Did you bless the Lord? (part 3)
Verse of the day: Romans 12:1 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship”
The verse of the day holds many revelations at the same time. First, it urges us to offer our body as a living sacrifice. I wonder whether it happens to you to offer your body to God as a sacrifice because we are not talking about the spiritual body but the physical one. Giving your body as a sacrifice means to accept to kill something that would please the flesh in order to bless the Lord.
The verse of the day clearly precise that we don’t just have to give a sacrifice but the sacrifice has to be a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. The sacrifice that matches those three conditions will be called (according to the verse of the day): “A proper worship”. Other translations talk about it as a “Spiritual Act of worship”. We all know that an act of worship is normally done spiritually but this time we are learning about an act of worship done through our physical body.
Let’s separately talk about the three conditions for a worship to be proper:
a. The body has to be a living sacrifice
The sacrifice is defined as a willing abnegation of the body. Once something is sacrificed, it cannot be claimed or protected because when it is sacrificed, it does no longer belong to us. If we sacrifice our body for God, it means that we give it up in order to please Him. In the Old Testament, animals were killed but it wasn’t any kind of animal because the value of sacrifice matched with the value of the animal for the person who gives the sacrifice. Nobody could offer a dead animal. The animal had to be alive before being slaughtered by the priests. God rebuked those who offered blind, lame or diseased animals (Malachi 1:8)
Today we are in the New Testament and God does not ask us to sacrifice animals but He asks us to sacrifice our bodies. To sacrifice your body means making it available to pray and serve God only to obey and please Him.
Remember that the sacrifice needs to be alive, which means that you don’t necessary have to pray or serve God only when you feel like doing it. You don’t have to wait for the convenient or comfortable time in order to worship your God otherwise we wouldn’t talk about a living sacrifice.
When, in the morning, you don’t feel like leaving the bed for prayer, that’s exactly the same situation when a ram refused to move forward to be slaughtered. It’s the animal’s scream that valued the sacrifice. If you can move forward and enter in prayer despite of the flesh resistance, you would be blessing Him. To be continued in the fourth part.
Chris Ndikumana
