Peace/Bethlehem
9-3-2023
A-Pentecost-16sermon2023 (Proper 17)
Romans 12:1-2, 9-21
Living Sacrifices
Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and from
our Lord Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our text is from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans,
chapter 12, verse 1: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in
view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy
and pleasing to God--which is your spiritual worship.”
In order to better understand our text I need to brief you on
the purpose of the book of Romans. When Paul did his early
missionary work in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, his
missionary base was the church in Antioch in Syria. Paul and
Barnabas had spent significant time there.
But now Paul has his sights on doing missionary work as far
west as Spain. This is how Paul himself put it in Romans 15:23-24,
“Since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since
I have longed for many years to come to you, I hope to see you in
passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by
you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while.”
Paul wants to use the Roman church as a missionary base for
his projected trip to Spain, like he had used the Antioch church in the
east. But Paul had never been to the Roman church; so he felt it was
necessary to write a more thorough explanation of the Gospel and
give the rationale for his missionary work to the Gentiles.
Paul also wanted to ease any tensions there might be between
the Jews and Gentiles at the Roman church.
The book of Romans has two main sections: chapters 1-11 and
chapters 12-16. Our text is the hinge at the very beginning of the

second section, chapter 12 verse 1, and the hinge word is
“Therefore”.
The word “therefore” refers back to everything Paul has already
said in chapters 1 through 11; and the “therefore” sets up what Paul
is going to say in chapters 12-16.
The main theme of Romans 1 through 11 is the mercy of God in
the midst of human sinfulness. In chapters 1, 2, and 3, Paul describes
the desperate situation of humankind, not just for some people, but
for the entire human race. Paul levels a stunning indictment of sin
first against the Gentiles and then also the Jews.
Listen first to what Paul says about the Gentiles: “They have
become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and
depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice.
They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters. Insolent, arrogant and
boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;
they are senseless; faithless, heartless, ruthless.” (Romans 1:29-31)
Paul really lays into the Gentiles, but then , amazingly, he
brings the Jews under the same condemnation: “The Jews and
Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written: there is no one
righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one
who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become
worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Romans
2:9-12)
The situation seems hopeless for both Jews and Gentiles. All
people have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Indeed without
God, we humans are in bondage to sin, condemned by the law of God,
candidates for God’s righteous wrath, and destined for temporal and
eternal death.
This indictment is a key and necessary message of the book of
Romans, but it is not the main message. The main message of the
book of Romans is the mercy of God that comes to the human race in
the person and through the work of Jesus Christ.

Now listen to these crucial words in Romans 3. After Paul says
that the law of God condemns every single person in the world and
that no one can be declared righteous by observing the law, he writes
these incredible words, Romans 3:21-25:
“But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been
made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This
righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all
who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace
through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. God presented
him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”
Goodness and forgiveness are God’s alone to give. This
eliminates every human attempt to achieve salvation. God alone is
righteous; all humans are sinners in need of righteousness. The
strange and wonderful news of the Gospel is that God justifies the
ungodly, He saves the sinner, He loves His enemies, He makes people
who are estranged from Him righteous and gives them the goodness of
Christ Jesus, which he won by His perfect life, by His atoning sacrifice
on the cross, and by His glorious resurrection.
The power of the Gospel is the power of God in Christ which sets
a person free and enables that person to receive in faith what God
has done for him or her. This mercy of God in Christ Jesus offers
peace with the Father in heaven, freedom from the power and
penalty of sin, freedom from the curse of the Law and from the wrath
of God, freedom to rise above the dark valley of despair, ultimately
freedom from death itself.
In chapter 4 through 11, Paul elaborates on the gifts and
benefits that come our way because of Jesus Christ.
Then we come to chapter 12 and the key word at the
beginning of chapter 12, “THEREFORE”.
The “therefore” in Romans 12:1 refers back to all that Paul
has said in chapters 1 through 11 about being redeemed by Christ,
being reconciled to God, being joined to Christ by baptism, being led

by the Spirit, being an heir of God and fellow-heir with Christ, sharing
Christ’s sufferings, having Christ and the Spirit interceding for us,
knowing that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth
comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us”, and knowing
that “nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love
of god in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
All of that, and more, is included in the single word
“therefore” at the beginning of our text: “THEREFORE, I urge you,
brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as
living sacrifices.”
“Living Sacrifices!” Normally when you think of a sacrifice,
you think of something that is dead. In the Old Testament, you take a
goat, you kill it and offer it as a sacrifice. You take a pigeon, a lamb,
or a bull, kill it, and offer it as a sacrifice. The very nature of a
sacrifice in the Old Testament requires that something must die in the
process of the sacrifice. In the Old Testament, people dedicated or
sacrificed many things to God—animals, grain, and other offerings.
Many times they were set on fire, burned up before the Lord as a
expression of total giving.
Here in our text, Paul says, “offer your bodies as living
sacrifices.” In other words, offer your whole being, all that you have
and are, as if you are offering yourself on an altar to the Lord. But
you don’t have to die because Jesus died for you! Instead of dying,
you stay alive; but you live your life in such a way as to give it
entirely to God. It’s as if you crawl up on an altar and give yourself to
God, to be used for His purposes.
You can see immediately what the problem is. The problem
with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off the altar!!
Nevertheless, Paul says this is our spiritual worship. In other
words, this sacrifice doesn’t involve a physical death but spiritual
devotion. Paul is saying that everything we do with our bodies is a
matter of worship. We are never without our bodies.

Therefore everything we do—eating, sleeping, touching, tasting;
housework, homework, and family life; what we do in our work and
what we do in our play—all of it and each part of it can be a way of
worshipping God—giving praise and thanks to God for the gift of
Christ, acknowledging God as the Lord of our life, and dedicating
ourselves to a sacrificial love of our neighbor: a living sacrifice!!

How can we apply all of this to our daily lives? What does it
mean to be a “living sacrifice” today?
The way I want to get at this is to read a modern paraphrase
of our sermon text, Romans 12:1-2, 9-21. This was written by J.B.
Phillips, and it is a paraphrase I heard on the radio when I was a
teenager and I was really struck by it. Here it is:
“With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my
brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies as
a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by Him. Don’t
let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God
mold you minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that
the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands, and moves
toward the goal of true maturity.
“Let us have no imitation Christian love. Let us have a
genuine break with evil and a real devotion to good. Let us have
real warm affection for one another as between brothers, and a
willingness to let the other man have the credit. Let us not allow
slackness to spoil our work and let us keep the fires of the spirit
burning, as we do our work for God.
Base your happiness on your hope in Christ. When trials
come endure them patiently; steadfastly maintain the habit of
prayer. Give freely to fellow Christians in want, never grudging a
meal or a bed to those who need them. And as for those who try to
make your life a misery, bless them. Don’t curse, bless.
Share the happiness of those who are happy, and the sorrow
of those who are sad. Live in harmony with one another. Don’t

become snobbish but take a real interest in ordinary people. Don’t
become set in your own opinions. Don’t pay back a bad turn by a
bad turn, to anyone. Don’t say, “It doesn’t matter what people
think,” but see that your public behavior is above criticism.
As far as your responsibility goes, live at peace with
everyone. Never take vengeance into your own hands, my dear
friends: stand back and let God punish if he will. For it is written:
‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay.’
And these are God’s words: ‘If your enemy is hungry feed him; If he
is thirsty, give him something to drink. For in so doing you will heap
coals of fire upon his head.”
Don’t allow yourself to be overpowered with evil. Take the
offensive—overpower evil by good!’ Amen!
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep
you’re your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus.

By  Pastor Jack Flashbart