THE SACRIFICE GOD WANTS
“And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him” (Romans 12:1).
Under the Old Testament system, mankind had only one course in experiencing reconciliation with God, and that was to accept the system of reconciliation that God himself provided. Each year, the Hebrew nation was called to express repentance from sin and faith in the plan and power of God for providing redemption from sin by obeying his directives relative to the offering of animal sacrifices.
The transgression of God’s law required that life be given—that blood be shed—in order to demonstrate the holiness of God’s nature and the severity of God’s wrath. The law of God had been transgressed, and death had to come. To let it be known that he did not want man to pay his own penalty, God gave the Hebrews yearly object lessons to show that his wrath did not preclude his lovingkindness. He himself would provide the necessary sacrifice.
Those animal sacrifices were a “shadow of things to come” (Heb. 10:1), which we now know are the spiritual blessings in Christ. The reason that man is no longer required to engage himself in this disgusting slaughter of animals is because Christ “has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26). In other words, the sacrifices of the Old Testament were not an end to themselves, but were merely the foreshadowing of the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. They demonstrated that God would provide the necessary sacrifice. The animal sacrifices were not what God really wanted, even in the day when they were required, but were shadows of the obedient life and sacrificial death of Christ to which they pointed (Heb. 10:1-10).
But there is yet a sacrifice that God desires and demands from his people. It consists not of the outward ceremonies of the Levitical law, but of the inward devotion of the heart. Paul informs us that the only reasonable service we can now give to our Redeemer is to offer our bodies as “living sacrifices.” The point, both from the book of Romans and the entirety of the New Testament narrative, is that the sacrifice of Christ accomplished our salvation.
The cross did not merely make the believer’s salvation possible—it brought it about. Now, since the work is finished, the only reasonable course we have, once we have experienced the benefits of Christ’s work, is to live to serve and please God for all that he has done for us. Christ paid it all. We demonstrate that we believe this by our changed hearts and lives.
May God’s people ever go forward determined to glorify him in our “bodies and in our spirits which are God’s” (1 Cor. 6:19). You have nothing that God desires except yourself—mind, soul, and body. How can we but recognize that the goodness of God leads us to repentance (Rom. 2:4)? The sacrificed self-will on the altar of the heart, and the subsequent sacrifice of the entire life, is the praise, worship, and service that will honor God—yes, the only service that he will accept.
Dewayne Dunaway
