"Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-- This is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transofrmed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will."
Romans 12:1-2
A very familiar passage to most people, this passage struck me in the most interesting way. Today, I had the privilege to go up to Fair Glen to visit my former high school fellowship at SCBC, Gideon Fellowship, for their annual Winter Retreat. The speaker for the saturday was interestingly the Pastor Fred Tham, who recently left SCAC, and is in search of a new home church. The interesting part of it is that our former youth pastor was his twin brother Pastor Ted Tham, of which i have a very good relationship with. But in bringing up this passage, Fred mentioned a point that i thought was very intriguing:
worship <==> sacrifice
in living a life of worship, it is important that we should be making sacrifices. essentially, being a christian is about making sacrifices. many times we are tempted to do something that is the desire of our lustful hearts, but not of our Father's heart. we must sacrifice these desires and grow to love our Lord's desires (easier said than done, not too possible with human power). in that, as we develop as a christian, i think that God shows us what parts of our lives we need to change, and we should stretch ourselves and make those sacrifices and lifestyle changes. in making such sacrifices, living sacrifices, then it is holy and pleasing to God, and that is a spiritual act of worship, as it says in the text.
God parallels the importance of sacrifice in his son Jesus. Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice of dying on the cross for humankind. Evidently, it was something that he didn't want to do ("My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as as I will, but as you will." Matthew 26:39b), but he was willing to make the sacrifice for the sake of God's will. Jesus' second prayer on Gethsemane: "My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless i drink it, may your will be done." Mt 26:42b. Knowing that this was the only way, and it was God's will that this should happen, Jesus took the sacrifice upon himself.
so next time u think about what worship really is.. remember that worship is not just singing a bunch of nice songs with a bunch of nice people. no way it's so much more than that. He asks so much more of us than that. worship is sacrifice, according to his good, pleasing and perfect will.
4 comments:
Decided to write with proper capitalization, eh. But that broke in your last paragraph =p
haha.. all that effort i make to write a nice coherent passage and that's ALL u notice
it's becuz i wrote that last paragraph on a different day
and if u look at it carefully, the entire thing actually isn't capitalized perfectly
I'm not sold on the worship <==> sacrifice thing. It is to be a poetic (for lack of a better word) concept used to stipulate the significance of both worship and sacrifice in a person's life. They are to me not wholly intertwined, but separate acts that meet in certain aspects and times. That's my word on the technical side of it. Maybe you'd say it's theology. However, the message that presses us to do both worship and sacrifice I do not argue at all.
As worship stems forth from sacrifice, praise stems from sacrifice. in days of old, to worship was to bring a sacrifice to be offered to the Almighty. and some things never change. only the object & subject or perhaps the content & context of our worship. what do you think?
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