Seven Sacrifices to Joy

Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power...

Thanks so much for taking time out of your day to come and share Coffee Hour with me and take in more of this series, The Seven Sacrifices to Joy.” The good news is we are headed toward the finish line of this series and the series to follow will have you giggling from the inside out for sure! Grab your SOF (strand of faith) and your coffee, hot or cold, and let’s go tie some knots in our faith as we learn more about what it means to offer up our bodies as a sacrifice.

Another definition for bodies, (soma) from the Greek concordance reads: “it is translated ‘slaves.’ In its figurative uses the essential idea is preserved, the complete man.”  Here’s my summation of that translation: I choose to be a slave… to freedom in Christ or to bondage of my flesh. Does that make sense?

Let’s paint a verbal picture of a tug of war. On one side is your physical self, your flesh, and on the other side is your spiritual self, your soul. You may be wondering, well, where’s the mind? Right in the middle and it will follow whatever pulls the hardest! So when the flesh screams for something not so good and contradictory to the spirit, that’s the first tug. And trust me when I say that what the flesh wants, it usually screams for if not given right away and the spirit, well that can tend to be drowned out by the screaming of the flesh if we are not still and listening to its whisper.

Now, the spirit will tug back, and the more it has been nourished, the harder it can pull, allowing your spiritual self to win over the flesh, thereby becoming a slave to Christ. Each victory intensifies the next tug…and the next, and then next, and so on and so on; the good news is that the intensity of each victory increases too and increases our awareness of the next tug, and sometimes before it even happens, because His Spirit within you has increased your awareness, wisdom and discernment.

But then there will be a different tug-of-war, and so on and so forth. Life is full of tug-of-wars, the flesh over the spirit. As soon as we have figured out how to let our flesh win over the body in one air, He moves us into another area that needs refining, pruning, sharpening. Sometimes it feels as though our hands, and hearts, are full of blisters from all the tugging, but can I assure you that staying in the fight to learn how to offer up our bodies as a living sacrifice will help us finish the race!

The next thing I discern from this one verse, this sacrifice of our body, is to be available… and not just on Sundays, or whenever your Sabbath is. This scripture is saying that we are to render to God the use of our bodies as a living sacrifice to Him. Unfortunately, we can be living externally but actually dead…internally and therefore eternally.

In the Old Testament, when the offering was placed upon the altar, it was not to be reclaimed; it was to be consumed before the Lord. In other words, there was no taking it back, no Indian-giving! :-)

Now, while our bodies are not laid upon an altar as was done in the Old Testament, they are still to be a sacrifice offered to God for consumption in the gospel ministry and never to be reclaimed as our own again. I keep hearing that song, “I have decided to follow Jesus; I have decided to follow Jesus; I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back”!

What if we faced each temptation to give into flesh and allowed His Spirit to tug us through and over the victory line? Each victory will lessen the chances of turning back and increase the propensity to offer up our body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto the One who joins us in the tug-of-wars of this life, welcoming us into the next…

Join me tomorrow for the CONCLUSION of this series!

Love,

Evinda