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. —Romans 12:1.
Because God went first and sacrificed his most precious gift, Jesus, to save us, he can ask us to surrender ourselves to him. Only one problem: the sorry sacrifice wants to keep crawling off the altar. Let’s admit it; talk of sacrifice and being a living sacrifice doesn’t sound all that enticing. Except offering ourselves to God is where we find life and find what is most enduring about ourselves. As the famous missionary Jim Elliot profoundly put it, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” We offer ourselves, our will, our time, our heart, and our commitment, to God each day because of what he has already done for us, and the greater things he has promised us in the future!