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The first lines of Romans 12 tells us, “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. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” What exactly is a living sacrifice, and why must the audience of this text present their bodies as such.
When googling the definition of sacrifice the first definition is, “an act of slaughtering an animal or person or surrendering a possession as an offering to God or to a divine or supernatural figure.” As someone who hasn’t read the bible (until this class) I didn’t know that sacrifices were pretty common in the Old Testament. The death of Jesus is supposed to be the ultimate sacrifice, so then what is a living sacrifice.
My first source believes a living sacrifice is placing God in to everything one does, “So if your bodily life–what you do with your hands, feet, arms, tongue, your eyes, your ears–when all of that becomes worship, it becomes a way of displaying the value and worth of Christ in your life.” So the audience is the living sacrifice, and this chapters is, in a way, an outline of how the author believes the audience should live their lives. Like in the earlier gospels where it is said not to worry too much about the steps of worshipping, but the worship itself.
My second source goes on to talk about the next lines of the passage. The author does not want the audience to conform to this world as said in Romans 12:2. This source goes on to explain, “First we should not allow ourselves to be poured into the world’s mold. This will only cause us to look like the world, to act like the world and to talk like the world. Instead we should be transformed by renewing our minds with what God has said.” To me this goes back to the ‘don’t jump off a cliff because everyone else is’ phrase we are taught as children.
My third source brings points out mercy before worship in this passage, “Or to put it more carefully, Paul defines the Christian life as worship so that it can be merciful. If we are not worshiping in our behavior — that is, if we are not making much of God’s mercy in Christ in and alongside our behavior — we are not giving people what they need most. And that is not merciful. A merciful lifestyle depends on a worshipful lifestyle. So before Paul defines Christian living as merciful, he defines it as worshipful.” This goes back to my point of earlier gospels and how the words or focused on too much. By focusing too much on being a ‘living sacrifice’ it could be easy to forget what that entrails exactly. To be merciful one would have to worship. Being merciful does not entitle the worship, which is what the author is trying to get across.
To me this passage is inspiring in a way. Without the religious context the passage is telling the audience to put everything they have into what they believe in. The next line tells us “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” This line brings me back to the point the passage being a guild line for how we should live life.
So a living sacrifice basically means putting all your life into god. Even for someone like me who isn’t religious, I still can get behind the putting all of your life and passion into something. The passage is telling its audience to put all their being into worshiping, and by doing that they are being living sacrifices. By putting all your being into god, which is worshipping. Then one can be merciful for the sake of worship. The passage continues on into the different guild lines of how the audience should like ‘not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think.’
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