A couple years ago, my older boys had a basketball teammate who was all about sacrificing his body on the court. The epitome of hustle, he would hit the floor (usually multiple times) in every game. I have watched him send a concessions table flying. The steel girder he slid into on one occasion offered less give. He was all in, and it showed by his all-out effort.
His activity on the court reminds me of the kind of sacrifice of my body that should stem from my appreciation for the mercies I have received from God! The first blog article in this four-part series noted how Paul appealed to the Roman believers by asking them to view their salvation through the lens of divine mercy. What kind of response does God desire as we consider such mercy? He wants us to place our bodies at His disposal. We often think of this in general terms of giving our lives to the Lord. Romans 12:1 is more specific: God wants us to surrender to Him our bodies. Mouth, mind, hands, feet—everything is to be His. Our culture says, “My body, my choice.” God says your body is not your own; therefore, you ought to glorify Him with it. How? By placing your body at His disposal.
An act of sacrifice
Admittedly, this is a sacrifice. And that is the very language the passage uses. In the Old Testament, a sacrifice involved a priest, an altar, and an animal. The animal was selected and set apart for sacrifice. It had to pass certain ritual specifications. Only an animal offered in the precise way prescribed by God was acceptable to Him. When a sacrifice was made in this way, the offerer glorified God.
In response to mercies received, New Testament believers do not bring an animal to the altar; they bring themselves. Their bodies are offered to God to accomplish purposes He established—just like a lamb, bull, or goat was given in the Old Testament. Their bodies are to be given to God in ways acceptable to Him; that is, according to specifications spelled out in His Word. A key difference is that our bodily sacrifices are living.
We are to live in ways holy and acceptable to Him. Isaiah epitomizes a person who places himself at God’s disposal: “Here am I. Send me” (Isaiah 6:8). Isaiah does not even inquire what his assignment will be. The Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus asks, “Lord, what do you want me to do?” (Acts 9:6, emphasis mine). This is a no-holds-barred placement of himself at God’s disposal. God decided how his body would ultimately be used: Paul would bear God’s name before “Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel” and would suffer many things (Acts 9:15-16, NKJV1). The point of sacrifice is that you relinquish your right to what you are sacrificing.
Such sacrifice need not be burdensome. Giving his flesh for Christ’s body was a joy to the Apostle Paul (Colossians 1:24). David Livingstone echoed Paul’s sentiments when declaring, “I never made a sacrifice.” In addition, a body offered to God ends up being a body you keep. In Christ’s upside-down kingdom, he who loses his life keeps it (Luke 9:23)! Missionary to the Aucas in Ecuador, Jim Elliot, said it well: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
An act of worship
Placing our bodies at God’s disposal to be used as He sees fit is an act of worship. The word “service” (Romans 12:1) is used of the sacrificial ritual carried out by the priests in the Old Testament. Their activity in the Temple was worship (Hebrews 9:1, 6). Those who brought animals were “worshipers” (Hebrews 10:2). You and I worship when we place our bodies at God’s disposal—a worship on par with what took place at the Temple! It is a reasonable act of worship. In divine mercy, if God will someday wholly redeem these bodies—and has already paid the price for that redemption—what would be more logical than to offer them to Him now? Our bodies are what God asks for. As Naaman of old, we sometimes have inflated opinions of what we would like to do in the name of God! We want to give God huge sums of money or do something spectacular. What God wants is you. Isaiah had the right idea—God wanted him: “Here am I; send me.” Isaiah’s body became the instrument through whom God preached to His people for upwards of sixty years.
The beauty of surrendering your body to your Creator-Redeemer is that He then uses you in ways uniquely suited to you! “Follow me,” Jesus said to His disciples, “and I will make you become fishers of men” (Matthew 4:17). He took fishers of fish and turned them into fishers of men. What would Jesus make you if you genuinely offered yourself to Him? If He is the Potter and you are the clay, don’t you think He knows how to mold you into the best possible pot you could be? Only those who surrender themselves to Him truly live.
I am continually astonished when I think about my original plans for my life—to be an electronic engineer. Sure, I enjoyed math and science in high school, but an electronic engineer? I bail out of any job that might hold the possibility of electrocution; God did not wire me to be an electronics guy! When I surrendered myself to my Lord during my freshman year of college, I had no idea that I would minister God’s Word in over 20 countries during the course of twenty years. On multiple occasions, when I have been teaching on remote islands or preaching in missions conferences, I have thought to myself, “This is what I was made to do.” I would never have discovered it on my own, but when I bowed the knee in an act of worship to the God who owned the title deed to my life anyway, I found what He had made my body to do.
Conclusion
Have you genuinely given your body to the Lord, placing it at His disposal? Have you placed any restrictions on Him? Are you waiting until the time is right? Until your financial house is in order? Until your children are a certain age? Until you have fulfilled your childhood dreams? Jesus taught that such thinking renders a person unworthy to be His disciple. So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple (Luke 14:33). The sacrifice does not determine what happens to itself!
A living sacrifice also finds that he or she must make a fresh offer to the Lord on an almost daily basis. Paul said, “I die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31). Jesus taught that following Him means taking up the cross daily (Luke 9:23). It’s easy to assume a general life tenor of surrender to the Lord, but how about today? Does God have my body today?
Placing our bodies at God’s disposal is a key step on the pathway to proving God’s will. Have you ever seen a small child bodily resisting a parent’s guidance? The parent cannot get anywhere with the child because he or she will not submit. Similarly, it is only when we take our hands off our own lives and give up our own rights that we are in a place where God can lead us into what He wants for us.
1 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Click here to view part 1 of this series: Appreciating Mercies Received.