Romans
12:1-8 The New Life
in Christ
I appeal to
you therefore, brothers and sisters, 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
renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is
good and acceptable and perfect.
For by the
grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more
highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgement, each
according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we
have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who
are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of
another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us:
prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching;
the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in
diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
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Let’s
start with our bible passage this morning. Our scripture talks about being a
living sacrifice that true worship is to make yourself and myself into a living
sacrifice. Oh no, a living
sacrifice didn’t have much to do with my plans this morning. As my eyes peeped
open at the alarm clock, I did not bounce out of bed, yelling good, good time
to sacrifice. That is not how I pictured worship this morning. I was thinking along the lines of a cup
of coffee, a nice breakfast, a few peaceful prayers, a little learning sermon, pleasant
music and then lunch. Sacrifice
didn’t have much to do with my plans.
But this passage on sacrifice reflects our next rarely taught Christian
lesson, surrender. This lesson goes by several names. Whether you call this
lesson surrender or sacrifice or submission or abandonment of self, surrender is
at the core of living a Christian life.
Surrender
of the self is what Jesus calls us to do.
There is this passage from Matthew 16:24-5 “Then Jesus told his
disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will
lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Jesus is describing a spiritual
practice of surrender. Jesus calls
it denying oneself. But in this
surrender instead of losing your life you find it. This is a paradox.
A paradox is two statements that seem to be contradictory or even
impossible or mutually exclusive.
But in actuality is profound truth. Here is the paradox.
You have to be a living sacrifice. According to our scripture if you can
be a living sacrifice you can be not conformed to world but be transformed.
According to Jesus, You have to lose your life to find it. This is surrender
that lead to life.
Surrender
is just too hard a concept. So I
wonder if we can simplify. Is there one image that could help us this
morning? I am hoping this is it, A
Snow Angel. If you have ever made a snow angel raise your hand. If you are over 50 especially, raise
your hand. It doesn’t matter if you have done this yesterday or 50 years ago,
you know how it works. The snow
has been a little skimpy lately but if you get a good deep snow and you fall
backwards and fan your arms and legs, there you have it ‘A Snow Angel.’ That
instant when you tip over backwards that is surrender. This big hard concept is
a simple as this.
But
the problem is we make it hard. We don’t like surrender. Quite frankly
surrender has never been much encouraged.
What do you think of when you think of surrender? If you surrender, you are a loser. You
have raised the white flag. You have given up. You are defeated. We don’t value any of that. We are a “never say die” culture. Our hero’s don’t surrender. They go
down fighting. How odd Jesus did exactly the opposite of our hero culture. Jesus emptied himself of power and went
to the cross. Jesus practiced
complete surrender to God so that through him God could overcome death. God
wants the same for us. God wants
us to surrender to God so we can overcome, overcome our faults, our limitations
and ourselves and even to overcome death.
Perhaps
if we just answer two questions we can get back to the simplicity of that snow
angel. 1) Who we surrendering to and 2) what are we surrendering? First of all
you need to think of whom we are surrendering to. Does God want us to give up
and give in to an enemy? No. The surrender is not to a stranger or an enemy but
to a father, a creator, a mother hen, and a sacrificing savior. Your surrender
isn’t to a stranger but to someone who knows the hairs on your head, someone
who knows you better than yourself.
This surrender is not to an enemy who will humiliate and ridicule and
perhaps massacre you but to the God who made you, works to guide and teach you
and ultimately whom you will return to.
So in this way surrender isn’t a crazy radical act. It is the nature turning of a child to
a parent. Or it is as easy as tipping back into deep soft snow.
The
next question is what are we surrendering? We surrender our life, our control of our life to God. Well let’s just turn that one over in
thought. What do we control in
life? Can anyone make you taller
by sheer will? Can you prevent
cancer? Can you prevent your loved
ones from dying? Can you control what
people think of you? Seems to me
that there is a whole bushel worth of things I think I can control but that I
really can’t. Perhaps I could
surrender this silly belief that I am in control. It seems the most important
thing to surrender is the illusion that I am god, that I know what is best,
that I am always right, that my wishes and dreams are reality. This process of
surrender might free me of a lot of anxiety.
I
will give you an example. In
NYC there was a mother named Becky.
Becky had a child with Downs’s syndrome. When her little one was little she would work and help with
care plans and it seemed to be working.
But in time her little boy got older. He needed to go to a new school
with new schedules and new teachers and new faces. And Becky would be bolt
awake at 4:00 am worrying about all this.
In
her devotionals she wrote, “We feel tension because we care. So much. We carry tension
because we fear we’re not enough.” The basic truth is that
while she could do lots there would always be something that she could not
do. There are always things
we cannot do. When we face this we
need to practice surrender. We do the things that we are called to work on and
leave the results to God. Surrender leads to God dependence, which leads us to
peace. This surrender is what Paul was getting at when he wrote, “Do not be anxious about
anything,
but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,
present your requests to God.
And the peace of God,
which transcends all
understanding,
will guard your hearts
and your minds in Christ Jesus”
Philippians 4: 6, 7
We
need to surrender not just the illusion of control but also our very
selves. We give God the big and
the little things of our life. As
an example there was a Seinfeld episode that illustrates this. George Costanzia is a rotten guy. He is selfish and pretentious. His life
is a mess. So in this episode,
George acknowledges that all his basic instincts are wrong. So he decides to
live his life doing the compete opposite of what he would ordinarily do.
So instead of ordering a ham on rye sandwich, he
orders a tuna fish on whole wheat. Instead of lying to a woman and telling her
he is an architect, he admits he is unemployed and living with his parents.
Instead of pocketing some money he found he returns it to the owner. His life totally changes around. We are like that too. Instead of asking
what we want, we ask what God wants. We think we are doing this practice of
surrender for God right.
Wrong. We are actually
doing the surrender for us.
Our passage from Romans 12 has been paraphrased in the message like
this. “So
here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary
life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it
before God as an offering.”
We
have an illustration of this ordinary walking around life right in this
service. The second hymn was “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” I loved that Hymn. The hymn is a fantastic
combination of ragtime, speak easy and gospel. That is about my favorite
combination. But that hymn represents what is the basic orientation of our
life. Jesus, come follow me. Do what I am doing. Follow me around my
life and make it whole and safe and good.
Maybe this ordinary walking around life can be redirected in a
foundational way. Before I start walking, I offer God the steps. Before I slip
my feet in slippers, I offer God my feet. Before my mind makes elaborate plans
for today, I let God renew my mind. All that has the simple abandon of an angel
in deep snow. We will close with the hymn “I
Surrender All.”
Amen.
