Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2)

What Is Your New Year’s Resolution?

I believe it is an appropriate thing for Christians to make new goals for the year but the challenge is to have the right goals and the motivation to follow through. In Romans 12:1-2 Paul calls believers to the goal of offering their bodies 24/7 as living and holy sacrifices to God. Paul emphasizes the body because loving and serving God sacrificially involves what we do with our bodies as well as our minds. You cannot separate the body from the mind in Christian living and discipleship. Many professing Christians don’t seem to understand this. They think they can separate their belief in Christ from what they do with their bodies. A good example of this is found on Facebook, the popular online networking website. It is not unusual to find people describing themselves as committed Christians and sharing their favorite Bible verses right next to posting pictures of themselves drunk at parties or making suggestive poses. There is a big disconnect between what they profess and what they are doing with their time and their bodies. The Bible says that when a person becomes a genuine Christian he becomes a new creature in union with Christ with a desire and passion to become holy in his thoughts, words, and actions.

This exhortation to offer holistic sacrifice and worship to God comes after Paul has fully explained the meaning of God’s grace in the previous eleven chapters of Romans. The rest of the book deals with how grace must work itself out in the Christian life. Paul says grace, properly understood and received, should result in sacrificial body and mind worship to God. The basis for this kind of living is God’s mercy. Christians are to keep God’s mercy in view. The Christian life is not a set of do’s and don’ts in order to gain God’s mercy, acceptance, or blessing. No, the Christian life involves knowing and believing God has already given believers salvation by grace through the work of Christ. Jesus came to be our substitute. He received the judgment of God that we deserved for our sins though His death on the cross. He lived a perfect life fulfilling God’s laws so that we could receive His merit and be declared righteous and acceptable to God. Paul is saying that having received this mercy already believers will strive to offer themselves in sacrificial worship to God.

Christians don’t obey to get God to love them more, or to appease God’s anger, or to bribe Him to do something for them. They obey because God has already shown them mercy in saving them. If you don’t understand this concept and keep reminding yourself of it constantly, you will lack power for spiritual growth, and you may become bitter and angry, or you will burn out and lose your motivation for growing. Believers are to keep in view the mercy of God – that means the gospel. We are to preach the gospel to ourselves and remind ourselves of God’s manifold blessings. Theologian John Murray said, “It is the mercy of God that melts the heart and it is as we are moved by these mercies of God that we shall know the constraint of consecration as pertains to our body.”

How is this kind of sacrificial worship sustained? It is sustained by the Christian keeping God’s mercy in view. But secondly, it is sustained by the Christian intentionally refusing to conform to the sinful ways and thinking of the world, and by the mind being transformed by the Word of God. The gospel and the Bible must be the force that works in the transformation and renewal of our deepest inner self. Believers are to be constantly in the process of being changed and renewed in their minds by the Word of grace.

So, this New Year I challenge and urge you, along with Paul, to resist stagnation in your Christian walk and pursue the goal of giving yourself to God in everything you do with your body and mind.

Pastor Doug Griffith