Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16:13-20
Today, I want to begin with a famous, yet deeply challenging instruction given by the Apostle Paul. In Romans 12:1, he wrote: “Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship that you should offer.”
I want to pause right there and ask a very important question: What does it mean to be a “living” sacrifice? In the old Hebrew, it was ‘Olah’, which meant in English ‘something that goes up.’ The Olah was entirely consumed by fire on the altar, ascending to God as a pleasing aroma.
Whether it was consumed by fire or just killed to be offered, by definition, a sacrifice doesn’t survive the altar. Once it is offered, its life is over. It is given up completely, and that is why it is called ‘a sacrifice’.
When Paul says, “Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice,” he is introducing a stunning paradox. How can a sacrifice possibly remain alive? There is an old saying among preachers that the problem with a “living sacrifice” is that it keeps trying to crawl off the altar! Well, in a way, isn’t that true of us?
God is not asking us to lay down our physical lives on a literal altar. Instead, He is asking us to do something that is much harder than. He is asking us to take our ordinary, breathing, walking, living lives and place them on the altar.
We often think of worship only as what we are doing right now—singing songs, praying together, sitting in these pews on a Sunday morning. But the text says that offering your life as a living sacrifice is your true worship.
This means the altar is not just located at the front of this sanctuary. The altar is your kitchen table. The altar is your office desk. The altar is your daily commute, your classroom, and your workshop. Whatever you do in your ordinary lives, you are called to do it as if you are offering it directly to God, to please Him.
I came across a remarkable story about a woman who escaped North Korea fifteen years ago. I made a few adjustments to the story’s details to protect her privacy and I’d like to call her ‘Sook’.
During the most devastating famine and natural disasters of the early 1990s in North Korea, international organizations estimate that roughly 2 million people died from starvation or hunger-related illnesses.
Sook also lost both her parents and her grandparents to starvation during that time, finding herself completely orphaned at a young age. For years, she had to survive on the streets, begging for food just to stay alive.
Eventually, at the age of twenty, she successfully made a miraculous escape through China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Upon her arrival in the South, she was granted a South Korean citizenship, a free house and job. There are now more than 30,000 North Korean defectors living in Sound Korea as citizens.
Long story short, after years of intense study and resilience in South Korea, Sook achieved her dream and became a medical practitioner.
During an interview, a reporter asked her a simple question: “What drove you and sustained you through all these years to reach such a remarkable achievement?”
Her reply was just one word: “My father.”
She explained that back in her early childhood in North Korea — long before the tragedy and the hunger — whenever she brought home good grades, her father would embrace her tightly around the neck. He would walk her over to their neighbors, proudly showing off her report card to everyone in the village. And she loved it. She loved seeing the joy on his face, and that kept her at the top of her class for years.
Even though she is now an adult in South Korea, and even though her father is long gone, she confessed that every gruelling and painful hour of her medical studies and training was driven by one single, enduring goal: to make her father proud. To bring a smile to his face.
Her success wasn’t driven by a desire for personal glory, wealth, or even the pursuit of a more comfortable life in South Korea. She concluded, “From start to finish, it was entirely about pleasing my father, who is somewhere in heaven.”
Friends in Christ. That was it. When you help someone in need, you are actually pleasing their heavenly Father, the God of all humanity.
Whenever you stand up against injustice for someone else, you are bringing joy to Christ, who used to preach good news to the poor and the captives.
Every kindness you show, every dollar you give to help someone struggling, every minute you spend keeping the lonely company, and every tear you shed with the broken-hearted, it all becomes a true worship to God. If you keep living this way for all your days, trust me, friends, you yourself, and your whole life become a living sacrifice to God.
Let me break it down into everyday terms. Think about what this means for tomorrow morning. When you wake up and put your feet on the floor, you are stepping into a sanctuary of God’s making. When you are meeting with someone in the afternoon, it is never just the two of you—you are meeting in the very presence of God.
When you are typing an email to cheer up some lonely friend, driving your kids to school, helping a neighbour, or offering a warm hug to the lonely, those are the hands and feet of a living sacrifice. It is not just once-and-for-all surrender on an altar. Instead, it is a continuous, daily posture of the heart offered to God.
When you choose to respond to a frustrating coworker or a difficult family member, that’s when it becomes an act of worship. It pleases God.
Your hands and feet can be a living sacrifice. Your mentality and your whole body can be a living sacrifice. Your time, your talents, your money, your whole life should be a living offering to God.
There is no such thing as a “secular” job or an “ordinary” chore. Everything is elevated if you do that to please God. You don’t have to be a pastor or a missionary to do holy work; you just have to do your daily work with a holy mindset as a living sacrifice to God.
In today’s gospel reading from Matthew chapter 16, Jesus asked Peter along the coast of Caesarea Philippi: “Peter, who do you say that I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Messiah and the son of the living God.” Christ is the son of the living God.”
This is the precise reason why we must live as a living sacrifice to that living God. Whether in the stillness of the morning or the rush of the afternoon, let’s keep offering our everyday lives back to the living God as a living sacrifice.
