10. “How We Offer Ourselves to God” (Romans 12, Part 4)

I want to start by thinking about where we’ve been to this point.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been focusing on a single biblical instruction: “Offer your bodies to God as a sacrifice.” The first 11 chapters of Romans is Paul’s articulation of the gospel. And 12:1-2 is the therefore; therefore, if you understand the gospel, this is what you’re going to do. The more we come to understand what God has done in Jesus, the more we will come to see that this is the response, this is what we want to do: to offer ourselves to God. 

This is a call, we have said, for consecration. Taking the imagery of the Old Testament burnt offering, Paul is telling us that the Christian life is about surrendering, letting go of a wrong way of life where we are in control and we are the ones who protect ourselves, and it’s about giving—giving ourselves to God, trusting ourselves to Jesus where he is the master of our lives. 

Now, we acknowledged, this is a daunting invitation. It can feel threatening. The idea of giving ourselves over, relinquishing control of those things that matter most to us is scary. Doesn’t giving ourselves away mean losing ourselves? Losing our joy? Our freedom? Our lives? 

And if it is anything other than God, the answer is yes. When we completely give ourselves to anything on this earth, no matter how valuable: whether comfort or family or accomplishment or whatever, if we give ourselves completely to that, we lose ourselves. But with God, it’s the very opposite. As we give ourselves to God, we find ourselves. As we surrender our lives in service to God, we find freedom. For God is not a black hole. He’s not a taker who seeks to suck everything from us. God is a god of abundant grace, and what he desires for us is communion with him. He has given himself for us, event to death on the cross, that we can experience his goodness. And through Jesus he enables us to be in a relationship with him, where we can learn to give ourselves back to him, and in love he smiles upon us. Every aspect of this is God’s mercy, God’s grace, intended to make us what we were created to be. 

As Nick pointed out last week, the hymn we sing, “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” captures this well. This hymn was written by a pastor by the name of George Matheson. At the age of 20 his fiancée broke off her engagement with him, because he had discovered that he was going blind, and that idea was too much for her. For the next two decades as he worked as a pastor his eldest sister was his primary support, both in terms of friendship and ongoing care. But then she got engaged, and on the night before her wedding, as he felt the complicated emotions of both being glad for her but feeling a deep loss, he wrote these words about God:

“O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul on thee
I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer fuller be.” 

That’s it. We have a God whose love for us will not let us go, and he is intent on making us whole. As we come to see this, we learn to give ourselves to him, to the one who alone is worthy of our worship. And as we give ourselves to God, we experience the ocean depths of who he is and we become filled with him, and so we ourselves become richer and fuller and more alive.

In these final 2 weeks of this focus before Easter, we move from the what and the why to the how. We’ve spoken of what God is inviting us to do: offer ourselves; and why we want to do this: because there is nothing greater or more human and life-bringing than communion with a God who loves us. But how do we do this? What does it mean in practical terms to “offer our bodies as a sacrifice” to God?

I have a friend who went through a difficult emotional time. He speaks of one night just walking outside in a park, and at a certain moment he got down and prayed to the God he barely knew. He felt this strange power filling him and in that moment he dedicated his life to God. Let me ask you, is that what it means to “offer your bodies to God as a sacrifice?”  

Or perhaps we might think of moments in the worship service when we feel emotionally struck by the reality of who God is; as we sing words of praise we raise our hands and in our hearts say, “Lord, I give myself to you.” Is that what Romans 12 means when it tells us to offer ourselves to God?

Well, yes, the Bible says, but also no. Yes, those intense moments can be good and deeply meaningful expressions of giving ourselves to God. But it’s about more than this. What Romans 12 is speaking about is less about being stirred by our passion and more about depending on God’s grace. It’s less about a big commitment made in the moment and more about a deliberate lifestyle. These are the two ideas we’ll be considering this morning.

Depending on God’s Grace

I want to draw your attention to the logic of our brief passage. We’ve been focusing on the first sentence. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual, or supremely human worship.” Then he immediately goes on to give another command: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Now this is not Paul changing the subject. He’s not saying, “Okay, living sacrifice, got it? Let’s move on.” No, after starting with a metaphor: “Think of your lives as a burnt offering given over to God,” and then he says, “Now let me tell you what I mean by this. Let me tell you what it’s going to look like for you to offer yourselves to God as a sacrifice. What it’s going to look like is a deliberate effort to be formed by his grace.”

Where do I get that? Well, in verse 2 we have two parallel instructions about influence. We can be conformed, which has the idea of being pulled backward, into old ways. Or we can be transformed, being brought forward into something new. And the choice is between being shaped by the sin of godlessness or depending on the grace of God. 

On one hand, “Do not be conformed to this world”: the word for “world” here is literally “this age,” referring to the time before Christ’s return, when humanity continues to be in rebellion against God. We’re going to look at Ephesians 4, because we find there a very similar train of thought. The beginning command is “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do,” don’t be conformed to this age, he is saying. And he describes this influence further in verse 22, speaking about “putting off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life.” 

It’s about making a clean break. It’s not calling for a minor tweak in our lives. It isn’t one of those “praise sandwich feedbacks” that gives some tips in between kind words: “You’re doing a lot of good, but there are some things to clean up, but we’re making a good start.” No, it’s about completely ending the old way: “Don’t be conformed” to what previously shaped you, Romans says, “Don’t walk like that” Ephesians says, “you’ve learned to put off your old self.”  

And the life specifically we are to make a clean break from is the former life of godlessness. It’s the human project of trying to live without God at the center of our lives. The attempt to be self-sufficient, in control, navigating the course of our lives. In a description similar to what we saw in Romans 1, Paul describes it in Ephesians 4.

In the old way, Paul says, you were alienated from the life of God. You were disconnected from communion with him as you chose to live apart from him. And being disconnected from God does a real number on us. It takes away our capacity to sense the things that we’re meant to sense. Notice what verse 18 says about a person’s condition apart from Jesus: working backwards the hearts is hard and calloused. If you’ve ever had callouses on your fingertips from playing an instrument, you’ll know that they stop being able to feel things. The human heart lost a kind of sensitivity. The mind was darkened—when trying to look, people are unable to see what they need to see, because they’ve lost the light. And then, finally, the minds are futile. That is, disconnected from God, people lose sense of their purpose. We know that we’re meant for something, but we’ve forgotten what. 

I recently read a story of someone who was backpacking in the middle of nowhere and became lost because his compass had become demagnetized. A compass has one purpose. Guided by its magnetic polarity, a compass is made to point to the magnetic north pole. Because if you are able to know where true north is, you’re able to navigate your out of almost any wilderness. But if your compass spends too much time near magnets or other electrical devices, like your phone, it can lose its magnetism. It’s no longer able to sense where true north is. And if you don’t know your compass is faulty, you can try to follow its guidance and become completely lost. 

And that’s how we function apart from Christ. The way of living without God and trying to do it on our own is a way of darkness, confusion, because our minds and hearts have lost sensitivity to our true north. And so, on one hand, part of offering ourselves as a sacrifice to God is  making a complete break from the project of self-sufficiency, not letting ourselves be conformed to that former way.

On the other hand, it says, we are to seek to be transformed by the renewal of your mind. What does that mean?

Ephesians 4 uses a very similar phrase: verse 23, “be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” And in Ephesians we see how this renewal of the mind takes place. 4:20: “You learned Christ!” You heard about Jesus, how he died and rose again for you. But you didn’t just hear about him; it says you were taught IN him. You came into a relationship with Jesus, so that you didn’t just know about him, you joined him. He became your teacher. You became his apprentice. He brought you into a new way of understanding and a new way to live. This is what Paul means when talking of your mind being renewed. Jesus is turning the light on in your understanding. Jesus is making your heart become soft again. With the Spirit of Jesus at work in you, the needle of your compass is becoming remagnetized, and you once again are discovering what true north is. Worship involves allowing ourselves to be transformed by this.

So, notice this: when we’re talking about the renewal of our minds, we are first and foremost talking about something that happens to us. It’s a work of God. It’s his grace. The old way is one of self-sufficiency, trying to do it in a godless way; stiff upper lip, we don’t need any help, thank you very much. That’s what we’ve made a break from. But the renewal of the mind is about God working in us what we could not possibly do on our own. Being transformed by the renewal of our minds means learning to be shaped by the grace of God. Worship, giving ourselves to God, means giving ourselves over to his grace. 

The worship God calls us to is not primarily about being stirred by our passion. It’s about depending on his grace. 

I know of a pastor who says that for over a decade had seen it as his responsibility to whip up himself and his congregation every Sunday to get to an emotionally appropriate place for worship To feel the passion; to get to that climactic sense of once again being able to say and to sing and to feel, “Yes, I give myself to you.” Do know that feeling, that tendency to feel like you need to get yourself to the right place so that you can really worship God?

And here’s what he said, “I am weary and tired, and I have come to see that the center is all wrong. We feed upon Christ, the Bread of Life, not our own subjective experience.” And he’s right. Because worship is not about paying God back, where he did the first part, paying for our sins, and now it’s our turn to give something back through some way of drumming up our emotions. Look, doing stuff on our own is what got us in trouble in the first place. God doesn’t just come to us and wait for us to come back to him, he also takes our hands, takes our hearts and helps us to give ourselves to him. Every Sunday morning we are reminded by the call to worship that it’s God who gently calls us into communion with him, and we in our weakness entrust ourselves to him to lead us. In the same way, Every day he is the one who enables us to give ourselves to him. He is the one who renews our mind, giving us the strength and the wisdom to worship him. Jesus is our worship leader.

Do you see how this can free us from anxiety? Offering ourselves to God is about depending on God’s grace. 

At the same time, and here’s where we get to the second point offering ourselves is not about a one-time big commitment. It’s a deliberate lifestyle.   

Let me say something obvious. When Paul says, “Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” the very fact that he says this means that these things don’t just happen automatically. Right? Not being conformed to this age and being transformed by the renewing of your mind—these things involve ongoing, deliberate choice.

And of course they do. Think for a moment about all the thousands of little choices you make every day, most of them not even conscious. You choose to check your phone; choose to go for a walk; choose to stay silent during a meeting; choose to eat a sandwich; choose to get work done. What drives those choices? Most of the time, it’s not because you drew up some major plan for the day, identified your goals, organized all the objectives and said, “To get this day done right, I will eat some Triscuits for a snack at 2:45PM!” No, most of the decisions we make are based on cues from the people around us—like now, even if it’s your first time at church, you aren’t talking back to me because you look around and see nobody else is. Or because of habit—every day you choose to brush your teeth because that’s what you do. Or because of a desire. I’m hungry, I’ll eat. None of these are conscious.

But here’s the challenge—societal examples, habits, and are desires are exactly the areas where we need to exert resistance. Do not be conformed to this age—that’s about societal cues right? Without conscious resistance we will be shaped by a society held captive by the old way of self-sufficiency. Do not return to the former way of life—that’s habits right? Without conscious resistance, we will find ourselves stuck in our habits that do not rely on God’s grace. Watch out for deceptive desires—again that means if we just follow our desires, we will be led down the wrong path. 

Societal influence, old habits, confused desires: all of these exert a subtle pressure to be conformed to the former way. And that means to “not be conformed” will require more than just a big one-time commitment, “It’s all yours, God!” We’re being naïve if we think that decision suddenly changes everything. No, it needs ongoing, steady, intentional resistance. It needs the kind of modest, plodding practices that we’ve been exploring this past year. Paying attention to what is shaping us. Thinking about our habits and instincts, and over time, when we see ways that we’re being pulled by godless instincts, taking steps to make a change. The only way we can obey this instruction not to be conformed is to be deliberate. 

And the same holds for the second half of this instruction. How are we to pursue this transformation that is connected to the renewing of our minds? Not just by once and for all saying, “Jesus I believe in you.” Learning Jesus, to use Paul’s language, involves paying daily attention, listening, reflecting, seeking to understand, like we’re doing in our Romans studies. What’s more, it requires resolve. Because when Paul says we are to be transformed by the renewing of the mind, he’s saying that the change that is happening to our understanding must now translate into every aspect of life, into new actions, new habits.  And if you know anything about how life works, you know that changing these things does not happen automatically or accidentally. It demands thoughtful, careful, choices. The only way to be transformed is by being deliberate.

The worship God invites us into is really a matter of consciously deciding, again and again, to do certain things in certain ways, to create new patterns of memory and imagination deep within ourselves. It’s to do over time what initially feels unnatural and constraining because it’s actually the way of life and freedom.

When I was a youth pastor, I taught myself to play guitar to accompany our youth group. You’ll never see me up here, I’m no Nick Owens, but I learned to play some chords and keep a beat. But early on, I developed some bad habits. The left hand can feel awkward with strings, and so I learned some shortcuts that at first made things feel easier but also kept me from being able to play very well. When I realized my mistake, I had to teach my left hand a new way, and it was hard, it didn’t feel natural. Every song, I had to slow down, watch my hand, figure out where the fingers could go, until over time it became more natural, and I became a much better guitar player than I would have been had I stuck with the old way.

And why would we assume the Christian life is different from this? There is a life that will feel natural to us, because it will look just like what we see around us, it will feel familiar and will fit our desires. But this life, as natural and as intuitive as it might feel, is broken and will never get us where we want to go. Jesus leads us into a better way, and we better believe at first this different way will feel weird. It will force us to slow down, pay attention, try again and again, learn from others. It will be hard at first. But it’s good. The way of giving ourselves to God and coming to experience communion with him involves making ongoing deliberate choices. 

Throughout this time, I’ve tried to move our imaginations away from what we probably naturally think of when we hear “offering ourselves to God. Away from some idea of something big, something passionate, something decisive—maybe in our minds we can hear music going, eyes shut, words making a big commitment. Because that image misses two very important truths. The ongoing act of giving ourselves to God is slower, less dramatic and way more deliberate. And giving ourselves to God ultimately happens not by our power, but by his grace.  And so I’d like to close by giving us a different image 

All of us here who are believers in Jesus are spiritual infants. We are just beginning to learn the freedom that comes in giving ourselves to God. We’re all a bunch of one year-olds only beginning to learn to walk. Every day, as we’re trying to love God and serve him, we are just wobbling around often not being able to stay in the same direction, often falling as we’re pulled down by bad habits and bad thinking. It’s a slow process. But all this time, as we are tottering, we are not alone. The Psalmist says of God, “You hold me by my right hand.” Jesus is holding our hand. He is teaching us to walk. When we stumble, he helps us up. Our worship leader is patiently, gently leading us, day by day, one step at a time, toward it means to give ourselves completely to God’s grace. Worship means trusting the one who holds us and taking that next step.

O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul on thee. I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean’s depths its flow may richer fuller be.