“Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I loved calculus. I was kind of…okay…a lot of a nerd in school…and still today…so that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I think it’s because I had a terrific teacher for Calc 1 and 2 in college (and 3 too, but by then I already loved it, so that didn’t matter quite as much) which helped enormously. I think I enjoyed math so much generally because it fits with how I’m wired. There’s generally one way to do a problem and it’s either right or it’s not. In any event, acknowledgment of my weirdness aside, not a few students sitting in an upper level math class like that wonder the same thing: how is any of this ever going to have any practical meaning in my life? In other words, what am I honestly supposed to do with this? Or, more simply, so what? Paul has spent the previous 11 chapters of Romans offering up a lot of theology without much in the way of application. Starting here in Romans 12, he sets about fixing that. Let’s begin the next phase of our journey today: what to do with the Gospel.

One of great basic principles of Biblical interpretation I regularly remind my congregation of is that if you see a “therefore” in the Scriptures, you need to back up and see what it’s there for. Well, we’ve spent the previous nine months exploring what lies behind this particular “therefore.” Paul has been laying out the Gospel in beautiful detail. It’s time to talk about what to do with it. And the first thing Paul lands on here is simple: if God has given so much to you in Christ, it only makes sense for you to give yourself to Him in service and worship.

This is something Paul intends as a command for all believers. The original word he used was adelphoi which is generically translated as “brothers.” It’s the brotherly part of Philadelphia’s being the city of brotherly love (although their sports fans sure don’t have the reputation of being very brotherly or loving). But while we tend to think of the word “brotherly” as masculine, in the Greek of the day it referred more generally to a group of men and women, kind of like “guys” for a Midwesterner refers to a coed group. This explains why the CSB uses the phrase, “brothers and sisters,” instead of merely, “brothers,” as many other translations choose.

So then, addressing this and the following counsel to the whole church, Paul offers these observations “in view of the mercies of God.” Okay, well, what are the mercies of God? The previous eleven chapters. The Gospel is a gift of the mercy of God. Remember what Paul said back in chapter 5? God demonstrated His love for us through the sacrificial death of His Son while we were still His enemies. He gave up His life to free us from the sin that otherwise held us locked tightly in its deadly grip. He didn’t have to do any of that, and we certainly didn’t deserve it. But He did it anyway because He is a good and loving and merciful God.

Paul’s framing out what comes next as a response to God’s mercies, though, is even more specific than that. He’s referring more directly back to what he was just talking about in chapters 9-11, and especially the end of chapter 11. God had taken Paul’s audience—and his modern readers alike—from being a people who were lost and disconnected from His true, life-giving vine, and made them part of His people, heirs to the eternal life of His kingdom. “As you once disobeyed God but now have received mercy through their [the Jews’] disobedience, so they too have now disobeyed, resulting in mercy to you, so that they also may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may have mercy on all.” It is in view of these mercies that we are going forward here.

And what is it we are to do in view of these mercies? Well, lots of things, but the very first one here is “to present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” What’s this talking about? Paul is drawing on sacrificial imagery his audience all would have understood whether their background was Jewish or Gentile. Pretty much every religion then involved offering sacrifices of some kind or another. Sacrifices were the means by which you got the attention of the gods. They were how you pleased them. They were how you made things right with them when you had done something wrong.

And the most common type of sacrifice was the burnt offering. The burnt offering was placed on the altar and entirely consumed by the fire. It was given totally over to God without holding anything back. What’s more, there were rules governing the purity of the sacrifice. You couldn’t give God or the gods junk. Sacrificial animals had to be entirely without blemish. They had to conform to the standards of the object of their offering. To fall short of this was to offer a common and displeasing sacrifice. That was worse than not offering a sacrifice in the first place.

That’s the imagery Paul is drawing on here. He is calling us to make ourselves a living sacrifice to God. In light of all God has done for us in and through Jesus, making us His children, and giving us eternal life, we are to give ourselves unreservedly and entirely to Him. We are to make ourselves completely at His service to go and do as He directs.

Really, no other response makes any sense. To do anything else reflects a profound lack of understanding and gratitude. Any other response than this reflects either a persistent ignorance or else a decision to embrace evil in and with our lives. No, that doesn’t mean someone who rejects the Gospel is going to become a mass murderer. Evil is far more often a great deal more mundane than that. Evil is itself not a thing. It is the absence of a thing. It is the absence of good. And because all good comes from God, to reject Him is to embrace evil.

Yes, but what does it look like for someone to make their life a living sacrifice. On the main, the differences may not be immediately noticeable. The person who is fully dedicated to Him and the person who is not will still do many of the same things. But how they are pursued, why they are pursued, and the spirit with which they are pursued will vary quite significantly.

The person who has made his life a living sacrifice will look for ways to glorify God through his faithful obedience to His command to love one another after the pattern of Jesus’ love for us in everything he does. He goes about his day radiating the fruit of the Spirit through his life. He says yes to some surprising things and no to others that are equally surprising because they will or won’t enable him to glorify God with his life more fully. He’ll be generous in ways most others won’t. He’ll never lose sight of his ultimate purpose even when a proximate purpose isn’t entirely clear. Again, he may do many of the same things as everybody else, but if you look long, you’ll quickly see that something is different. He is a living sacrifice.

At the end of v. 1 here, Paul calls all of this “your true worship.” The precise rendering of the Greek here is tricky. Some translations go with “true worship” like the CSB does. Others phrase it “reasonable service.” Still others call it our “spiritual act of worship.” Which one is most correct? All of them. Those phrases all convey slightly different ideas in English, but they were all contained in the one Greek phrase, so there’s no reason we have to try to parse out why Paul meant just one of them and not the others.

Paul’s point is that doing this—offering our lives as a living sacrifice to God—is the thing that is the most right thing to do for God in light of the Gospel. Giving ourselves unreservedly to His service is the true and most spiritual act of worship we can perform. Worship is acknowledging, celebrating, and participating in God’s character. Well, when we give our lives to Him, we do so in acknowledgment that He is worthy of such a gift. Such a self-giving is an act of celebration, even if sometimes a solemn one. And it is all about participating in His character. And, as we have already talked about, this service is entirely reasonable in light of what God has done for us.

And that really is the point for us here. Given what God has done for us, giving ourselves to Him is the thing that makes the most sense to do. This doesn’t mean committing our lives to serving Him on the mission field in some foreign and dangerous country. It means being willing to live our lives at His direction. Most of the time, for most people, His direction involves being faithful to His commands right where He has already placed us.

You can be a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, right where you are. Start loving your neighbors intentionally with the love of Jesus. Be kind to everyone. Practice sacrificial generosity with the resources God has entrusted to you. Share the good news of the Gospel with the people in your sphere of influence. Serve those in need selflessly. Help those around you experience the goodness of God’s kingdom because of their interaction with you. In light of the Gospel, all of these things and more like them just make sense. They make more sense, in fact, than anything else. Let’s get to work.