August 11 – Romans 11:36-12:1

This week we’re rounding back to our 2024 yearlong theme, A Lived Amen, and the banner text of our theme, Romans 11:36-12:1. The first half of the year we’ve unpacked our theme in various sermon series (Being the Church, Jesus & People, Ecclesiastes, Jesus & Money), but before we get into the fall we want to revisit what the overarching idea has been for all of these: seeing the surpassing worth of God and worshiping him with our lives.

The two verses of this text correspond to the two parts of that goal. First, Romans 11:36 is a quick doxology, a little hymn of praise to God. Like Paul, when we truly see God’s all-surpassing greatness, by which we come to understand him as the source, sustainer, and goal of all things (“from him and through him and to him”), and simultaneously perceive the mercy we’ve received in Christ (12:1), we are moved to worship: “To him be glory forever. Amen.” After asking what stood out to us in the passage, the next two questions will dig into this observation and valuation of God as the supreme object of our worship.

But we should ask, what comes after the “amen”? What should we do with this flow of worship from our hearts? This is the second half of that goal: worshiping God with our lives. Paul plants a giant “therefore” right between this doxology and the verses that follow (actually, all of chapters 12-15) because the two are linked; in light of this, we must do that. And what is it that we must do? “Present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice”—in short, we give God everything. God is the all-in-all, therefore we give him all; God is the Everything, from whom we have received everything, therefore we give him everything.

The rest of our discussion time will focus on that phrase, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice,” which is loaded with meaning. For example, note how Paul phrases this by talking about presenting our “bodies.” By this he means the whole of our lives, our very selves, but with a particular emphasis on the physical, visceral, even mundane aspects of our embodied existence. As we say in our DNA language (which we go through in the Membership process), Jesus is worthy of our entire lives.

And there’s another important word choice in that little phrase; Paul’s use of the word “sacrifice” tips us off to his meaning in the death and resurrection of Jesus, which he connected to our faith-filled response in Romans 6: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his…[so] present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life” (6:5; 6:12). This life we live is patterned off Jesus; he was the sacrifice that died so that we might be the sacrifice that lives.

We’ll then ask in discussion what it would mean for each of us individually to be a living sacrifice, and it might be overwhelming or scary, make you feel like you’re failing, or make you suspect that the church is just trying to get you to serve or give more. But looking back at 11:36 we can see that this is all about God, about his worth and our response to him. And, just as Paul mentions God’s mercy in this passage, we can remember how utterly needy we are before God. Any response that we discuss is one that we need God to help us fulfill. And, as much as that response is worked out within the local church, that’s a means to an end rather than the end itself. What we’re interested in doing is being formed together as disciples of Jesus.

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