Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Now the series, as you well know, is on body language. We spend, Hal Boyle says—whoever Hal Boyle is, I have no idea, but I'm quoting him correctly—Hal Boyle says we spend only about 25 minutes a day in articulated speech. The rest of the time we communicate by waving, grimacing, grunting, frowning, shrugging, and long memos. 25 minutes a day in articulated speech. I don't think he knows too many women.

And yet, when you really think about it, communication is where an awful lot of problems lie. There's more ways to tell a husband you're displeased with him—I think we all know that—more ways than chewing him out. Silence will do it. Have you ever sat shrouded in silence, covered in prickles, enjoying a pout? And you haven't had to say a thing. I remember my husband coming home once and saying, "Is there anything wrong?" and I said, "Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope." You can do it. Even while you're saying one thing, your body is saying another.

There's more ways to tell a teenager you're hurt than yelling at her. A glare will do it. I well remember my teenagers coming to worship here at church and my daughter saying to me, "Mother, would you mind sitting behind a pillar or something? You're always glaring at me across the church." Even though I was not next to her whispering in her ear, I could tell her exactly what I was feeling about her behavior as she whispered to her girlfriend in the pew and didn't listen up to Daddy's message.

There's more ways to communicate hostility than argument. You and I know that. Crossed arms, a back, walking away, stamping our foot. And conversely, we can use our bodies to communicate good things as well as bad, even good news, even gospel news. And of course, the word gospel means good news. What are we saying to our world as Christian women through our body language?

Would you like to turn with me please to Romans chapter 12, verse 1? Romans chapter 12, verse 1. Today we're going to be looking at the body, which of course incorporates all the other things we'll be looking at: the eyes and the nose and the mouth, the tongue, and the ears, and all of the rest. So it's very fitting that we just think about the body as a whole today. Romans 12:1 is where we'll be staying, just one verse. "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship."

One verse, but loaded with things that you and I can learn. I want to ask three questions basically. First of all, we're going to look at why. Why should I present my body to God? Well, the answer is there, I've read it to you already. "Therefore, I urge you, brothers"—Paul is speaking—"in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies." Why should I offer my body? Because of the mercies of God. Now, what does that mean?

Let's think about application. Whenever you read the scriptures, you read revelation and then application should follow. What does it mean? What did it mean to the people the writer or the speaker were speaking to, and then what does it mean to me? Three things: what does it mean? What did it mean then? What does it mean now? Often the hardest of those three steps is to bring what it meant then into our modern context and keep the spirit of it and the sense of it. And that's why there are many interpretations of things, and that's why people who are evangelical scholars seem to take different views of things.

Perhaps they all agree on what it says and perhaps they all agree on what it meant then. The hard thing is bringing it up to date. What does it mean in my kitchen? What does it mean in my life? What does it mean in my society? Because let's face it, there are a lot of things that aren't written about in the Bible. Abortion, as such, is not written about in the Bible. Paul does not write a letter, one whole letter on abortion. But he has a lot to say about life and the value of it, and so we take the essence and the teaching of the scriptures and we apply it to our modern-day society.

So why should I offer my body? Well, the application comes in chapter 12. The application of what? There's one little word, did you notice it? "Therefore, I urge you." The chapter starts off with this word. It's not a very important word, you say "therefore." I mean, what's therefore there for? And that's a good question. What is a therefore there for? Whenever you see a therefore, you should ask what it's there for. Because it's a link word. And what it's doing is linking what has gone to what is about to happen in the Bible.

So what has gone so I can apply it? Well, what has gone is Romans chapter 1 through 11. And in a sentence or two, the central message of chapters 1 to 11, which I must now apply—therefore, I must do something about—is capsulized in chapter 3 of Romans. If you'd just like to turn to that, I'll read you a few verses from it. Romans 3:21 is the heart of the epistle. It's the doctrine which must now be applied, the revelation so we can come off it to the application. This is the heart of the Romans epistle.

"But now a righteousness from God apart from law has been known, to which the law and the prophets testify. This righteousness or righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There's no difference for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, or the standard that God has set, which is perfection. And are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a sacrifice, or if you like, as a living sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood. He did this to demonstrate His justice because in His forbearance He'd left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate His justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus."

What does all that mean? Let me try and take it and give you four things it's really saying in language that we can grasp quickly so we can go on. The heart of the doctrine or the revelation of this epistle is that all have sinned. We are not perfect. You're not perfect, I'm not perfect. Every little baby that's born is not perfect. We are born with a propensity to sin, a wantingness to do the wrong thing instead of to do the right thing. All of us: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. We all sin at different levels, but we all sin.

What does that mean? Well, there isn't anybody perfect except Jesus. He was the only perfect person. So as we look around to measure ourselves, don't measure yourself by someone else, however good or bad they are. Measure yourself by Jesus. Are you as good as Jesus? No, says the Bible, you have come short, all of you. God is just. He must do the just thing. He has rules. He says, "Break the rules, you have to be punished." We have rules as moms: "Do this, and if you don't, you'll have to be punished." God has rules. We're made in His image and we've all broken His rules. So He has to punish us. He has to do the right thing.

Why does He have to do the right thing? Because He's right. He's righteous. He's holy. He's perfect. And a perfect, holy, just judge has to do the right thing. So He looks all around the earth and He says, "Well, they've all sinned. Oh dear, they've all broken the laws. What am I going to do? I have to punish them. But I don't want to punish them because I love them. So I will come to Earth in a human body and will present that body to myself and accept my own sacrifice, if you like."

God came to Earth in the person of Jesus Christ and He took the punishment that He should have meted out to you and me for breaking His rules. And that's what the cross is all about. And that's what all of this means that I've just read to you in language that perhaps for some of us is hard to understand unless we take it apart. All have sinned. God is just. There was a substitute, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, God Himself. God bore our sins in His own body on the tree, Jesus Christ.

If you just put God's name in there, you'll understand that God was at Calvary doing something about us, all of us who'd broken His rules so that we could be forgiven. So that He had punished a substitute or someone, for He said, "Break the rules and somebody has to be punished," and He took the punishment for us so that He can now justify those who believe in Jesus. So if we will come to Him and say, "Thank you, God, for making my salvation possible," then we can know that He forgives us. And being a Christian is really being a forgiven sinner, someone that knew they'd sinned, knew God was just and must condemn them for that and punish them, and yet looks at the cross of Christ and realizes that God said something there.

What did He say? In body language, He said this: "Here am I, God, crossed out, a living sacrifice shedding my blood for you." He didn't have any strength left to say too much when He was on the cross, but you don't have to listen to what a person says to understand what they're saying. Look at Him. Christ's body language said, "I love you. I am doing this to make it possible for you to have a relationship with God so the sin that has separated us can be taken away."

You know, there's you, if you like, sitting on my hand, and all your sin is in between and there's something in between you and God. And you've known it. You haven't known what it was, but God seems far away and unreal. Well, on Calvary, God took the sin and placed it on Christ His Son, and together the Trinity did something that made it possible for us to get together. And now we need to reach up and take the hand of God and come close and say, "Be my Father, be my Savior, forgive me." And He will.

Now the essence of 1 through 11 of Romans is that. The application is because of those mercies—that's the mercy of God that we're reading about—"Because of the mercies of God, I beseech you that you present your bodies a living sacrifice." Now this doesn't mean we pay for our own sin, that we are crucified for our own sin, that there is anything I in my body or out of my body could do to make myself right with God. It means because He has offered His body a living sacrifice, what mercy! I am so overwhelmed with gratitude at the grace of God and the love of God that I willingly, joyfully present my body back to Him, a living sacrifice.

And of course, I am allowed not to be crucified, apart to crucify to my own selfishness. I am allowed to live. I do not have to do what Jesus Christ did for me. He did that for me. It is done once for all. But what I now do in gratefulness is present my life back to Him. Now my life is lived in a body. I mean a body. We do not and cannot live the Christian life out of our bodies. We live the Christian life with our bodies. And you know, I don't think some Christians have ever got hold of that. That's what I'm going to talk about.

So the application of what has gone before: He gave His life for me, I give my life to Him. I can't wait, I can't wait. Here is my life. But you can't offer a life without the body. Some people try. Some people think that Christianity is mystical only, or relational only, or prayer only, but even prayer cannot be prayed without a body to pray it in. So we are one person: body, soul, and spirit.

If you want to see how body language shows this, the person who wrote this will show you how. Paul, or Saul as he was then, in Acts chapter 9, if you turn to it quite quickly—in Acts chapter 9 we'll see Paul's body language and what happened to him as he got hold of the Romans epistle, which he of course wrote. As he got hold of that in reality in his life, Acts chapter 9. Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and he asked him for letters to the synagogues, so if he found any who belonged to the way—which is what the Christians were called, that was their movement, they weren't called Christians at this point, they were called followers of the way.

So if he found anyone that was a Christian, if you like, whether man or woman, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. What was Paul or Saul's body language saying? Well, his mouth was breathing out murderous threats. What were his hands doing? Dragging off men and women and shoving them in prison, and worse, they say, torturing and killing them. What were his feet doing? Running to Damascus to chase more Christians. He'd gobbled up all those he could find in Jerusalem. Amazing.

And then something happened. We know what happened, don't we? "Who are you, Lord?" he said as the light shone around him and he dropped on his face in front of God. "I'm Jesus, whom you're persecuting. Now get up, go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." "Who are you, Lord?" "I'm Jesus." What happened then? Amazing. Look at his body language, verse 19. Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus after his conversion. At once, he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God.

Did he do that without his body? No, he used his mouth. All those who heard him were astonished and said, "Isn't this the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on His name? Hasn't he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?" He grew more and more powerful. He baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the very Christ. What was he doing with his feet? Following Jesus. There's a very interesting little verse in verse 25. I just noticed he had to get out of the city in the end. He became so dangerous to the Pharisees' cause, not to the church's cause, and they had to help him escape.

So they lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall, very exciting escape, or maybe very humiliating. Who did that? Verse 25, his followers. I mean, he'd only just found Christ, he'd discovered he was wrong and had the humility and size to say it: "I was wrong. All my life I've had this religion that I thought was right, now I've discovered I'm wrong." And he began to follow Jesus and immediately he has followers following him, who actually help him to escape. It didn't take long.

So he has caused other people's feet to follow Jesus, not only his. And you see his body language is saying all these things. It's an incredible thing that of course his feet took him all over the world as the great apostle, a missionary to the Gentiles. It's because of him we are here. We are Gentiles and it's because of this man whose body language changed because of his conversion to Jesus Christ that we sit here today. We find him in Acts 16—you don't need to look at it—with his feet in the stocks for the sake of Christ. We hear him in another place in one of his writings saying, "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus. I bear in my body the marks."

So if you want an example of body language, you've got it in Jesus hanging on the cross. The "I" crossed out, body language: "This I will do, present my body a living sacrifice, to do whatever is necessary because I love these people." If you want it in apostle, Paul, every time you read in the Acts the Apostles, look for his body language and see the change and what we can say to our world one way and what we can say to our world by what we do in our body another way.

But there's another more modern story I'd like to tell you as an illustration of this application of this revelation. And that's the story of CT Studd. When I was converted to Jesus Christ as a student at Cambridge University hundreds and hundreds of years ago now, I assure you, I was totally unchurched. I had no idea what anything was about. If I had come to a meeting like this, I would have sat there in one of those chairs and thought, "This makes no sense at all. What's it all about?" But then I wouldn't have even come even if I'd been invited.

After I was converted with a sort of dramatic conversion, not akin to the Apostle Paul—who would dare to say that?—but as dramatic an occurrence as he had in his life. Some of us are not converted to Christ with a dramatic occurrence, I happened to be. And there in hospital, seriously sick, I was faced with the gospel for the first time and committed my life to Christ. The girl that led me to the Lord Jesus began to ply me with Christian books which I had never read and didn't know existed. She said, "I want you to read a doctrine book a week, I want you to learn so many verses a week, I want you to read a missionary book a week, and I want you to write a report on all the books I give you to read."

I remember getting six through the mail and I was in college at the time trying to become a teacher, so it was hard to do my theological homework as well as everything else. But you didn't know Jenny. I'd better do my homework by the time she met with me the next week. And one of the books, the first book she ever gave me—and I was still sort of recovering from my spell in hospital, sitting in my professor's little room with the gas fire turned on, with my feet propped up and wrapped round with my prof's rug—I picked up this book, "The Life and Work of CT Studd."

He came from Cambridge, too. I could see him along with all the black-gowned young men that I was a part of at that time. Brilliant young student. His father was a tea planter in India, came back and raised horses. His horse won the Grand National horse race, the greatest horse race they say in the world. Then DL Moody visited England and this man, wealthy, aristocracy, got saved or got converted or came to faith in Christ or was born again or whatever phrase you want. Anyway, he got it.

He began immediately, the father of CT Studd, to hold gospel meetings, and in the words of CT Studd, "Everyone in our house had a dog's life a bit until they were converted." He had three sons, did this man, this wealthy man who'd come to the Lord through DL Moody's ministry. CT Studd was one of them. All of them went to Eton, which is the top school you can go to in England, and to Cambridge, which I think is the top university.

On top of that, CT Studd was England's greatest, they say greatest ever, cricketer. He led our English cricket team. He was a mighty sportsman and his other brothers, incidentally, also had high honors in sports, but he was the most brilliant. He had gone up to Cambridge, having been converted through his father's ministry, but it wasn't until he heard DL Moody himself that he committed his life fully to the Lord. His father died very suddenly two years after his conversion, left a vast fortune, which CT sat down and in one afternoon disposed of every penny, most of which went to the Salvation Army actually, some to DL Moody and others to charities.

And so rising up from the table penniless, he said, "Well, now I suppose I'd better go to the mission field." And together with seven other of the most brilliant Cambridge students of all time, they became what was called the Cambridge Seven. And they went to the CIM Mission to China together to win China for Christ. The newspaper media of the day—every headline in every paper in England and some around the world—said, "Never before in the history of missions has so unique a band set out to labor in the foreign field."

It was true. His life was a huge blessing. I sat and read the book all day by that little gas fire in my beautiful old English college and I was moved. I read that he read a message on a missionary door: "Cannibals want missionaries." CT liked that sort of message: "Cannibals want missionaries." Then he read that there were thousands and thousands of tribal people in Central Africa who had never even had one person to tell them of Jesus. Nobody had ever gone. "It had to be done," he said. He wrote poetry, the most awful poetry you can imagine, but I still remember most of it. "I want... some like to live within the sound of church or chapel bell, I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell." That's CT Studd.

He wrote a little book called "The Chocolate Soldier." He lambasted Christians who didn't know how to stand up. They melted when the heat was on. He had very graphic ways even though he had this brilliant mind, he brought it right down to where it was. And so he went to China. He came home a museum of diseases, his doctor said. And then he went to India and he came home with two museums of diseases in his body. And then his wife, who was also totally broken in health, stayed home for the next 16 years while CT went to Africa and opened up the interior of Africa with a 19-year-old boy who became his son-in-law.

And I tell you, it is some story to live and survive the white man's grave in the middle of Africa. He did it. And he did it at a place called Ibambi, where Dr. Helen Roseveare many years later served God and went through her own living sacrifice as she was captured by rebels and tortured and raped. And so you see, here I had an example of a man who, to a young student who had just come to Christ herself, captured and challenged me.

And of course, the text on his tombstone and across his life was this: "If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him. If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him." That was one reason I joined as a student what was called the Cambridge 70. Billy Graham came in my day and age and the Christian Union said, "Wouldn't it be wonderful? 100 years ago, DL Moody came and the Cambridge Seven changed the world. Wouldn't it be wonderful if 70 students could feel the call of God upon their life for full-time commitment?"

And I am one of those 70. And it's through the influence of a man who lived a long time ago. Read missionary biographies. Read "Peace Child," one of the greatest books, bestsellers of all times. Read that book and you will find your heart responding. So why should I present my body? Because He did. "If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him." My body language should reflect that. CT's body language surely reflected it.

So, second question. What should I present? A body. A body, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God. The presentation: what is a body? I'll give you my husband's definition. I think it's as best as anybody else's or maybe better. A body is a physical entity by which a spiritual being gets around in a physical environment. A body is a physical entity by which a spiritual being—the real me, the soul, the personality—gets around in my physical environment. God has given us a vehicle to drive. God has given us a bus to drive, a car to drive. This is it. God has given us a tent to live in, a picture Paul has in another place.

But the body is a physical entity. "A body has thou prepared for me," said Jesus to God in eternity. A body. What sort of a body? A smiling Jewish body with Jewish hands attached to strong Jewish carpenter's arms. What did Jesus do with it? He walked over rugged Jewish terrain. He didn't go far. Most of us have probably been further than Jesus Christ went in His lifetime in His body that God had prepared for Him. Now He gets around in His body, which is the church, because remember, a body is a physical entity by which a spiritual Christ gets around in a physical environment.

But I'm not going to muddy the waters today with getting into the body as a picture of the church. I'm talking about this body today: the temple of us, the Holy Spirit and our own soul and personality. We are not just body. In fact, the world says body, soul, and spirit. God says spirit, soul, and body, but they are all one. Let's get it in perspective. The body is dignified and glorified by the incarnation. God could have come in any form: as an angel, as a god, as something that none of us have ever seen or imagined. But He didn't.

Something happened in a woman's womb. As I once said, what would have happened if someone would have aborted Jesus? He chose a woman's body. Incredible. And He dignified and glorified the human body by doing that. It isn't the most important, but it's certainly not unimportant. Paul knew that there were Greeks around when he said these sort of things, and he knew that the Greeks believed that because the body did evil things, they believed the body itself was evil. This runs counter to all scripture. It runs counter to all scripture. It's salvation that makes the difference between what the body does. I showed you that in the body language of Paul who had been Saul.

Sin desecrated the temple, the body became defiled and polluted, but the body is redeemed flesh secondly. First of all, the body is a physical entity. Secondly, the body is redeemed flesh or can be. It's what happens when the Holy Spirit comes into my body and begins to motivate my body to say different things that matters. So a deprecation of the body is not right. So many people today getting into all these weird religions where they say the thing to do is to get out of the body. Why? Because the body is evil. The body does evil things. But the body can be that wonderful communication as we get around in our physical environment.

The body is integral in the personhood of man from the outset. Now, there will be a dissolution of this body because of sin, which is abnormal, and there will be a new body, whatever that will be like, in heaven. But the body is very important. Paul says more about this body than an awful lot of people do in the Bible. In fact, I just gathered all the direct quotes and there are hundreds of them. Paul talks about this body. He put high premium on what we do in this body and what this body does: where it takes us, how it behaves. And we will be taking that to bits in the days that come with the eyes and the ears and the lips and getting into the details of it.

Sanctification must be within the scope of the body. Sanctification must bring the body within its scope. Sanctification must embrace the physical, holiness, what we do. Now, if you want to see a little bit—and we don't have time to read all the references—but just turn to Romans 6 quickly and I'll show you something here. Romans chapter 6, verse 11: "Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your"—where, spirit and soul? No—"in your mortal body so you obey its evil desires. Do not offer the parts of your body to sin as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who've been brought from death to life. Offer the parts of your body to Him as instruments of righteousness, for sin shall not be your master because you are not under the law, but under grace."

What a wonderful message we have if there's a part of our body giving us trouble because we are not or cannot control it and it is doing things we know very well. Then the Holy Spirit can give us the power not to offer that particular instrument to evil to do those things, that part of the body, but to offer it to God. And so Paul has a lot of things to say directly about the body and its instruments to us.

The body is to be a living sacrifice. The Jews thought of the dead sacrifice. Here we think about the living sacrifice, and the picture is taken straight from the burnt offering, which was the continual sacrifice. And the word living is continual; it has the connotation of living on and on and on and going on and on and on, being and doing. And so we are to offer our bodies, our whole persons, but certainly our body to be involved in a continual service. It's going to be costly because a sacrifice is a sacrifice. It's costly to do things with your body for God. It doesn't cost too much sometimes to do things with your mind or your spirit; sit around and do a lot. But the actual practicality of your body getting up and doing something is a costly business. Can cost you sleep, it can cost you trauma and trouble and energy and bruises and hunger and thirst and all sorts of things. But a sacrifice is a sacrifice.

And this body must be offered to God as this living sacrifice. Now the problem is the living sacrifice usually keeps crawling off the altar. Maybe if we were a dead sacrifice, we wouldn't have all the temptations to quit doing and being for everybody. I don't know. I remember that very definitely in my young missionary days of feeling that the mission had bound me up and put me on the altar because my husband was away all the time, and I thought that wasn't very fair. They've offered me as a living sacrifice on their altar.

I was talking to somebody yesterday and she said, "What are you going to talk about tomorrow?" and so I was telling her. She said, "Oh boy, should I have just come from a situation where there's a family and an elderly person needs caring for? The whole family got together and they asked me to come in and counsel them because that was her job—she counseled whether elderly dying people should go home or not, was the family able to cope."

So she said, "It was one of those things and I went along," and she said they said, "Well, thanks for coming, but we've sort of sorted it out. We've decided that she will look after the elderly relative." What were they doing? They were offering her body as a living sacrifice. Now maybe it was right that she, whoever she was, offered her body to do that, but we mustn't offer anybody else's body. I think Christians are very good at this. Whose body do you think you're offering? We offer whose body? Your body. My body. I'm responsible for what I do in my body. I'm not responsible for what you do. I can give you opportunity to offer your body as a living sacrifice, but you have to do it. Think of Abraham. He offered his son as a living sacrifice.

You say, "Well, there you are, you're contradicting yourself." No, who did he offer? Isaac. Who was Isaac? A strong, robust 17-year-old strong young man. And who was Abraham? An old geezer, weak at that point. He could not have offered Isaac if Isaac had not decided to offer himself. So there's two things here. Of course, we are to give other people opportunity, but we must not presume. Yours is the decision and it will never work unless you get the privilege and responsibility that because of the mercies of God, you are to offer yourself in this living, costly, sacrificial lifestyle for Jesus Christ.

This will be a holy sacrifice. What does that mean? Set apart for God. Holy means whole; it means clean, without blemish. The sacrifices had to be offered without blemish. Doesn't mean you've got to be clean before you offer your body to God, doesn't mean you've got to be perfect or none of us would be doing anything. But it does mean there's to be no known or unconfessed sin in your life. And if that's set as far as you know, then we say, "Well, as much as I know of me, Lord, here I am. Here is my life, take it." If Jesus knows that, let me tell you, He will respond to it. If you have presented as an act of faith your whole self, your body, as a living sacrifice, I can tell you without equivocation, He will not say, "Well no thank you, keep it." He will say, "Thank you very much," and take it. And that's scary. That really is scary, but He will.

And this will be acceptable to Him. What's acceptable to Him? Holiness. Do you know how women need to be accepted? Do you know how they're running around trying to feel accepted? I was in Cincinnati on Monday meeting with the Bengals' wives. Now you know probably who they are—I thought it was Mr. and Mrs. Cat or something, I didn't realize this was a football team, Cincinnati Bengals—and these were the wives of the football players until I was staying in the big star's home. And I turned around when I heard this voice say, "Hello, Jill," just as sort of a normal sort of voice, but living in somebody, I tell you. I have never in my life seen such a huge man. He is the biggest man on the team, I tell you. I just said, "Oh, hello."

It was amazing. And all the beds in their house, I'm sure if he wants to sleep anywhere, he could sleep in them. I could have run around the bed and had my three-mile run. It was an amazing home and amazing people, wonderful people, new believers. And then I had the privilege of speaking to 25 of the women of that team and the coaches' wives and the owner's wife and—I had a wonderful day. They had never been to anything quite like that before and neither had I.

I shared the day with a wife who is still married to a famous football player who used to play for the Miami Dolphins when they won three Super Bowls. And she is now full-time ministering to sports people with her husband. And she gave her testimony and I did the teaching. We were there from 9 till 4 and we just kept talking. She really gave me a lot of good quotes, but one I asked her if I could use. She said that when her husband was this big star of the best team in football, she used to go behind the scenes and wait for him to come out of the locker room.

And she said all the men would come out and there'd be this mass of little boys and big boys all waiting for autographs. And she was struggling very much with her self-image because her identity at that point was in her husband. Who was she? Nobody apart from being his wife. And so she stood there feeling very miserable and everyone kept saying, "Oh who's that? Oh, that's the quarterback or that's the linebacker," and so they'd run up and get the autograph. And in the end, there was hardly anybody left and she was still waiting for her husband to come through the door.

And this little nine-year-old boy turned around after getting his autographs and he looked at her and he came up with his pencil poised and he said, "Are you anybody?" And she said, "No, I really don't think or feel that I am. I'm nobody. I just happen to be married to this man. My identity's in him." And she felt like nobody. She wanted to be accepted, so she dressed this way. Her body language said she wanted to be accepted. Do you ever see women that want to be accepted? Watch their body language. Watch what they say, watch what they wear, watch where they go in that body.

Well, she found Jesus. She found that God accepted her. What's acceptable to God? Offering Him a holy, clean life. And in that, she found her identity because if her husband dies, her identity or she doesn't die. If her children leave, she doesn't die. She has acceptance with God and therefore can accept herself. So she's able to give her body as a living sacrifice now. And it is a sacrifice to come from where they have financially to living by faith, caring about the wives of the pro world, which is not an easy thing to do. And she is another living example of somebody that has given her body a living, active sacrifice.

So, how are we doing? Are we presenting our bodies a living, holy sacrifice? Well, how do we do it lastly? How do we do it? We enlist the mind. It's a rational thing. We do this; it is your reasonable—and the word is rational or worshipful—service. And there are differences of opinion which it means. The word itself could mean either. By giving my body practically and physically to God to use as He wills, to take Him where He wants to go, I am doing spiritual service. Spiritual service is not singing hymns alone. Spiritual service is not having your quiet time. Spiritual service, worshipful service is described in Romans 12 as presenting your old body to God.

Maybe this sounds really weird to some of you, but I think some of you have been living your Christianity without your body. I heard somebody the other day say, "I love little children." Then why don't you take that body of yours into the nursery and show by your body language you mean what you say? Right? That's what I mean. "Therefore honor God with your body," 1 Corinthians 6:20 says. It's got to be rational. You've got to enlist your mind. You've got to sit there and think: how much of my body is involved in conscious sacrificial service of God on a Sunday? Or what's my body doing the rest of the week?

And this, the Bible says, is reasonable. Why is it reasonable? You say, "But that's unreasonable! Absolutely unreasonable! Why should God have all of me?" Well, it's reasonable, remember, because of the mercies of God. "I beseech you," says Paul. It's the heart of a shepherd. Because of what God has done for you, then present your body a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your rational, reasonable service, which is your spiritual worship.

Let's pray together. Perhaps some of you are saying, "Well, I don't know how to present my body to God. It sounds such a weird concept to me. I've never heard anything like this." And others of you, of course, have never even realized that the mercies of God had something to do with you. Maybe in the quietness, you'd like to just say, some of you: Jesus, I never really realized you were God and you gave your life for me. Therefore, no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for you. Here is my soul, spirit, and body. Forgive me. Forgive me for what I have done in and with my body up to this point in my life. Cleanse me from my sin. Be my Savior. Teach me what the mercies of God are all about so that my living, joyful, active, consecrated service may be language to a world that is tired and jaded, communicating the life there is to be known in Christ.

Dear Lord, we realize that this sacrifice that we've talked about today from Romans 12 should be a practical response to the mercies of God. We've no idea what this will mean, but as best as we now know how, some of us would like to give you ourselves, and particularly our bodies, right now. To yield our bodies as Paul tells us to, and the instruments of those bodies as instruments of righteousness. Teach us in the coming days exactly what this means in practical terms so that our body language will communicate our Christ to our world. Amen.