One of the important aspects or elements of the Christmas season in many countries is the giving or exchanging of presents. We here in Germany still have the privilege of living in a country where abundance (to be perhaps more accurate - an over-abundance) of material things is available and where this year once again many presents are being given and exchanged. The tradition of giving presents at this holiday time is unfortunately also reason for an almost complete of this festive season which really was to have a completely different connotation. Also, many organizations use this time of year to call upon people for donations, often times to use the fact that by the general atmosphere hearts are a bit more soft and receptive to give a present to someone in need for their requests to give to a good cause. However, quite a number of these "presents" or "gifts" are not really "gifts", rather they are a promotional investment in order to prompt some more business in the coming year.
I have thought about some of these points during the last days and weeks repeatedly, and I was – as I readily admit – not very blessed thinking about this. However, God used this situation to bring a really different matter about "giving" and "gifts" to my attention and put something on my heart which was really a wonderful blessing to me. As I thought on some of those things, I realized more and more how wonderful and great our God is and that He, as the Giver of all good gifts, even made room for us to be able to in return give something to Him.
Our heavenly Father is our great, big, wonderful God! He is the Almighty, the Creator of the heavens and the earth. He made everything! Without Him there is nothing! O, that we would think about that for a while and meditate on this! So much in God's creation around us points us really every day in manifold ways to God and reminds us that He is the cause and the originator of life! Without Him, really nothing goes!" And yet, how many men and women hardly ever in any situation think about God … they never see God in anything of their surrounding. For them, there is no God. That is not how it should be!
Romans 1:20.21:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
When we look around us and look to the creation, then this should cause us to turn our hearts to God. We should praise Him and exalt Him, we should give Him the glory and magnify Him in our lives. Our hearts should be full of gratitude and expressions of thanksgiving as we consider all the things which God at all times provides for man.
But, that is not always the case. Even we as Christians, who love God and who desire to serve Him, at times lack and forget to give God the glory and to remain thankful for what He already has given us. Many people have no regard nor respect for God, they are rather continuously concerned with ignoring God and magnifying themselves and to complain all the time. That is not good, and there is really no excuse for such behavior either!
The great problem of man is told in Romans 1: Man does not glorify God as God and is not thankful to God as would be appropriate. This leads to becoming vain in his imaginations and his now foolish heart being darkened so that he finally worships the creation rather than the Creator! We should be thankful to God, and we should glorify Him.
Psalm 29:1–2:
A Psalm of David. Give unto the LORD, O ye mighty, give unto the LORD glory and strength.
Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.
What a tremendous truth is given us in these two verses! They speak of us being able to give something to the LORD! How often do we see ourselves only in the position where we are the ones asking God for something and then receiving something from Him. Here, we are reading about something which we can give Him, we are seeing ourselves in the position of those who are giving something to the LORD.
Worshipping God in the beauty of holiness should be our top priority. God desires worship, He wants to have undivided and unlimited worship of His creation. To worship God should be our greatest concern. There are surely a number of so-called good causes, some also in the name of Christianity. But, all of that can only take 2nd place compared to worshipping God – worship of God must absolutely have pre-eminence over everything else.
God desires our hearts, He wants our all. And He deserves it, for He is the Highest, He is the Greatest, the Almighty, our heavenly Father. He should always occupy first place in our lives; nothing should ever take His place.
Psalm 96:7–9:
Give unto the LORD, O ye kindreds of the people, give unto the LORD glory and strength.
Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts.
O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.
Again we can read of giving glory due unto God's name and of worshipping in the beauty of holiness.
We now, by faith in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice, are placed in the position where we now can worship God in beauty of holiness. We become now God's children and belong to His family.
We also read that they during the times of the Old Testament were to bring gifts and come unto God's courts – a reference to the sacrificial services and the worship conducted at the tabernacle and later on at the temple. The Israelites brought their tithes as offerings and gifts to the temple, and at various occasions they gathered at the temple in Jerusalem in order to glorify God and to worship Him there.
We today are not dependent on a certain place – such as Jerusalem – when we want to worship God and when we want to bring our gifts to Him. We can do so at any time and at any place. Our greatest gift which we have is our life which we can dedicate to God as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to Him.
Romans 12:1:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
This tremendous encouragement by the apostle Paul, by which he (as inspired by God) admonished the believers at Rome, is also of importance to us. This encouragement is applicable for all believers in Christ, for all members of the church of God, and it is valid for all believers at any place and during all times of the duration of the church.
We have first received from God as God has shown us His great love, grace and mercy in Christ when we were yet sinners. None of the believers is excluded, not one has brought himself by own works into a special position with God, not one has because of own works or own endeavors saved himself. No, it is due to God's great mercy which He extended to all of us according to His good pleasure that we could be saved.
This mercy of God is now then the basis, the reason, the encouragement or whatever else may be needed to get us to be admonished to live according to our calling as sons of God. God has reconciled us to Himself and has made us to be His children, and by His working in Christ we were made nigh to Him. God's working has made us to be His children and made us to be of God's household. What do we now want to do?
The appropriate answer to God's gracious working and his love is service – worshipping Him!
But we must be careful not to try and take the steering wheel once again into our own hands and to devise that which may agree with our imaginations but not with God's plan. That would not be very good either. God's Word helps us, and these words of Paul declare unto us what is such proper and reasonable service to God.
Our reasonable service or worship concerns us as persons, as human beings; this service is not concentrated on some products, things or stuff which we bring to God. We bring OURSELVES as a living sacrifice to God, as it reads, "that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice".
The word "bodies" is most likely used in the figure of speech Synecdoche, by which a part of the person (the body) actually stands for the whole being. We now, as sons of God, are living beings of body, soul and spirit. These three as a whole make up "US" as persons; the body of itself is not a living person, the soul by itself does not exist as a living person, and in the same manner the spirit is not existent apart from body and soul. We cannot really give our bodies alone as a living sacrifice and "keep back" soul and spirit. Therefore, this is obviously to be understood as a figure of speech, when we read here that we should present our "bodies" as a living sacrifice: "body" denotes the whole person.
Furthermore we have another figure of speech in the expression "present as a sacrifice", for here now our lives are compared to the offering of a sacrifice, obviously relating it to the sacrifices which were known to all. An essential part of a sacrifice is also that the sacrifice is no longer the property of him who is offering it, but now belongs to God to whom is was offered.
This aspect is also true of us as believers in Christ Jesus.
1 Corinthians 6:19,20:
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.
These verses show us that we now are no longer our own, that we do not belong to ourselves any more. God has paid a price in Christ for us, Jesus has paid the necessary ransom for our redemption with his precious blood.
1 Peter 1:17–19:
And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear:
Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers;
But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:
What tremendous truths these are, and how they explain to us some more about the mercy of our God which we read about in Romans 12:1. God did not have to do what He did – He could also have done differently, for what we really deserved as sinners was completely different.
Romans 6:23:
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The wages of sin is death – that is what we as sinners had deserved, that is what should have come our way. But God, out of His great love, did not let this come on us, rather He considered a different possibility: Mercy! God showed mercy toward us in Christ, in that He provided His only Son as sacrifice for our sin and in that He let His Son suffer the "righteous wages" for our sins on our behalf, and by this He then could give us as a gracious gift the gift of life.
We are bought with the blood of Jesus, redeemed and we have become the property of God. We now belong to Him! Therefore we should now live as it pleases Him. We should live as Paul said so that we praise God with our body – once again it is obvious that "body" means our whole being while we live in this body as a person. Our whole life should be to the glory of God and should bring Him praise and honor.
As we can see from these passages, our basis or foundation for being able to give anything to God is the sacrifice of Christ. We now then can give our lives to Him since He has purchased us with the precious blood of Christ.
Romans 6:11–13:
Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.
Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
Once upon a time we were under the power of sin and could not but fulfill the lusts of the flesh and live in the vanity of our minds. But in Christ, something has drastically changed regarding our situation: When we confessed Christ and believed on him, we "have died to sin". We are now "dead" to sin, we are therefore free from sin's power. Sin has no right to us and really also no power or authority over us.
However, it is necessary that "we reckon ourselves" as such, that we think this way and believe in our hearts accordingly and act in harmony with our faith. If we continue to allow sin to have any room in our hearts and if we grant our old man nature any room in our walk, by not reckoning that we really have died to sin, then we will continue to be under the dominion of sin and we will live in a way which will not glorify God and be to His praise.
We can see from these verses in Romans 6, that it is our job to now make the decisions in our hearts with the righteousness God has given us and the power which He has bestowed upon us to no longer serve sin but rather to live to God in Christ Jesus. The Word of God addresses us with a command which we should and can obey, "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body …" This we could still do, why else would we be encouraged differently? Furthermore it then says, "… that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof." Once again, we are encouraged to something – actually to an act of "disobedience"! For once, we are encouraged "to be disobedient", and we are well advised to not obey sin "in the lusts thereof"
Instead we are to give our members, to give our bodies, as children of God to give ourselves to the service of God. We should give Him our lives, give Him our members as " instruments of righteousness". We give ourselves to God, we dedicate our lives to Him. We give Him honor and glory in all things and live according to His will a life which indeed then is a living sacrifice pleasing to Him.
May we during this season of the year, during those weeks of the advent season and the holidays themselves think of our reasonable service when we read of "gifts", "presents" etc. God has given us life so that we in turn now can give it to Him in service and worship to bring praise, honor and glory to our God. Let us give Him what He deserves, and what is expressed so wonderfully in the title of a book by Oswald Chambers: