Paul's metaphor on living sacrifices in Romans 12:1 has always confused me. Many have joked that the problem with living sacrifices is that they keep trying to crawl off the alter. This snippet made a lot of sense out of his metaphor and hit a lot of hard notes in me.
By Cliff Bajema.
If I tell God that I’ll give up eating sweets for a month when sweets are really not something I desire anyway, then I am offering a dead sacrifice. If I tell God I’ll do something or yield something to him which is no struggle for me anyway, the sacrifice is not really a sacrifice. It is religious tokenism; it is heavenly-brownie-points accumulation.
But suppose some desire is intensely active in my flesh and has reached the dimension of an addiction. Whether it is food, or a drug, or sex, or a certain person I’m in love with, or a professional objective, or gratifying thoughts of revenge, or soothing emotions of self-pity, or… whatever, then for me to say to God ‘I will yield this addiction to you’ is a terribly difficult thing to do. It becomes a living sacrifice.
Sacrifice is living when it hurts, when it costs me something.
By Cliff Bajema.
If I tell God that I’ll give up eating sweets for a month when sweets are really not something I desire anyway, then I am offering a dead sacrifice. If I tell God I’ll do something or yield something to him which is no struggle for me anyway, the sacrifice is not really a sacrifice. It is religious tokenism; it is heavenly-brownie-points accumulation.
But suppose some desire is intensely active in my flesh and has reached the dimension of an addiction. Whether it is food, or a drug, or sex, or a certain person I’m in love with, or a professional objective, or gratifying thoughts of revenge, or soothing emotions of self-pity, or… whatever, then for me to say to God ‘I will yield this addiction to you’ is a terribly difficult thing to do. It becomes a living sacrifice.
Sacrifice is living when it hurts, when it costs me something.
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