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The Lord Wants Our Sacrificial Service


(Overcomer Wu)

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” -- Romans 12:1

God is building His Glorious Church throughout the world. One may sow, even with his or her own life, others may water, while others reap. God has a place for each one of us to fill in His grand plan of even before time began. There was an early missionary motto some of you may have heard is, "For service or for sacrifice." In actuality, God wants both our service and sacrifice. Hence, I've entitled this discourse: “The Lord Wants Our Sacrificial Service.” We can fully trust the loving heart of God, who foreordained how we can best serve Him according to the gift of grace given to each one of us. The new motto -- “Our Sacrificial Service to the Lord” -- I believe fits all of us who seek to follow in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus, Who Himself had taken the path of ultimate sacrifice of not only losing His physical life, but of suffering the 3 hours on the cross of being separated from God the Father, which were the only times He ever suffered such separation; hence the most painful moments of His life on the earth. God Himself calls us to it through the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, when he beseeches us "by the mercies of God" to present ourselves "a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is [our most] reasonable service” (12:1). While the call is to all, the application will be very personal for each of us. "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me” (Matt 16:24). God repeated this word in Mark 8:34 and Luke 9:23. Voluntarily denying ourselves – our desires, our will, our comfort, our preferences, our goals, our career, and the right to our self in general – of whatever God asks of us personally in order to faithfully serve Him for His good pleasure, should be the most reasonable, even a joyful and a privileged response in the light of Christ’s utmost sacrifice of Himself for us, and the eternal benefits of not only having our debts with God paid, but also made His many sons which are ours as a result.

How we need to approach the throne of grace to receive the mercy and needful grace each day for us to reach the finish line – goal Christ has set for us – without abandoning or compromising our cross. It is easy to pick up the cross for a moment than to carry it to the end, especially when the weight of the cross seems to grow heavier with each step that we take. Blessed is he who endures to the end and “he who keeps My works until the end” (Rev 2:26). Bearing the cross may involve crossing an ocean with the Gospel to some lonely and hostile places where the zeal of the dominant religion of the place is to kill Christians... much like the apostle Paul himself when he was still a Jew; he confessed that “as to zeal, persecuting the church” (Phi 3:6). Of course, we know now-a-days that there are other religions who made it a sports or a means of serving their god by killing Christians. In serving the Lord in some cases of which I am personally well-acquainted with, it means spending one’s life on a wheelchair, handicapped in body with various other ailments while not being bitter towards the Lord or blame Him in anyway, but continue in my service to Him in whatever He has granted me the grace to do as my gift to the Body of Christ. The Lord desires that we all be willing faithful sacrificial servants of Him by offering our ALL, without reservation, to Him as a living sacrifice. Most of us are somewhere in between, we are willing to serve the Lord only faithful to the degree of our comfort zone, but not to the point where it becomes painful either to our physical life, our pocket book, or our other priorities. O Lord, may you break through in all of us that you may have Your way to rule and reign freely in and through us. May we all yield our hearts and our life to You entirely without reservation that we may be able to say sincerely to You, “Make Your home in All our hearts,” which was the prayer of the apostle Paul in Ephesians 3:17.

Please allow me to share with you some stanzas of a hymn I've written back in 1994 when I was sorely tried and the cross I had to bear would have been unbearable to me without the Grace of the Lord to sustain me:

  1. O Jesus Christ, this is my heart's most earnest plea:

    Thou would find a restful dwelling place in me;

    Knowing of Thy boundless love, God's fullness filled I'll be.

  2. Yet to this end, my self Thou must eradicate,

    That Thou may my being wholly saturate;

    Thus my heart would crown Thee as the Only Potentate.

  3. Thou has revealed: my self is destined for the cross;

    For this wretched self is full of baneful dross;

    Thus I fain would take my lot in constant suffer loss.

  4. When through the sorest tribulation I must pass,

    There Thy Spirit always 'round me encompass;

    For Thou show Thy mercy in Thy wisdom unsurpassed.

  5. When through the vale of "naked faith"† Thy Spirit lead,

    'Tis my prayer: That Thou my soul-life do deplete,

    That I'll reach the final goal of one with God complete.


    † An expression used by Mme. Guyon to mean a long journey of desolation aimed at bringing the self to its

    final termination.

It is not just in life’s momentous decisions but in every small, daily matters that we faced with choices. It is those Christian who have truly offered themselves to the Lord as a living sacrifice who is able by the Spirit to mortify the selfish desires and plans in the most trying circumstances of life as well as in our daily lives. Oftentimes, it is a choice between good – better – best. What is it that I need to put aside of personal interests in order to invest more time, talents, energy, and finances for the Lord and the souls He loves and have predestinated to be His children?

Paul pled with the saints in Corinth not to receive the grace of God in vain (2 Cor 6:1) just as the the God's Grace upon him was not in vain (1 Cor 15:10). Praise be to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Who did not consider it in vain to come to earth and suffer and die for us! May the plan, purpose, and will of God be fully realized in and through us by the great sacrifice of His once Only-Begotten Son. Yet, that is dependent upon our willingness to be a faithful in presenting ourselves as a continual, living sacrifices.

God said in the book of Zechariah chapter 8 verse 2, “Thus says the Lord of hosts:‘ I am zealous for Zion with great zeal; With great fervor I am zealous for her.” It was also said of the Lord Jesus: “the zeal of Your House has consumed me” (Jn 2:17). Likewise, the apostle Paul’s great zeal for the Lord and His House/His Kingdom was proof of God’s love in His heart: "The love of Christ constrains us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then we were all dead: and that He [Christ] died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again” (2 Cor.5:14). In the same context, the apostle Paul also reminded us of the solemn word that "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he had done, whether it be good or bad [worthless]” (5:10). How much consideration do we give to the seriousness of this upcoming unavoidable judgment? Of course, our sacrificial service and offering of ourselves to the Lord and His House is best motivated by our love and a zeal for Him and His House, but if not, it is not uncommon in the Bible that many godly characters were outstanding in their service and devotion to the Lord out of the motivation of fear as well... such as Enoch who walked with God for 300 years and was the first to be raptured! I have no time to get into the proving of his faithful walk with God was out of fear at the moment except a hint: the name he gave to his son, who was Methuselah, whose name literally means, when he dies it[referring to the flood] shall come). Sure enough, it was the very year that Methuselah died when the great deluge in Genesis 7, at the time of Noah, came! In short, only as we live as His faithful, self-less, sacrificial servants can we stand before God unashamed in that day!

May we encourage one another to remember these exhortations of Paul in these perilous last days with their many distractions and diversions. In a very subtle ways, we are indeed already living in the perilous times that we were warned by the Scriptures would come (2 Tim 3:1). Those who remember what life was like in the earlier years may either despair of today’s society and the degraded standards and stand hopelessly by in despair. Or we may plunge in zealously to make the most of the freedom and little remaining time and opportunities that the Lord has afforded us for the furtherance of His kingdom and the gospel. One thing we can do above all, is to seek God for His intervention in prayer and labor wholeheartedly to bind the enemy and for the spread of His Kingdom and the fulfillment of His eternal purpose to build His glorious Church on this earth today!

Elisha was bold to ask for a double portion of the Lord’s Spirit that had been on Elijah. Elijah told him he was asking a "hard thing," but it seems God did give it to him (2 Ki 2:9-10). Many servants of the Lord and missionaries have served the Lord with great fervor and sacrifices to the last breath of their physical life. Their zeal seemed to know no bounds in order that God might come in revival power and glorify His Name by accomplishing His great purpose and the grand design for a corporate man to be the expression of God's glory and authority on this earth through the power of the Holy Spirit. How many of us dare to ask for a double portion of God’s Spirit in order to finish the work He has commissioned His people to do in these closing days of time? Well, to ask for the this is not so much a problem, but are we willing to cooperate and carry out what the Holy Spirit is eager to accomplish through our frail earthern vessel is the real question? Because only when we are willing and consecrated to the Lord for Him to use us as He wish in the manner that He desired, sometimes sacrificially, and according to His own plan and purpose, then our prayer for the extra portion of the Spirit will surely be granted!