Romans 12What is Worship Pleasing to God?

Transcript

Every single time we open our mouth, we're worshiping God or we're stealing worship from him. What is worship that's pleasing to God? And he actually tells us in the Bible, and I can think of no better verse to go to than Romans 12. In it, Paul writes, "I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship."

And did you notice what Paul doesn't say here? He doesn't say your worship is one hour of singing songs and listening to a sermon on Sunday morning. No, he says to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Now, to understand what Paul is getting at here, there's one key word that's so easy to overlook. He starts out Romans 12 by saying, "Therefore," this means Paul is saying, "Because of everything that comes in chapters 1-1, now we can live in a manner holy and pleasing to God."

So you have to ask yourself, what did Paul write about in chapters 1-1? And he writes that the righteous live by faith. That it's always been about those who believe in the promise and are counted as righteous because of faith. In chapter 11, he talks about how everyone has been grafted in. Meaning that the mercies of God have resulted in salvation for anyone who would believe. So because we have been saved, redeemed from our former way of life in which we could not help but to sin, we now are able to serve God holy and righteous before him.

In Romans 6, Paul says it another way. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. So every day is a living sacrifice. We're to come to God and be used in every area of your life. You don't just worship God on Sunday morning.

You worship God on Monday morning when you drive to work, when you obey your bosses, when you pay taxes, when you use your spiritual gifts in a way that builds up the body of Christ. And if all of that sounds familiar, I just paraphrase Romans 13:14 and 15 in which Paul tells us, "All right, be a living sacrifice." And here are some practical ways that that sacrifice is to be lived out.

Let's keep going in verse two. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. So if you want to know what worship is, it is doing the will of God every single day in every single moment. And this testing is active and intentional because we as people can so easily determine what God wants as his worship.

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