When sacrifice isn't really sacrifice

Here’s a verse you’ll know:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Rom 12:1)

It’s often used as the go-to verse to back-up the challenge to be fully committed as a Christian, isn’t it? To give up my ambitions, and really make sacrifices for the sake of God. What should I give up for God in response to his mercies? Everything, even my life.

But as I was reading Romans 6 it struck me that reading 12:1 this way is probably misreading it and unhelpful. Let me explain.

Romans 6:13 has a strong similarity with 12:1, and it comes in the context of an important point Paul is making:

Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. (Rom 6:13)

The point Paul has been making in chapter 6 is that as Christians we have been ‘baptized’ into Christ’s death—indeed we are dead and buried with him (Rom 6:3-4). This frees us from the body of death and sin, because “our old self was crucified with him” (Rom 6:6). And we’re not just dead and buried in Christ, but also raised to life with him through his resurrection (Rom 6:5). (Rory Shiner’s two books One Forever and Raised Forever are very helpful on these ideas of what it means to be ‘in Christ’ through his death and resurrection.)

So, in 6:13, when he challenges us to present (or offer) ourselves to God, Paul reminds us that we do so “as those who have been brought from death to life”.

The point Paul is making in chapter 6 is important to bear in mind when we arrive at Romans 12:1 and read the word ‘sacrifice’. Note that it is not just a (dead) sacrifice. Paul wants us to be a “living sacrifice”, which reminds us that we present ourselves for service “by the mercies of God”, not as those who are dead, but as those who have already died in Christ and have risen to new life in him. That was Paul’s point in chapter 6.

So when we see the word sacrifice, we need to remember that Paul doesn’t use that word in order to call on me to dig deep and give up my life for God. No, my life ended when I became one with Christ and I was baptized into his death (Rom 6:1-5, cf. 2 Cor 5:14-15; Gal 2:20).

In that sense, I have no life to sacrifice; there is nothing that I can give up, because my old life ended, and the new life I have does not belong to me—i.e. “we are the Lord’s” (Rom 7:4, 14:8). In fact, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).

We need to stop thinking about Romans 12:1 as a call to give up our lives as if they belonged to us, and as if we are donating ourselves to God and he should be jolly appreciative of our generosity.

No, it is only by the “mercies of God”—by his generosity—that we can present ourselves to God as a ‘living’ sacrifice, proof of the reality that as Christians, by God’s grace, our own lives have ended and our new lives already belong to him.

Photo  credit: Puzzled Monkey