July 29, 2014
Living Sacrifice
My neighbor’s cat has
expanded her territory and laid claim to a patch of grass in my backyard. Now,
before Bill can even mow the grass, he has to remove five dead mice and one
bird. Obviously the cat is not hungry; she’s just demonstrating her prowess on
a grass altar. It does give me pause to think that some of the things I place
on the altar before God are also dead. “Therefore, 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” (Ro 12:1 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Our bodies are not our life. They are only tools for interacting with anything else through this medium of physical substance we call the universe. Even our own interaction with ourselves must be done through the body, for thoughts and feelings are essentially conveyed through chemical activities within vastly networking neurological channels of the body.
-----Many people are fooled into thinking our bodies are our life. They think we all extended from a couple bubbles in a mud-hole which each engulfed some amino acids, then found sex and went wild. We ourselves are essentially spirits. But we don’t know as much about spirits as we do mud-holes and stuff, because spirit does not interact with physical substance such that it can be experienced, normally. We can’t see it, touch it, smell it, can it, or control it in lab experiments. It’s just what it is, how it is, inside a body. I speculate that it interacts on “the other side” of the mind than does our consciousness and in a manner that would take significantly more words to describe than would be appropriate here. And that is all there is to life. A spirit that can’t contact anything but by reflecting itself through a body, otherwise trapped, imprisoned, alone, gasping for life, eating everything it can, demanding freedom.
-----Unless the spirit knows the sacrifice. Thankfully, no more do we have to know the mechanics of spirit to walk and jump and blissfully sit or lay than do we have to know automotive mechanics to start a car and drive for groceries. But like we have to know the turning of a key to get groceries, and which key to use to start the car, we have to know the process of sacrifice and from where it extends to free the spirit.
-----Our preacher waxed hotly Sunday. He can do that well. This time he did it about what good sense says will follow turning to the Lord. We come for who He is and what He does for us. Both of those is truth. And the truth is expressed in love, which is doing right to the loved ones. So if we come to Him whose walk of total truth and love expressed sacrifice into a world of feeding upon others by giving Himself as food for the healing nutrition of trapped spirits, will we then, after seeking what He was, eat others for the nutrition of our spirits? No! We’ve come to truth which adjusts us to what truth is. And in this world of selfhood the truth about surviving is the processing of what gives us survival: sacrifice. Christ, our only way of living is sacrifice. Therefore, to be living we are sacrificing.
-----Well, the process can not work without a spirit defining it. The trapped spirit consumes. But when the essence of all we are that is our spirit is joined by all of God's essence in His spirit, it is like an unimaginably expansive hole has blown into the prison wall, the tomb lid, the spiritual side of what we are. Then our spirit not only has company, but wise company. Loving and guiding company. Filling and nourishing company. Company that knows only sacrifice works life in a world of cannibals. And so we feed ourselves carefully to others, passing up a promotion to preserve time for the family, extending our other four fingers with the middle one to smile and wave at the guy who cut us off on the way to get groceries, pulling a few extra dollars out of our pocket for the neighbor on hard times, enduring the possibility of scorn to tell the passing stranger that Christ can make him alive too. We don’t feed ourselves to their pleasures surely, but for their lives, and even more, to their hope in Christ.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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