'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.'--ROMANS xii. 1.
In the former part of this letter the Apostle has been building up a
massive fabric of doctrine, which has stood the waste of centuries,
and the assaults of enemies, and has been the home of devout souls.
He now passes to speak of practice, and he binds the two halves of
his letter indissolubly together by that significant 'therefore,'
which does not only look back to the thing last said, but to the
whole of the preceding portion of the letter. 'What God hath joined
together let no man put asunder.' Christian living is inseparably
connected with Christian believing. Possibly the error of our
forefathers was in cutting faith too much loose from practice, and
supposing that an orthodox creed was sufficient, though I think the
extent to which they did suppose that has been very much exaggerated.
The temptation of this day is precisely the opposite. 'Conduct is
three-fourths of life,' says one of our teachers. Yes. But what about
the _fourth_ fourth which underlies conduct? Paul's way is the
right way. Lay broad and deep the foundations of God's facts revealed
to us, and then build upon that the fabric of a noble life. This
generation superficially tends to cut practice loose from faith, and
so to look for grapes from thorns and figs from thistles. Wrong
thinking will not lead to right doing. 'I beseech you, _therefore_,
brethren, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice.'
The Apostle, in beginning his practical exhortations, lays as the
foundations of them all two companion precepts: one, with which we
have to deal, affecting mainly the outward life; its twin sister,
which follows in the next verse, affecting mainly the inward life. He
who has drunk in the spirit of Paul's doctrinal teaching will present
his body a living sacrifice, and be renewed in the spirit of his
mind; and thus, outwardly and inwardly, will be approximating to
God's ideal, and all specific virtues will be his in germ. Those two
precepts lay down the broad outline, and all that follow in the way
of specific commandments is but filling in its details.
I. We observe that we have here, first, an all-inclusive directory
for the outward life.
Now, it is to be noticed that the metaphor of sacrifice runs through
the whole of the phraseology of my text. The word rendered 'present'
is a technical expression for the sacerdotal action of offering. A
tacit contrast is drawn between the sacrificial ritual, which was
familiar to Romans as well as Jews, and the true Christian sacrifice
and service. In the former a large portion of the sacrifices
consisted of animals which were slain. Ours is to be 'a living
sacrifice.' In the former the offering was presented to the Deity,
and became His property. In the Christian service, the gift passes,
in like manner, from the possession of the worshipper, and is set
apart for the uses of God, for that is the proper meaning of the word
'holy.' The outward sacrifice gave an odour of a sweet smell, which,
by a strong metaphor, was declared to be fragrant in the nostrils of
Deity. In like manner, the Christian sacrifice is 'acceptable unto
God.' These other sacrifices were purely outward, and derived no
efficacy from the disposition of the worshipper. Our sacrifice,
though the material of the offering be corporeal, is the act of the
inner man, and so is called 'rational' rather than 'reasonable,' as
our Version has it, or as in other parts of Scripture, 'spiritual.'
And the last word of my text, 'service,' retains the sacerdotal
allusion, because it does not mean the service of a slave or
domestic, but that of a priest.
And so the sum of the whole is that the master-word for the outward
life of a Christian is sacrifice. That, again, includes two
things--self-surrender and surrender to God.
Now, Paul was not such a superficial moralist as to begin at the
wrong end, and talk about the surrender of the outward life, unless
as the result of the prior surrender of the inward, and that priority
of the consecration of the man to his offering of the body is
contained in the very metaphor. For a priest needs to be consecrated
before he can offer, and we in our innermost wills, in the depths of
our nature, must be surrendered and set apart to God ere any of our
outward activities can be laid upon His altar. The Apostle, then,
does not make the mistake of substituting external for
internal surrender, but he presupposes that the latter has preceded.
He puts the sequence more fully in the parallel passage in this very
letter: 'Yield yourselves unto God, and your bodies as instruments of
righteousness unto Him.' So, then, first of all, we must be priests
by our inward consecration, and then, since 'a priest must have
somewhat to offer,' we must bring the outward life and lay it upon
His altar.
Now, of the two thoughts which I have said are involved in this great
keyword, the former is common to Christianity, with all noble systems
of morality, whether religious or irreligious. It is a commonplace,
on which I do not need to dwell, that every man who will live a man's
life, and not that of a beast, must sacrifice the flesh, and rigidly
keep it down. But that commonplace is lifted into an altogether new
region, assumes a new solemnity, and finds new power for its
fulfilment when we add to the moralist's duty of control of the
animal and outward nature the other thought, that the surrender must
be to God.
There is no need for my dwelling at any length on the various
practical directions in which this great exhortation must be wrought
out. It is of more importance, by far, to have well fixed in our
minds and hearts the one dominant thought that sacrifice is the
keyword of the Christian life than to explain the directions in which
it applies. But still, just a word or two about these. There are
three ways in which we may look at the body, which the Apostle here
says is to be yielded up unto God.
It is the recipient of impressions from without. _There_ is a field
for consecration. The eye that looks upon evil, and by the look has
rebellious, lustful, sensuous, foul desires excited in the heart,
breaks this solemn law. The eye that among the things seen dwells
with complacency on the pure, and turns from the impure as if a hot
iron had been thrust into its pupil; that in the things seen discerns
shimmering behind them, and manifested through them, the things
unseen and eternal, is the consecrated eye. 'Art for Art's sake,' to
quote the cant of the day, has too often meant art for the flesh's
sake. And there are pictures and books, and sights of various sorts,
flashed before the eyes of you young men and women which it is
pollution to dwell upon, and should be pain to remember. I beseech
you all to have guard over these gates of the heart, and to pray,
'Turn away mine eyes from viewing vanity.' And the other senses, in
like manner, have need to be closely connected with God if they are
not to rush us down to the devil.
The body is not only the recipient of impressions. It is the
possessor of appetites and necessities. See to it that these are
indulged, with constant reference to God. It is no small attainment
of the Christian life 'to eat our meat with gladness and singleness
of heart, praising God.' In a hundred directions this characteristic
of our corporeal lives tends to lead us all away from supreme
consecration to Him. There is the senseless luxury of this
generation. There is the exaggerated care for physical strength and
completeness amongst the young; there is the intemperance in eating
and drinking, which is the curse and the shame of England. There is
the provision for the flesh, the absorbing care for the procuring of
material comforts, which drowns the spirit in miserable anxieties,
and makes men bond-slaves. There is the corruption which comes from
drunkenness and from lust. There is the indolence which checks lofty
aspirations and stops a man in the middle of noble work. And there
are many other forms of evil on which I need not dwell, all of which
are swept clean out of the way when we lay to heart this injunction:
'I beseech you present your bodies a living sacrifice,' and let
appetites and tastes and corporeal needs be kept in rigid
subordination and in conscious connection with Him. I remember a
quaint old saying of a German schoolmaster, who apostrophised his
body thus: 'I go with you three times a day to eat; you must come
with me three times a day to pray.' Subjugate the body, and let it be
the servant and companion of the devout spirit.
It is also, besides being the recipient of impressions, and the
possessor of needs and appetites, our instrument for working in the
world. And so the exhortation of my text comes to include this, that
all our activities done by means of brain and eye and tongue and hand
and foot shall be consciously devoted to Him, and laid as a sacrifice
upon His altar. That pervasive, universally diffused reference to
God, in all the details of daily life, is the thing that Christian
men and women need most of all to try to cultivate. 'Pray without
ceasing,' says the Apostle. This exhortation can only be obeyed if
our work is indeed worship, being done by God's help, for God's sake,
in communion with God.
So, dear friends, sacrifice is the keynote--meaning thereby
surrender, control, and stimulus of the corporeal frame, surrender to
God, in regard to the impressions which we allow to be made upon our
senses, to the indulgence which we grant to our appetites, and the
satisfaction which we seek for our needs, and to the activities which
we engage in by means of this wondrous instrument with which God has
trusted us. These are the plain principles involved in the
exhortation of my text. 'He that soweth to the flesh, shall of the
flesh reap corruption.' 'I keep under my body, and bring it into
subjection.' It is a good servant; it is a bad master.
II. Note, secondly, the relation between this priestly service and
other kinds of worship.
I need only say a word about that. Paul is not meaning to depreciate
the sacrificial ritual, from which he drew his emblem. But he is
meaning to assert that the devotion of a life, manifested through
bodily activity, is higher in its nature than the symbolical worship
of any altar and of any sacrifice. And that falls in with prevailing
tendencies in this day, which has laid such a firm hold on the
principle that daily conduct is better than formal worship, that it
has forgotten to ask the question whether the daily conduct is likely
to be satisfactory if the formal worship is altogether neglected. I
believe, as profoundly as any man can, that the true worship is
distinguishable from and higher than the more sensuous forms of the
Catholic or other sacramentarian churches, or the more simple of the
Puritan and Nonconformist, or the altogether formless of the Quaker.
I believe that the best worship is the manifold activities of daily
life laid upon God's altar, so that the division between things
secular and things sacred is to a large extent misleading and
irrelevant. But at the same time I believe that you have very little
chance of getting this diffused and all-pervasive reference of all a
man's doings to God unless there are, all through his life, recurring
with daily regularity, reservoirs of power, stations where he may
rest, kneeling-places where the attitude of service is exchanged for
the attitude of supplication; times of quiet communion with God which
shall feed the worshipper's activities as the white snowfields on the
high summits feed the brooks that sparkle by the way, and bring
fertility wherever they run. So, dear brethren, remember that whilst
life is the field of worship there must be the inward worship within
the shrine if there is to be the outward service.
III. Lastly, note the equally comprehensive motive and ground of this
all-inclusive directory for conduct.
'I beseech you, by the mercies of God.' That plural does not mean
that the Apostle is extending his view over the whole wide field of
the divine beneficence, but rather that he is contemplating the one
all-inclusive mercy about which the former part of his letter has
been eloquent--viz. the gift of Christ--and contemplating it in the
manifoldness of the blessings which flow from it. The mercies of God
which move a man to yield himself as a sacrifice are not the diffused
beneficences of His providence, but the concentrated love that lies
in the person and work of His Son.
And there, as I believe, is the one motive to which we can appeal
with any prospect of its being powerful enough to give the needful
impetus all through a life. The sacrifice of Christ is the ground on
which our sacrifices can be offered and accepted, for it was the
sacrifice of a death propitiatory and cleansing, and on it, as the
ancient ritual taught us, may be reared the enthusiastic sacrifice of
a life--a thankoffering for it.
Nor is it only the ground on which our sacrifice is accepted, but it
is the great motive by which our sacrifice is impelled. _There_
is the difference between the Christian teaching, 'present your
bodies a sacrifice,' and the highest and noblest of similar teaching
elsewhere. One of the purest and loftiest of the ancient moralists
was a contemporary of Paul's. He would have re-echoed from his heart
the Apostle's directory, but he knew nothing of the Apostle's motive.
So his exhortations were powerless. He had no spell to work on men's
hearts, and his lofty teachings were as the voice of one crying in
the wilderness. Whilst Seneca taught, Rome was a cesspool of moral
putridity and Nero butchered. So it always is. There may be noble
teachings about self-control, purity, and the like, but an evil and
adulterous generation is slow to dance to such piping.