Offering

Day5

Word Study

Sacrifice

Another kind of offering was a “whole burnt offering,” which was a valuable animal from one’s flock. It had to be without defect (holy and without blemish). Why? That animal is expensive monetarily and valuable for what it produces. When someone offered that animal to be burned, it was meant to symbolize a larger truth—that everything you have is at God’s disposal. You didn’t give God your left-overs—whatever was left over at the end of the month—or something you really didn’t want anyway. The burnt offering was always burnt totally and represented complete surrender and devotion to God.

To be “a living sacrifice” is to be fully at God’s disposal—to be available and willing to obey God in whatever he asks or commands.

The expression “living sacrifice” itself is something of an irony or a paradox, isn’t it? I mean, we all know what the word “living” means, but the word “sacrifice” means to kill something, to make it dead. So a living sacrifice describes, in a sense, a deliberate, living killing. This is clearly what Jesus had in mind when he said in Luke 9:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

Luke 9:23-24

I heard someone one time say, “In Jesus’ day, no one took up a cross who was not on his way to his own execution.” To offer our bodies as a living sacrifice is to make a daily decision that my desires must die so that I can be free to do with my body what God desires. In the same way that you once used your body to serve yourself and fulfill the lusts and passions of your flesh, Paul is calling you by the Spirit, in view of all that God has done for you, to now give God full control of your body: your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your ears, your hands and feet, your voice, your sexuality, your intellect and imagination. He is worthy of it all.

Paul adds two adjectives in describing this sacrifice he is calling us to.

1. The first is “Holy.” To be holy means to be morally and spiritually pure. It also means to be completely set apart as God’s possession for His purposes.

2. That second adjective is the phrase, “Acceptable to God.” The apostle Peter said that we as Christians are, “To be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” It is not that we are acceptable to God on our own, nor can we make ourselves acceptable to Him. Instead, we are acceptable to God only through Jesus Christ, and what we offer to God is made acceptable only through Him.

Action Step:

How are you offering your body to God?