As I walked the dog, I prayed for the persecuted church, especially those who had been enslaved in central Africa by Muslim radicals. I thought of children being ripped from parents’ arms, terrified and wailing, to be sold on auction blocks now, today, in the twenty-first century. Women are being sold to Muslim husbands against their wills. The enslavers force men to hard labor. The words “living sacrifice” filled my mind.
It was so startling to me that I stopped mid-walk and meditated on it despite the dog’s reproachful gaze.
Early in our marriage, we received a newsletter put out by Pastor Georgi Vins, who had been imprisoned for preaching the gospel in the Soviet Union. He and his family were swapped to the United States for Russian spies in a prisoner exchange, one of the Soviet government’s worst mistakes. Only a few years after millions of western Christians began praying for the persecuted church, the Soviet Union fell apart, catching the CIA by surprise.
In one of Vins’ newsletters, words from another imprisoned Russian pastor whose name I’ve forgotten (God has not) reached me as we were going through a rough time, “If God can best use me in prison, why should I want to be anywhere else?” A living sacrifice.
Romans 12:1-3 tells us:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God. For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.
During the Obama administration, one of the Muslim terrorist groups, Boko Haram, I believe, kidnapped over 200 Christian teenaged girls from their school in Nigeria. The Obamas tweeted to release these girls. The terrorists returned some of them and sold others to Muslim husbands after they recited the Islamic Shahada, “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet”.
But, one girl, Leah, held to her Christian faith. She refused to recite the Shahada. They refused to return her. Wanting to break her, they gangraped her over and over and over again. She has had at least two children by these evil men. All of the hopes and dreams she had as an innocent schoolgirl are gone upon the altar of faithfulness. A living sacrifice.
Paul, when he wrote Romans 12, knew something of being a living sacrifice. His persecutors beat him multiple times, imprisoned him, falsely accused him. However, he offered himself while he lived to pain, alienation, danger and discomfort. One of the leading contenders to be a man of some repute among the Jews as a student of the great teacher Gamaliel, he became an outcast for Jesus’ sake.
Paul begs of us to become living sacrifices also. We may not face slavery, imprisonment, or being gangraped, but we may. However, we face that challenge of becoming a living sacrifice in our daily lives. One friend gave up a job on a road crew because he refused to stand around and insisted on doing his best as unto the Lord. Another friend sacrificed her ambitions as a psychologist so that she could care for the mother she did not get along with. A couple of men I know gave up marrying and having a family so that they could serve in small churches that could not support a family.
A living sacrifice. Being a sacrifice hurts. The lamb offered as a sacrifice gave up its future, its life. The Lamb of God gave up heaven to become a man, not only a man, but a poor man. That man gave himself to the worst of deaths, beaten, naked, on the cross fighting for each breath as His weakening body gave out so that we might know forgiveness and peace with God.
Being a living sacrifice requires a daily offering ourselves up to God, a daily taking on the mind of Christ in real life ways, not just the preach-it-at-church, feel-good ways. It involves what we say and how we say it, what we value, our entertainment, our work, our relationships, our ideas of success so that we might became a sweet offering to God. The early church turned the world upside down. Changing our world starts at the altar of sacrifice.
