“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship.”

The sacrifice of our life to our God is not to be seen primarily as the decision to go willingly to one’s death due to persecution or illness. The sacrifice of which Paul the Apostle speaks in Romans chapter 12 (above) is not a sacrifice of physical death. It is a sacrifice of one’s living every day. Jesus lived this self-sacrificing life every day He was walking on earth as a human. As the creator of all, the unlimited God, to be humbled to the point of becoming a human – an embryo no less – and to be born as the rest of us are is a sacrifice beyond measure. To go on living among those who practice only evil continuously, and to do so with out anger or retribution, is enormously humbling as well.

Then there was the torture, the public shaming, the submitting to physical death of the very creator and sustainer of all life. This is the model for our sacrifice. If it was so for our mentor and head, Jesus, it can be no better for His disciples.

Thus Jesus told us, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” This warning that saving one’s life, one’s self-derived and self-managed living, sparing it from being a living sacrifice to our God, will lead to losing everything is stark, unequivocal.

We must take this warning, this call to be true followers of Jesus in in His experience of sacrificial living seriously, friends.

Oswald Chambers captures this: “What God wants is the sacrifice through death which enables us to do what Jesus did, that is, sacrifice our lives. Not— “Lord, I am ready to go with You…to death” (Luke 22:33). But— “I am willing to be identified with Your death so that I may sacrifice my life to God.” We seem to think that God wants us to give up things! God purified Abraham from this error, and the same process is at work in our lives. God never tells us to give up things just for the sake of giving them up, but He tells us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having, namely, life with Himself. “

Our God desires the sacrifice of our living every single day, for when we retain possession of our living we refuse the Holy Spirit in us. Indeed, we cannot reasonably expect to be faithful to the uttermost under persecution if we cannot bring ourselves to sacrifice our living to Him from day to day.

This sounds harsh unless one considers what is gained by this living life sacrificially in like manner as Jesus lived His. What we gain is the fullness of our God Himself living His life in Christ in us. The Father in the Son in us by the Holy Spirit. Do I want to hold onto my itty-bitty little life with all its limitation, foibles, sins, and selfish pre-occupations? Or do I want to live life by the indwelling Triune God, a limitless, no-holds-barred kind of adventure in the great, mysterious unknown of eternity? This is the classic “no brainer” decision.

And let me tell you, it is an expansive life, if not explosive!