 1,000 bulls and 7,000 sheep for the Passover offering: sacrifices were a big deal, and Paul knew his readers were intimately familiar with the concept. The animals used were of economic value and practical use. They were cared for with feed, pasture lands, and physical labor. To take something like that, and kill it without receiving any personal gain, was a sacrifice. It was an active decision that cost you something.

Jesus is our sacrifice, once and for all. But Paul makes an appeal here. He says, do you want to know what worship means? Do you want to know how we respond to such a gift of mercy and grace? We look at what it took to make an animal sacrifice, and we live that out with our bodies instead. We feed and rest our bodies, souls and minds as caring for something that belongs to God. We use our bodies to think and act, to do and create, in a way that is set apart for God and acceptable to him. The Old Testament sacrifices were teaching us all along, not only that we need Christ for atonement, but about how it is we are called and enabled to live ever after. 

In a way, this type of sacrifice is infinitely harder than a one-time act. As someone once said, “the problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps climbing off the altar.” That’s how I feel sometimes, like I’m dragging myself back up, again, up and down. That’s how these days feel in general. As home dynamics, work demands, school phases, and personal routines fluctuate in this strange new world we’re ever-settling into, there’s a lot of up and down. Some days I do better than others, but I figure that’s why Paul uses the present tense here. It’s an ongoing thing, our worship. It takes time, our transformation. Sometimes it happens too slowly to be perceived, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, even, or even especially, in the world we now find ourselves.