A Living Sacrifice

Brandon Petras

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

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We offer our lives as a living sacrifice by shedding the old way of life or dying to self and taking on a new way of life that is pleasing to God and obedient to his Word.

Notes

Transcript

Intro

For those that don’t know this about me, I dabble in pizza making. I have for the last couple of years. In fact just last year I got my first wood-fired pizza oven.

Depending on who you ask you may get a different answer, but most pizza makers will tell you that a great pizza starts and ends with a great dough.

So for the last couple of years, even before I had my pizza oven, I began to experiment with making pizza dough.

I wanted to make Neapolitan style pizza. Big air bubbles and a nice chew when you bite into it.

Well, to accomplish this I learned early on that fermentation of the dough is one of the most important steps.

The reason most people who make their own dough can’t replicate a good Neapolitan crust is because they are in too much of a hurry.

Good pizza dough takes days to make, not hours. In fact my dough takes anywhere from 36-48 hours hours to make. Why? The answer is cold fermentation.

For my fellow science nerds out there. Fermentation is what cause dough to rise. This is where yeast comes in. The yeast that is added to the dough feeds on the sugars in the dough, converting them carbon dioxide and alcohol.

As the CO2 is created it gets trapped in the form of little bubbles. When the dough is baked the bubbles expand even more and the alcohol evaporates.

The longer the fermentation, the more air bubbles you have in the final product and it also can effect the flavor of the dough.

So the first mistake most people make is they don’t allow their dough to ferment in fridge for long enough.

The second is that they use too much yeast. Remember, you aren’t making bread, you are making pizza dough.

It only take 1/2 tsp of active dry yeast for two 14” pizza’s. That’s it. Why, because a little bit of yeast goes a long way when you give it time to do its work.

In pizza making that it what you want. A little bit, given enough time, goes a long way.

The Bible actually talks about yeast and how just a little bit can have a big impact.

Power in the Text

Paul in his letter to the Church in Corinth is writing to them to share his frustration with them over a situation going on in their Church that they should have stopped, but instead let it go.

You see there were reports of sexual immorality among members of their Church and rather than the Church confronting and addressing this sin, they instead had developed an issue of spiritual pride.

They were boasting and bragging about how spiritual they were and how righteous they were.

And Paul says hold on a minute. You have no business boasting about righteousness when sexual sin is allowed into the Church and everyone just pretends like it isn’t happening.

1 Corinthians 5:6-8 NLT 6 Your boasting about this is terrible. Don’t you realize that this sin is like a little yeast that spreads through the whole batch of dough? 7 Get rid of the old “yeast” by removing this wicked person from among you. Then you will be like a fresh batch of dough made without yeast, which is what you really are. Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us. 8 So let us celebrate the festival, not with the old bread of wickedness and evil, but with the new bread of sincerity and truth.

It doesn’t take much yeast to make pizza dough, even a tiny amount will cause fermentation.

Paul is saying we have to get rid of the yeast. We have to clean the whole bowl and wash out the yeast of sin before starting a new batch.

He is saying to this Church, look you can’t boast about righteousness and truth with old bread. You have to throw it out and start with new dough.

Last week we started this series on the altered life. We said that as followers of Jesus we have to do as Pauls instructs us in...

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.

This idea of sacrifice begins in the early chapters of Genesis at the dawn of creations.

We see two humans made perfect in the image of God who chose to break the one command God had given them.

Their disobedience brought the curse of sin not only onto them, but all who would come after them.

And how did they know they had sinned? The Bible says they felt shame and realized they were naked.

So God covered their shame.

Genesis 3:21 NLT 21 And the Lord God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife.

For the first time in creation Something is killed in order to cover their sin. Immediately we see that sin came at a cost. Not only would it lead to their eventual death, but it caused an innocent animal to lose its life to cover their shame.

Yet Paul in the New Testament says to present a living sacrifice to God. As we said last week, the word living and the word sacrifice did not fit together prior to Jesus’s death and resurrection.

So we now live altered lives wherein we give our lives as living sacrifices that are holy and set apart.

However, the Church in Corinth wasn’t being set apart. They were allowing sin to infiltrate their fellowship, not realizing the devastating impact that it was having.

Paul says this same thing another way in his letter to the Church in Ephesus.

Ephesians 4:17-19 NLT 17 With the Lord’s authority I say this: Live no longer as the Gentiles do, for they are hopelessly confused. 18 Their minds are full of darkness; they wander far from the life God gives because they have closed their minds and hardened their hearts against him. 19 They have no sense of shame. They live for lustful pleasure and eagerly practice every kind of impurity.

Here we see Paul reminding this Church of the way they used to live. He is reminding them of the kind of lives they have been both forgiven and set free from.

He is saying don’t live like that anymore, instead live an altered life.

Ephesians 4:20-24 NLT 20 But that isn’t what you learned about Christ. 21 Since you have heard about Jesus and have learned the truth that comes from him, 22 throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception. 23 Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. 24 Put on your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.

Big Idea/Why it Matters

Like the yeast of sin that so easily spreads, here Paul is describing the sinful nature as if it were a piece of clothing.

He says to through it off and instead put on something new as if changing one’s outfit.

This is a reminder that when we get saved, God doesn’t just try to clean the stains and mend to tears in our clothing.

Instead he gives us something entirely new to where. We take on a new nature and become a new creation. One that as Paul puts it is created to be like God, truly righteous and holy.

Again we come to back to this idea of being a living sacrifice that is holy and set apart.

Listen to me, hear me when I say that leading a holy life is not dependent on the morality of those around us or of those in charge of us.

We are living in such a time that morality is in the eye of the beholder. No longer do we see certain moral truths as being objective moral constants.

Instead morality is based either on the majority opinion or on what will give those in leadership the most staying power.

And unfortunately, this has caused many to confuse Biblical morality with legal morality. If the law says I can do it, it must be moral. If the law says I can’t do it, then it must be immoral.

This is why I believe being a new or young believer in this country is going to be very difficult unless you learn to surround yourself with the right people.

Application/Closing

Have you ever heard of the law of averages? Its a theory that says that the result of any given situation will be the average of all outcomes.

In the realm of sales this theory simply put means that in order to increase sales, one must increase their losses by making more sales attempts.

What’s my point?

This same theory is used sociologically, and it says that we are all the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with.

I want you to think about that for a moment. If that is true, do you think you are spending time with the right 5 people?

We often feel defeated when we aren’t able to live up to the perfect standards modeled for us by Jesus.

When we want to change this, the natural response is to work harder, punish ourselves more, or create more rules to follow.

But this doesn’t work. In fact, all this does is make pharisees out of people. And if it doesn’t do that, it causes people to give up and quit trying altogether.

This isn’t what Jesus tells us to do. Instead, Jesus tells us to just follow him. When we are around him more, we will become more like him.

It’s that simple, we just seem to have this need to complicate things.

How much time are you spending with Jesus? How much time are you spending with other people who spend time with Jesus?

One of the hardest lessons new Christians have to learn is the tragic reality that most of the people in their life prior to following Jesus likely won’t remain a big part of their life if they keep following him.

And the reason for this is because they are going to try to pull in a direction opposite of the one God is leading you in.

So a choice will inevitably have to be made.

For the sake of my relationship with Jesus do I surround myself with different people who are going to help me grow in my faith

Or, for the sake of my relationships will I compromise what I know to be true so there isn’t conflict.

Unfortunately for many, the wrong choice is made. And it plays out in their walk with God.

At one point they are all in and give their life to Christ and get real serious about Church and learning the Bible and growing in their faith.

But they never make the hard choices to change their circle of of closest friends or change their social habits and inevitably that pull of their former life is too great and they slip right back into who they were before they got saved.

The Bible warns us about this kind of thing.

2 Peter 2:20-22 NLT 20 And when people escape from the wickedness of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and then get tangled up and enslaved by sin again, they are worse off than before. 21 It would be better if they had never known the way to righteousness than to know it and then reject the command they were given to live a holy life. 22 They prove the truth of this proverb: “A dog returns to its vomit.” And another says, “A washed pig returns to the mud.”

When we live an altered life we are choosing to live a holy life. One where we are set apart.

But this can’t happen if we don’t first deal with the sin in our lives by throwing it off and getting rid of it in whatever form it takes and make a commitment to do as Paul says and put on righteousness.