Our Conduct Is Our True Life of Worship to the Lord

The Christian is always presenting himself before God, dying a little more, being crucified as Christ was crucified, being offered as a sacrifice before the Father and being consumed. Each day we are shedding a little more of our sinful nature so that the Body of Christ can become more real in us.

So Paul says, “Let us present our bodies as a living, holy sacrifice,” because that is what this is about: we are taking our bodies and sanctifying them. The word sanctify means to set apart, consecrate, dedicate something to a single purpose. So each day what we do is die a little more and become a little more sanctified; we consecrate ourselves to a single purpose, which is to please God, to serve God. We no longer serve the world. Our only reason for existing.

What is something sanctified? Something set apart. When the instruments and utensils of the Sanctuary were sanctified, that meant they could not be used for ordinary, everyday purposes. They existed for one thing alone: service in the Sanctuary, in the temple. They were holy objects.

Well, when we enter the way of the Lord, we too present our bodies and sanctify them. We consecrate our bodies to one thing alone and say: I will never again use my body for sinful purposes, for secondary purposes, but will always use it for the service of God, and I will sanctify myself. Then it says, “your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God”—pleasing to God because the only thing that pleases the Lord is holiness. Holiness is what pleases the Lord.

The Bible says that without holiness no one will see the Lord. We must serve the Lord, it says, in the loveliness and beauty of holiness, because that is what pleases the Lord, isn’t it? So we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, sanctified to Him and pleasing to Him, and then it says, “which is your reasonable worship.”

I know that many of us have stumbled over that expression and have not understood what that idea means: that we should present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, which is our reasonable worship. I want to clarify for you once and for all what that idea, “your reasonable worship,” means. What does that strange idea mean?

The word translated into Spanish as racional is logiken. It is a Greek word that means something reasonable, understandable, logical—from which comes the word logiken—or it can also mean spiritual. As the Greek philosophers used that word, logiken referred to that higher dimension of human life: to reason, to thought, to the highest principles, right? There is an element of reason here and an element of spirituality involved in this word logiken, which in this case is translated as racional.

What Paul is saying here, brothers and sisters, is that when we give our lives, our bodies—the sinful and biological part of our being—to the Lord for continual sanctification, and cleanse our lives, Paul says: that is true and logical worship of the Lord.

The word culto in the phrase “your reasonable worship” is latreya, from which comes the word idolatry. It means worship; it means ministering to the Lord. It is what you do when you worship the Lord. We come to the temple, don’t we, to worship the Lord. Paul says: present your lives to the Lord, sanctify yourselves, because that is what constitutes your true worship. That is the idea, isn’t it, behind “your reasonable worship.”

The Spanish translation is correct and equivalent, but somehow it does not let us understand what Paul truly means. Now, when we study the word in the original Greek, we can understand that what Paul is saying here is this: sanctifying yourself, living the kind of life God asks for, continually giving your life to the Lord and purifying yourself—that is your true worship.

Brothers and sisters, what truly pleases the Lord? It is not just our words or our songs. Those are good and they please God, but what truly pleases God, what constitutes our true life of worship and of pleasing the Lord, is our conduct, our holy life, our purification, our growth toward perfection, our commitment to please and worship the Lord every day of our lives. That is our true worship, our reasonable, spiritual worship.

Why does Jesus Christ say that the day is coming when God will seek worshipers in spirit and in truth? Because those are the ones who please the Lord. Those are the worshipers God seeks to worship Him: true worshipers. In other words, many people worship the Lord with their mouths but do not worship Him with their lives and behavior.

So what Paul is saying is: my brothers and sisters, sanctify yourselves, purify yourselves, give your lives to the Lord so that God may work on them and perfect them, because that is what constitutes your true, logical and reasonable worship. What a wonderful passage.

With that we conclude, and it is as though everything comes together and forms a single thought. This wonderful God, who has taken so much time to perfect His plan of salvation and has invested so much in us, deserves the serious and total surrender of our lives: a daily, continual coming before Him to present our whole being, so often used by the carnal nature and the devil as an instrument of unrighteousness, and to ask the Lord to transform it.

And in that effort, in our becoming more and more like Christ, we become true worshipers. That life of total surrender and consecration constitutes our reasonable worship—that is, our true worship, our genuine adoration, our truly pleasing God.

The one who pleases God is not someone who pleases Him only with his mouth, who simply comes to church and worships Him with his mouth, but someone who consecrates himself to the Lord and commits himself to Him to live each day a life that is pleasing to the Lord. That, in fact, is what constitutes our true worship.

Like few others, this passage makes dramatically clear what we truly must do as children of God and how serious the Christian life is when it is truly embraced and its meaning understood. May God grant that through this study—and later we will continue with other things in this wonderful passage—we may clearly understand the serious and great importance of surrendering our lives and living a life of holiness that is pleasing before the Lord.

I hope this study has blessed your life as much as it has blessed mine, and I bless you in the Name of the Lord. Let us commit ourselves to one another to live lives pleasing before God so that we can worship Him as He deserves. May the Lord bless you. I bid you farewell, Pastor Roberto Miranda.