I lived on a farm until I was in grade one. We partly lived off selling chickens and eggs. I remember clearly when my mom cut off a chicken’s head and it slipped out of her hand and started running headless…. Crazy and wild!
We are not like headless chickens. We have a head, Jesus Christ, and nothing can separate us – the body – from Him. He is faithful to the end (Romans 8). We can trust Him in everything, living with faith in our hearts. We are led by the Spirit, and don’t just do what we want, running after things that could give us some sort of identity. Mercy alone makes us right with God.
Paul writes about the incredible mercy of Jesus Christ in Romans 1-11. God has been merciful to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, those who believe in him are justified by faith and reconciled to God. We have the hope of everlasting joy. Build your lives on this mercy. Sink your roots into this mercy, and your new life will flow out with mercy. That’s where a joyful life full of sacrifices to Christ begins…
“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.” - Romans 12:1
Now here we can talk about sacrifice because it is in context of worshipping God. This is the language of worship from the Old Testament. In coming to God, the worshipper brought a sheep or bull or pigeon, and sacrificed it on the altar as an offering to God. There were different kinds of sacrifices, but at the heart of it was that sin demanded punishment, and the slain animal represented God's willingness to accept a substitute so that the worshipper might live and have an ongoing relationship of forgiveness and joy with God.
The sacrifice of our bodies to God is not a sacrifice for sin. That is done already in the sacrifice of Christ. Which is why bodies like ours are acceptable to God. We can give our bodies to Christ in worship by using our mouths (praising God and encouraging others), our eyes (being careful of what we look at) our hands (perceiving where we help), and in other ways. When we do these good and helpful things, we do it as worship unto God, with grateful hearts and by and through mercy (Jesus Christ). We add nothing to the cross.
Before we give ourselves away in mercy to man, we give ourselves away in worship to God. Making people comfortable or helping them feel good on the way to everlasting punishment, without the hope and the design that they see Christ in your good deeds, is not mercy. Mercy must aim to make much of Christ.
So why our body? The body is given to us to make visible the beauty of Christ. And Christ, at the hour of his greatest beauty, was repulsive to look at. Isaiah 53:2-3 describes Him, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” The beauty of Christ is the beauty of love, not the beauty of looks.
His beauty was the beauty of sacrifice…
God wants visible, lived-out, bodily evidence that our lives are built on His mercy. Just as worshippers in the Old Testament denied themselves some earthly treasure (a sheep, goat, bull), and carried their sacrifices to the altar of blood and fire, so we deny ourselves some earthly treasure or ease or comfort, and carry ourselves – our bodies – for Christ's sake to the places and the relationships and the crises in this world where mercy is needed. It may be your own home, or it may be Canada, or Timbuktu.
Let every act of your living body show that Christ is more precious to you than anything else. Let every act of your living body be a death to all that dishonours Christ… A body is holy not because of what it looks like, or what shape it's in, but because of what it does!
“Through [Christ] then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.” - Hebrews 13:15. When the lips join the heart in praise to God, the body becomes a holy, living sacrifice.
“Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” - Hebrews 13:16. When you do good in Jesus' name, with your mouth or your hands or your presence, your body becomes a holy, living sacrifice of worship. A body becomes a holy sacrifice of worship when it’s devoted to God's purposes of righteousness and mercy.
I am very hopeful of the future, even in the submarine stage of motherhood in which I’m in, with three little ones and building a house. God still reveals His glory to everyone who seeks Him. And my prayer for you is abundant life!
To read part one of this article, click here.