Is Your Job a Living Sacrifice?

From Gospel Translations

Audio Transcript

The aim of Romans 12:1–2 is that all of bodily life — everything you do with your bodies — all of life be worship. See that? “Present your bodies as living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

The goal of these two verses is that you find the way of life at work and your home that makes Christ look as valuable as he really is. That’s what worship is. Worship is an expression, a display of the worth of all that God is for us in Christ.

So when your bodily life, what you do with your hands, your feet, your arms, your tongue, your eyes, your ears — when all of that becomes worship, it becomes a way of displaying the value, the worth of Christ. So that’s the point of these verses. Paul wants to build on eleven chapters of theology and turn your life into doxology [worship]. It sounds like doxology, it looks like doxology, smells like doxology.

If you don’t know how to do that at work, if your work feels like the kind of work where that is an absolutely inconceivable idea, there are two possible problems.

One is you have the wrong job, but that’s probably not the case. It’s probably that Romans 12:2 isn’t happening to the degree that it should. Verse two is the means by which verse one comes about.

Your life becomes a worship to God, it becomes a manifestation of the worth and value of Jesus when you’re not conformed to the world and all their values, but you’re transformed by the renewing of your mind so that the will of God becomes precious to you, and a joy to you, and you find yourself living a lifestyle of love and sacrifice, and Christ-exalting standards that cause the world to recognize his reality and his beauty and his value.

So, it’s probably not that you’re in the wrong job. It’s just that we have a lot to do in order to pursue what it means to be renewed in our minds.