Living implies heartbeat, brainwave, breathing.  Sacrifice, as in a lamb on the altar in the Old Testament, implies slaughter, bled out, dead, no brainwave, no heartbeat, no breath of life.  Yet, when he went to define Christian worship, the apostle Paul employed the oxymoron “living sacrifice” to do so.  How can that be?

As we come to the second week of our 40 Days of Purpose Campaign, our emphasis this week is on worship.  In seeking to understand the true meaning of Christian worship, we can do no better than with this text of scripture in Romans 12:1-2.  It is here that Paul defines worship as an act of gratitude for all that God has done that is expressed by investing all that we are, mind, body and soul, in the singular act of serving God in the all the affairs of daily living.

“By the mercies of God,” he writes.  On account of all that God has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ to bring about our life and our eternal hope, we should give ourselves completely to him.  Worship that is driven by anything other than gratitude is not true worship.  Worship begins and ends in celebrating the mercies of God in Christ.

Fred Craddock tells of a young woman coming in a worship service to make her profession of faith in Christ.  He asked her what had happened to spur the decision in that moment.  She reflected that the night before she had been standing over her baby’s crib.  Staring at her sleeping baby and overwhelmed by the indescribable wonder of the gift she’d been given, she said, “I realized that I just had to have someone to thank.”  There was nothing left for her to do but surrender herself to the love of God, totally and completely.

Jesus once said “‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength’” (Mark 12:30).  Worship, true Christian worship, is a holistic experience.  It demands what can only be described as integrity, the integrating of all that we are in total surrender to all that we know of God.  No division, no segregation of any part of our lives, nothing left out or behind.  Nothing is more spiritually destructive than living a segregated, compartmentalized life. 

I am told that when Bill Clinton reflected on his private moral failures during his presidency, he realized that the mistake he had made was in compartmentalizing his life.  He kept his public life and his private life disconnected from each other.  He didn’t allow his public profession of faith to be integrated with his very private needs and desires.  Disaster soon followed.  Before we rush to judgment of our former president, we’d do well to remember that none of us faces a greater challenge any day than the discipline of keeping our lives fully integrated, public with private, true needs with public professions. 

Jesus said, “‘where your treasure is there will your heart be

also (Matthew 6:21).  What we most privately choose to cherish will be the gathering point for all the gifts, energies and resources of our total beings.  That’s why Jesus also said, “‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth’” (Matthew 6:24).  Do you see a common pattern developing in all of these scriptures?  Worship, again, is a holistic experience, involving the integration of all our being, or it is not worship. 

Have you ever stood on a boat dock preparing to get into a boat?  One foot is in the boat, the other still on the dock.  As the boat begins to push away from the dock, very soon you realize that you are going to have to put both feet one place or the other.  You have to stand in one place or soon you won’t be standing at all.  There is no more dangerous stance than to live with one foot in a stance of worship and another reserved for what you refuse to surrender in worship.  When reflecting on someone asking God for something without believing he’ll receive it, James wrote that such a person is “double-minded” (James 1:8).  Very legitimately, that phrase could be translated as “two-souled.”  It’s a kind of spiritual schizophrenia.  It’s like asking God to bless your finances while leaving your tithe in the bank.  It’s asking God for what you need but having a plan “B” just in case God doesn’t come through.  History is littered with the corpses of reputations, careers, marriages and even the bodies of those who lived as though there were a God with one part of their lives while simultaneously living as though there were no God with another. 

We’ve all heard the stories of men who traveled extensively and somehow or another managed to have one wife and family in one community while maintaining a second marriage and family in another.  We stand in awe that someone could pull that off.  But, frankly, once we decide that we will keep one part our lives cut off from God and community it’s only a matter of degrees in terms of the extent to which the self-destructive behaviors that ensue will go. 

As an act of worship, have you ever thought about inviting God into that part of your life that you most fear he will not love?  What would happen if you did that?  What if you took God into that secret place, walked around with him, showed it to him, and discovered that, even in your most secret places, God’s love still abides?  Any chance that might lead to worship?  In fact, if you feel that your life is being ripped apart by competing alliances, that it is segmented and compartmentalized, your only hope will be found in worship.  An act of integrating all that you are in total surrender to the God who created and loves you in every act of daily living.

Which brings us again to this very crucial place in our exploration of the meaning of worship.  Worship, the apostle Paul wrote, is an act of “living sacrifice.” 

Before we go any further here, let’s stop and create some images in our minds of how we go about receiving our spiritual nourishment.  One image is that of baby birds in a nest, unable to fly and still blind.  Heads cocked back, mouths wide open, they simply accept whatever morsel of food their mother brings to them and drops into their mouths.  Some people, sadly, worship like that.  Sitting in the pew, they cock their heads back, open their mouths and, unquestioning, swallow whole whatever the preacher chooses to drop into their lives.  It wasn’t meant to be that way.  Just because I’m standing up here holding a Bible doesn’t give me the right to circumvent your conscience and expect you to receive whatever I drop on you.  It is your responsibility, before God, to think and question and choose about what you will receive as nourishment and what you will not.  Which brings us to another image.

It’s a Baptist buffet, if you will.  Long tables laid out as far as the eye can see with every kind of covered dish you can imagine.  At the beginning of the line there are the plates, napkins and utensils.  Next, there are the main dishes.  Fried chicken, roast beef, mashed potatoes and brown gravy, casseroles completely smothered in melted cheese and hot breads, too.  Then, just before the table runs out, there are the coconut cream and pecan and chocolate pies.  So much food, so little plate!  So, you have to make choices.  You will be able to take some of what is there; you will also have to leave some behind.  It’s your choice.  What will you take, what will you leave? 

With that image in mind, I’d like for us to think about something Rick Warren has written and said in his 40 Days of Purpose materials.  Warren has said that the only reason for our existence in this life is to prepare for eternity.  Now, I’m not here to argue with Rick Warren.  And, maybe he meant something by that other than what I heard.  And, you may choose to put that on your plate if you’d like.  I’d like to tell you why, in passing down this buffet line of possibilities for spiritual nourishment, I think I’ll just leave that thought on the table.  When I heard it, that statement struck a raw nerve in me.  It reminds me of a theology that I was raised on, a way of thinking that I refer to as a theology of futility. 

It is a theology that teaches that the only thing that matters is what happens after we die.  That our lives here are really of no significance.  That we should spend every waking moment of our lives today preparing for another day yet to come.  And, over time, that way of thinking made me wonder why God even bothered creating this world in the first place.  Not to mention that I thought and preached as though the only thing that mattered was the ultimate, other-life salvation of people’s souls, as though salvation had nothing to do with their souls and lives here and now.  And, all this, not to mention that I never gave even one thought in my earlier years to issues like social justice and ecology.  Why bother?  None of this matters anyway.  All we’re here for is to get ready for eternity. 

Again, I think I’ll just pass by that food on the buffet line!  And, this is why.  In the book of Genesis, in the very first chapter, after God observed each phase of his creation, he stepped back and “saw that is was good.”  Good, I tell you!  Good.  Very good.  As though God were saying, “Wow!  I like what I see!” 

Yes, we are promised eternity.  No question.  But, we are also given this day, the day the Bible declares as the day the Lord has made in which we should rejoice and celebrate his good gift (Psalm 118:24).  This day!  This moment!  This world, right now!  This is what we’re given to celebrate and the moment in which we are given to worship the living God who gave us this world and our lives and place in it! 

If this world is not God’s good creation and living in this moment now is not a good thing, for its own sake, then please tell me why God bothered creating it.  And, why did he bother sending his son to this world he loved so much?  And, after Jesus died, why did God pluck him from the tomb and send him back into it again?  And, why has God promised to send Jesus back yet again to finish, forever, his work of reclaiming and redeeming his good creation?  And, why did Jesus teach us to pray to our heavenly Father, “‘Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’” (Matthew 6:10)? 

There is so much on the buffet.  You can put it on your plate, if you’d like, that our only reason for living now is to prepare us for eternity.  I think I’ll just leave it where I found it.  You see, from all that I can gather, especially in the teachings of Jesus, every time we clothe a naked person, visit the imprisoned, feed the hungry and welcome the stranger in this life (Matthew 25:31-46), every time we pull a child off of the street and put her into an After School Ministry and help give her a brighter future in this life, we are doing the eternal work of God in this present moment, acts of faith, hope and love that will transcend time as we know it. 

If we didn’t have that hope, the hope that what we are doing now matters now and for eternity, for eternity and for now, where would we be?  All immorality, in one way or another, grows out of living as though you have no hope.  When you have no hope, what reason do you have to care about how you live? 

Put yourself in the shoes of a Nebraska Cornhusker.  A week ago yesterday they played Texas Tech, a team that had never defeated them in football.  Yet, last week, Tech handed them their worst defeat in school history with a score of 70-10!  If you’re a Cornhusker and there is one minute left in the 4^th quarter and you are behind 70-10, what motivation would you have to play your best?  There is no hope!  No matter what you do, you’re not going to win the game.  If you play for Nebraska, last Saturday was a hopeless day.  That is, of course, until you realize that the next Saturday you’d be facing Baylor! 

People have to have hope in order to live, especially if they are going to live meaningfully and well.  There is hope for us today, if we are willing to receive it.  Hope that is uniquely found in the act of surrender to a holy God in worship.

While we’re in the buffet line, may I suggest one thing I do wish you would consider putting on your plate, just as the apostle Paul has done so in Romans 12:1-2?  May I suggest that, whatever you take or leave, please be sure and put some gratitude on your plate.  Gratitude for all of God’s goodness to you.  Gratitude for his eternal mercies in the Jesus he sent to the world you and I were born into.

This morning, if we all made lists of what we don’t have or wished we had but never will, we’d all crawl out of here on our hands and knees depressed beyond hope.  I wish I had a lot of things.  I wish I had a different body than I do sometimes.  The other day when I flew to Atlanta I had to go through the metal detector at the airport and, of course, with a metal knee replacement, I set off every alarm known to modern man.  I explained my knee situation to the TSA agent and he kindly explained that he would have to “pat down the area.”  After he patted down “the area,” as he referred to it, he said, “the area is cleared.”  Now, I know I’ve gained some weight over the years.  But, honestly, I never dreamed my knee would be big enough as to be referred to as an “area.”  Sometimes, I wish I had a different body. 

If we made a list of all that we don’t have, we’d be lost in discouragement.  But, when we stop long enough to think about all that we have been given, our minds, our bodies, our community of faith, our Bible, our Savior, our very lives and eternal hope, then wouldn’t you agree that, once we’ve made that list, we absolutely must have someone to thank?  Without someone to thank, we’d die.  With someone to thank, and in giving thanks by surrendering all that we are, mind, body and soul, a living sacrifice, in an act of worship in this very moment, we live!  We really live!