True worship

The Altered Life • Sermon • Submitted a year ago • Presented a year ago

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Because of Jesus's sacrifice, we are present ourselves as living sacrifices. By readying ourselves, we can respond to God's invitation to participate in true worship.

Notes

Transcript

Intro

When we talk about altars in a modern setting we typically think of the front of a Church sanctuary.

Some think of weddings as the bride walks down the altar toward her groom.

We think of altar calls where people come forward in response to a call, invitation, or even challenge.

But the term altar has been around a lot longer than Churches or Christianity.

In fact we see biblically the first record of an alter being built was by Noah after the flood waters had receded.

Genesis 8:20 NIV 20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.

The purpose of an alter was to provide a specially designated surface in which sacrifices would be offered.

This practice continued beyond Noah through Abraham and then his descendents like Moses and eventually King David and then his son King Solomon who built the first temple in Jerusalem.

The temple became the official home of the altar where all Jewish sacrifices would be made.

Sacrifice was a part of God’s plan and design for humanity. God used sacrifice to remind humans of their brokenness and need for healing and redemption.

It was through sacrifice that sin and guilt would be forgiven. When the Israelites were rescued from Egypt by Moses and entered the promised land, a land they would call their own so they could be their own people, they were given very specific laws regarding sacrifices.

Burnt offerings

Grain offerings

Fellowship offerings

Guilt offerings

Sin offerings

Leviticus 4:32-35 NIV 32 “ ‘If someone brings a lamb as their sin offering, they are to bring a female without defect. 33 They are to lay their hand on its head and slaughter it for a sin offering at the place where the burnt offering is slaughtered. 34 Then the priest shall take some of the blood of the sin offering with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering and pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar.

35 They shall remove all the fat, just as the fat is removed from the lamb of the fellowship offering, and the priest shall burn it on the altar on top of the food offerings presented to the Lord. In this way the priest will make atonement for them for the sin they have committed, and they will be forgiven.

It sounds cruel to think of these animal losing their lives, but understand that God did this to show us the deadly consequences of sin.

He did this to show us the sin leads to death. In this case it was the death of an innocent lamb. It was the shedding of innocent blood that made atonement for sin.

In other words, sin always has a cost. And the sacrificial system was a reminder of that fact.

It also foreshadowed or point to a future where God would one day provide the perfect sacrifice. Instead of having to sacrifice these animals at the alter over and over again, Jesus became the perfect, sinless sacrifice that would once and for all make atonement for our sin.

This in effect put an and to the need to sacrifice animals on the alter because the cost of sin was paid for with Jesus blood.

So cut forward to the early Church and the question of sacrifice comes up. Remember, Judaism is still thriving, the temple is still standing, and sacrifices are still being made daily.

So if Jesus became the perfect sacrifice, were these new Christians supposed to participate the in the sacrificial rituals like they had before they became followers of Jesus?

The short answer as no. The long answer was that the kind of sacrifices they were supposed to make had changed dramatically.

Power in the Text

The apostle Paul in his letter to the Church in Rome had this to say about offering sacrifices.

Romans 12:1-2 NLT And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.

2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

You Jesus’s death and resurrection changed everything. His sacrifice put an and to ritual animal sacrifices.

But while he ended one kind of sacrifice, he also ushered in an entirely new kind of sacrifice.

One where instead of something having to die, something would have to live. In this case us.

Look at what Paul says in verse one.

give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice

The greek word here for bring or present means to place beside, to set at hand, to provide, to place a person or thing at one’s disposal, to bring into one’s fellowship or intimacy, to prove, to stand ready.

In other words, we are told that because of the sacrifice Jesus made by giving up his life, we should then give up our own lives for him.

But by “give up our lives” we don’t mean to die like he did, but to live like he did.

We were dead in our sin and Jesus’s sacrifice has given us new life, so offer that new life back to God to be used and set apart for his purposes.

This is what we call the altered life. It is a life that is offered up to God as if on an altar. But there is more to it than simply making one’s self available to God.

Remember that the sacrifice is meant to be Holy or set apart. But what does that look like?

Romans 12:2 NLT 2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

You see an altar-ed life is also and altered life. One that is changed or altered in a way that it make the life you are offering an acceptable sacrifice.

Big Idea/Why it Matters

As followers of Jesus, we are invited to be a part of the worship of God previously only done by the Old Testament priests.

Remember, according to the old covenant only Priests could make sacrifices on God’s altar. Aside from being a priest, Jews could never draw near to God’s altar—not without severe consequences. In fact, any time a priest, Levite, or king drew near to God without authorization, wrath resulted”

Leviticus 10:1-3 NIV Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. 2 So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

3 Moses then said to Aaron, “This is what the Lord spoke of when he said: “ ‘Among those who approach me I will be proved holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored.’ ”

But now, as Peter puts it in...

1 Peter 2:4-5 NIV 4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house c to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

As New Testament followers of Jesus we are all priests and can therefore approach a holy God and offer our living sacrifices.

This is a great honor many of us pass off either unintentionally be being ignorant to what God expects of us.

Or worse, intentionally because we aren’t willing live an altered life.

We don’t want to change, we don’t want to give up our old ways of thinking, talking, and living.

If God is so holy that simply approaching him without authorization would result in his wrath in the OT, then how can we think that as people who claim to follow his son and yet choose to live such unholy lives can do so without consequence?

Have you decided to follow Jesus? Then you and I have no choice but to live an altered life. To live a life not of sinless perfection, but one that makes the hard choices to avoid sin and choose righteousness.

Not to earn God’s love and forgiveness, Jesus did that for us. But to demonstrate a heart of gratitude for what God has done for us.

Application/Closing

But what does that look like? What do I actually have to do? What changes, if any do I need to make?

I said last week that Christianity isn’t about following a list of do’s and don’ts. Rather it is about having our hearts changed through repentance.

But what you need to know about the Altered Life is that it takes proximity into consideration.

In Romans 12, Paul is try to get his listeners to understand that part of their act of sacrifice includes proximity.

One must remain near the altar, not literally but figuratively. We need to be close to Jesus in order to give him a sacrifice.

You want to know what an altered life looks like then stay close to Jesus. He will show you exactly what it looks like.

But here is the thing. You can’t be close to Jesus and while staying close to the world at the same time.

1 John 2:15-17 NLT 15 Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you. 16 For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world. 17 And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.

In order to live an altered life you need to have proximity to Jesus. You have to choose who or what you are going to be drawn by.

The world

Or Jesus

The other thing we need to live an altered life is a healthy fear of God. I know this sounds odd to some.

God is love why should I fear him? I don’t mean that we need to be afraid of God. But we need a reverential fear of his holiness.

Proverbs 8:13a NIV To fear the Lord is to hate evil

Do you hate evil or do you flirt with it? Do you avoid sin or do you participate in it? Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness or do you crave the pleasures of this world?

The writer of Hebrews gives a strong warning to Christians who choose not to live an altered life in...

Hebrews 10:26-31 NIV 26 If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, 27 but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. 28 Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.

29 How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.”

31 It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Last week we celebrated Easter. We talked about the significance of the resurrection. We talked about the forgiveness of sin that Jesus sacrifice offers us.

But do not be deceived into thinking that how we live has no consequence. God forgive us if we ever treat the blood of Jesus as an unholy thing by our unholy living.

Rather let our lives but set apart and offered up as living sacrifices to used by God for his purposes.

This week is just the beginning of a 4 part series on living an altered life. I pray you will join me again next week as we dig in even deeper.

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