I. We have in the text a very remarkable way of putting what I may call the sum of Christian service. The main leading idea is the gathering together of all Christian duty into the one mighty word sacrifice. Sacrifice, to begin with, means giving up everything to God. And how do I give up to God? When in heart and will and thought I am conscious of His presence, and do all the actions of the inner man in dependence on, and in obedience to, Him. That is the true sacrifice when I think as in His sight, and will and love and act as in obedience to Him. To consecrate oneself is the way to secure a higher and nobler life than ever before. If you want to go all to rack and ruin, live according to your own fancy and taste. If you want to be strong, and grow stronger and more and more blessed, put the brake on, and keep a tight hand upon yourself, and offer your whole being upon His altar.
II. We have here likewise the great motive of Christian service: "I beseech you, therefore, by the mercies of God." In the Apostle's mind this is no vague expression for the whole of the diffused blessings with which God floods the world, but he means thereby the definite specific thing, the great scheme of mercy, set forth in the previous Chapter s, that is to say, His great work in saving the world through Jesus Christ. That is "the mercies" with which he makes his appeal. The diffused and wide-shining mercies, which stream from the Father's heart, are all, as it were, focussed as through a burning-glass into one strong beam, which can kindle the greenest wood and melt the thick-ribbed ice. Only on the footing of that sacrifice can we offer ours. He has offered the one sacrifice, of which His death is the essential part, in order that we may offer the sacrifice of which our life is the essential part.
III. Note the gentle enforcement of this great motive for Christian service: "I beseech you." Law commands, the gospel entreats. Paul's beseeching is only a less tender echo of the Master's entreaty.
A. Maclaren, A Year's Ministry,1st series, p. 315.
The Self-sacrifice.
Consider:
I. The nature of the claim which is here made upon us. (1) Let us avail ourselves of the light which is shed on the nature of sacrifice by the term which is here employed. "A living sacrifice." The Apostle was addressing those to whom both the need and the thing were perfectly familiar. Sacrifice stands out with great prominence among the forms of the Jewish dispensation; and among all peoples the thing is to be met with, though the conception of its nature and relation, both to man and to God, would vary according to the moral education and condition of each particular race. But it is to be questioned whether the idea could be fully comprehended until He, in whom was life, had, through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God, and laid on His disciples the obligation to yield themselves a living sacrifice to God. The true sacrifice must be a living one. (2) The presenting ourselves a living sacrifice is the first act of a true man's life. Carry on the association sacrifice with life rather than with death, and it will help you with the second principle. Our highest and holiest relations begin when we make the sacrifice of the whole heart of selfishness to God. (3) This presenting ourselves a living sacrifice is the ground of all true rendering of duty to the Church, the family, and the whole world of man.
II. Consider the ground of this claim of God; and I note: (1) The Christian sacrifice is a living sacrifice because God urges His claims, not on the ground of His right only, but of His love. The Father loves us with a love which even our sin and apostasy could not weaken. He loves us with a love which could grapple with and conquer death. (2) God has not left, He will not leave, His work for us. He sent His Son into the battle; He became perfect as the Captain of our salvation by suffering. The Father hath sent, sendeth still, the Spirit to carry on the work, and present it to Him complete in the day of the Lord Jesus. The striving and pleading of His. Spirit still is the measure of His interest and hope. He is ready to animate us to achieve the sacrifice which His love constrains us to attempt; ready with all a Father's tender sympathy to share our burdens, to feel our pangs, to prop our weakness, to kindle our courage, to stir and plume our hope.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Divine Life in Man,p. 139.
Sacrifice.
What are the characteristics of the sacrifice which God's wonderful mercies have made binding upon us all?
I. First, the Apostle tells us it is to be a living sacrifice, and this is the great distinguishing mark of that personal offering required of us. Sacrifice of old was wont to imply the death of the thing or creature offered. Christian sacrifice is that of the life, and Christ has come to enable us to make that sacrifice a worthier one by giving us fuller and more abundant life to offer, by quickening and transforming all our capacities and fitting them for greater things. There have been those who have thought to offer to God a dead sacrifice, the sacrifice of a mechanical obedience, the sacrifice of stereotyped habits; and such sacrifice is not out of date. Others, again, have thought to offer a dead sacrifice in the shape of a hard, self-contained religion a religion without warmth of sympathy or expansive power the exclusive luxury of its possessor; all such sacrifices have but a name to live, and He who asks for nothing less than our very selves cannot away with them.
II. Secondly, the sacrifice demanded is a holy sacrifice. What awe surrounds that word, and how far away from ourselves and this miserable, selfish, sinful world that word always seems to carry us! We know what it means; we know that it implies separation; the drawing off from whatever is low and sordid and soiling, the solemn setting apart of whatever it qualifies for the express service of a pure and perfectly holy God.
III. And, lastly, this is a reasonable service which is demanded of us, or, as the words might be rendered, a ritual of thought and mind as distinguished from the outward and material ritual which has passed away. It is an intelligent offering that we are called upon to make, one that is both prompted and presented by the reason of the understanding, one in which the mind goes along with the heart. This is the glory of Christianity, that it addresses itself to man's highest power, that it enlists his intellect as well as his affections, that it finds scope for his divinest endowment, and gives heavenward direction to all that is in him.
R. Duckworth, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 33.
References: Romans 12:1. R. W. Church, Human Life and its Conditions,p. 31; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. vi., p. 13; E. Garbett, The Soul's Life,p. 313; W. C. E. Newbolt, Counsels of Faith and Practice,p. 125; H. A. M. Butler, Church of England Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 228; H. G. Hirch, Ibid.,vol. ix., p. 40. Romans 12:1; Romans 12:2. Homilist,vol. v., p. 126. Romans 12:1-3. Church of England Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 32.