Hebrews 13:15 “Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise–the fruit of lips that confess his name.”

These words are taken from the letter to the Hebrews, and these Jewish believers would have been familiar with the bloody sacrifice of animals in the regular worship life at the temple. Those sacrifices did not benefit the Lord in any way. He didn’t need these animals for himself. They didn’t serve the neighbors of the worshipers, except for the meat that was given to the priests to support their families. The sacrifices themselves didn’t even pay for sin, though they did preach the message that sin deserved death, and that God would accept a substitute and grant his forgiveness.

Those sacrifices all came to an end with Jesus. He gave himself as the ultimate sacrifice, the one that really did dispose of our sins. Through him, then, we offer God a different kind of sacrifice–one that isn’t a payment, but a free and thankful response. Hebrews describes it as a “sacrifice of praise.” It is a sacrifice that magnifies God’s name, that proclaims his unparalleled love for us and honors him for his saving work.

What does that mean? What will we do? Offering God a sacrifice of praise is more than what we say with our lips. We bring God praise when we live in a way that shows our hearts have been transformed by his love. That’s not the generic “niceness” and politically correct tolerance our world celebrates. This is the life of love that responds to insults and hatred with gentleness, kindness, even generosity. Solomon said it this way: “If your enemy hungers, feed him. If he thirsts, give him something to drink.”

Hearts transformed by God do not speak the rhetoric of a society that gives lip service to equality, but in reality thinks, “I’m just a little better than everyone else.”  It treats everyone with dignity. It adopts Paul’s exhortation, “In humility consider others better than yourself.”

Hearts transformed by God aren’t stuck on the world’s concept of freedom, the freedom to gratify all my urges. They embrace the Spirit’s idea of freedom: “The fruit of the Spirit is…self control.”

So offering God a sacrifice of praise is more than what we say with our lips. But it is not less. Here it’s called, “the fruit of lips that confess his name.” There is nothing more foundational for offering God a sacrifice of praise than meeting with his people each week to worship him. There is nothing that so distinguishes the disciple of Jesus from the rest of the world. I have personally known atheists who were kind, humble, and self-controlled. There are unbelievers who pray–probably billions of them. But only Jesus’ disciples gather together each week to sing his praises and talk about his love for them.

And what we say about him when we are gathered for worship will spill over into what we say about him in the world. For many, talking about Jesus’ grace seems forced and unnatural if it is part of a church program aimed at visiting people we have never met before. But if we are aware of how far we have fallen in our sin, and we see how temporary and disappointing all our earthly things are, and we know how dearly our Savior loves us, and we are sure of the perfect life that awaits us, how “natural” to praise him to the people we know, but who don’t know him.

It’s as natural as fruit growing on a fruit tree, “the fruit of lips that confess his name.”

Hebrews 13:14 “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.”

A number of times through this book of the Bible, the place where we live and all that it contains is referred to as a “city.” This is no comment on the importance of farms, but cities tend to be the center of culture, trade, industry and invention. They represent our achievements and possessions as well as the home in which we live.

Note that he does not say, “Here we do not have anything at all.” The longer I’m here, the more I accumulate. When I graduated from college, everything I owned fit in a Chevy Citation hatchback. A decade later, with four children at home, we held two rummage sales each year just to keep from being buried under an avalanche of clothing, furniture, and small appliances. Is there an adult reading this who wouldn’t need some sort of truck to move all he or she owns?

But our “city” and its contents are not enduring. Nothing lasts. My wife and I have owned three sets of washers and dryers. We are on our fourth refrigerator. Week by week there is always something to replace or repair–cars, homes, even body parts. None of it endures.

The same applies to the institutions that guide and govern the earthly “city” in which we live. If our world lasts so long, someday the United States will end up on the ash heap of history, just as every world power before it has. Even our church is not immune. American Christianity is shrinking at an alarming rate. Between one hundred and two hundred churches close every week. Jesus promises the faith he established will endure, but the shell in which it is handed on may not.

“Here we do not have an enduring city.” The slow death and decay of our possessions, our institutions, even our bodies, is a result and a reminder of the sin that infects us. God has cursed it all so that it does not become an obstacle to our return to him. Our hearts have surely wandered far from his when, even so, we prefer the possessions that rot and crumble in our hands, the corrupt and failing institutions under which we now live, to the imperishable world he has prepared for us.

God has given us something more. “We are looking for the city that is to come.” Many years ago my wife’s grandfather asked her if there was anything in his house she would like to have. There were two things she had always admired, both of them made by his own hands: a small drop leaf table and a knickknack shelf. They were promised to her that day. It was only after her grandparents died that they passed to us. Now they are proudly displayed in our home.

In a similar way we possess a far superior “city” to the one in which we now live. We don’t hold it in our hands yet. We are “looking for it.”  But God’s promise makes it just as certainly ours as if we were already there. Receiving this city also involves a death: the death of Jesus in payment for the sins that would have denied us this gift. God’s promise of forgiveness, and all he sacrificed to make forgiveness possible, make us sure this second city will also pass to us. If we are taking stock of our lives, our inventory would be incomplete without it.

This city that is to come has everything our current home lacks. “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp…On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there…Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse” (Revelation 21:23, 25; 22:1-3).

Instead of death and decay, the river of life, unpolluted, and the tree of life, bearing its fruit, healing the nations, and ending the curse. Instead of failed and failing institutions, God and the Lamb on the throne, giving light to a city so secure its gates never need to be closed or locked. Regardless of how much you have lost, whom you have buried, what you haven’t completed, how hard it is to get by–this is the greater part of what we have. As you take stock of your life, don’t forget your real estate in the city that is to come.

John 7:18 “He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.”

There is nothing wrong with having a large church, a successful ministry, and a good reputation in the community. We don’t want large numbers of people just for the sake of numbers. But behind each number there is a soul, a child of God who has been saved for eternity, when the gospel is preached and believed. The more believers the better.

But Jesus warns us here about the one who speaks on his own to gain honor for himself. There are ways of gathering large numbers that have nothing to do with bringing souls, or glory, to God. A man can develop a “cult of the personality” that attaches people more to himself than to Christ. Maybe he accommodates himself to the culture instead of confronting it where it needs to be confronted. Maybe his message is delivered with a winsome smile and appealing stories, but it doesn’t really say anything. Maybe he brings glory, not just to himself, but to all his listeners, by giving them some of the credit for their faith and salvation. If this is what his teaching accomplishes, he has failed the test.

“But he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth.” Jesus did more than teach good morals or gather a large number of disciples for himself. He brought his Father glory by teaching people what God is really like. He did not preach the hard-hearted bean-counter god of the Pharisees, only interested in whether we have paid him all we owe. He preached the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. He preached the God who has done everything we needed to be saved. He preached the God who made the ultimate sacrifice so that we might be saved.

That is still what brings God glory today. Yes, we have to preach everything in his law to bring people to repentance. But what brings God more glory than anything else is the truth that he kept the commandments for us perfectly in Jesus’ perfect life. He paid all the penalty for every sin in Jesus’ innocent death. Heaven is a gift that already belongs to us in Jesus’ glorious resurrection. Even the faith to believe it and receive it is his gift to us.

That is more than good advice or reliable information. That accomplishes God’s glory and our salvation. That’s the kind of teaching we can trust, confident we have found the truth.

John 7:17 “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.”

A better translation than, “If anyone chooses to do God’s will,” would be, “If anyone desires to do God’s will” in this verse. Jesus is talking about the condition of our own hearts. Do we want what God wants?

Is it hard to see why this is so important for how we receive Jesus’ teachings? When we want something to be a certain way, we can work very hard to justify our position. If a person wants to get drunk, he can redefine what it means to be drunk, and line up all those Bible passages that tell us it is okay to have a drink, and remind anyone who tries to confront him that the Bible says “Do not judge.” I have listened to people defend their sexual sin with some of the most far-fetched and outlandish interpretations of the Bible passages that condemn the same practices. One man even tried to twist God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah into a defense of homosexuality, if you can imagine that. Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” We’ve got enemies. Do we reinterpret what it means to love them to excuse ourselves?

It’s not just the moral issues. What God says about there being only one way to heaven can be hard to accept when we know someone who died trying another way, or no way at all. Do we want what God wants then? Scripture warns us that life in this world will be hard, and painful, and full of trouble, and that God disciplines us this way for our good, because he loves us. But when life actually turns out that way, and we are miserable, do we acknowledge that God is simply being gracious to us then? Do we want what God wants?  I could multiply examples.

The point is this: When we don’t want what God wants, then we don’t listen to his word with an open and receptive heart. We try to read our own ideas into his word. We may go looking for ways to defend our positions, instead of looking in the word to learn God’s positions. We may go looking for people who tell us what we want to hear instead of looking for a true teacher of God’s word. That is a heart problem. What is the status of my own heart?

If we are going to desire to do the will of God, God must first call us to repentance. That is why John the Baptist came as the forerunner of Jesus. His preaching of repentance prepared people to desire God’s will and recognize Christ. This is why the law must still be preached to us today. It breaks down our self-will, which stands in the way of acknowledging God’s will.

If we are going to desire to do the will of God, we need the gospel to give us faith. Desiring to do God’s will does not begin until after we trust in him. And trust in God does not begin until after we have been convinced that he loves us unconditionally and forgives every sin and gives us heaven. Only when we trust God and want what he wants are our hearts in any condition to test the teachers and know whether the word they speak is God’s own.

John 7:14-16 “Not until halfway through the Feast did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. The Jews were amazed and asked, ‘How did this man get such learning without having studied?’ Jesus answered, ‘My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me.’”

The question of the Jewish leaders does not mean that Jesus was illiterate. Like most Jewish boys of his time, he had likely attended the synagogue school and learned how to read.

But Jesus never studied in one of the rabbinical schools of his time. These were something like our seminaries. You may remember that the Apostle Paul had studied in the school of the well-known rabbi Gamaliel. But Jesus had no college level degree in theology. He was a tradesman, a carpenter by training, who had a brilliant grasp of the Scriptures. His teaching did not come from what he had learned in some theological school.

Likewise, the test of true teachers of God’s word is not about the school they attended or the number of degrees they have earned. These may not be bad things. We don’t want ignorant or lazy preachers and teachers, men who have not worked at learning Scripture and prepared themselves for serving God’s people. Continuing study is a healthy thing for one’s ministry. But theology degrees from prestigious institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and others do not necessarily make a better teacher of God’s word. Many things that could be learned from these schools would be serious problems today. In spiritual things, academia often produces a skepticism that gets in the way of knowing God’s word.

Jesus himself once prayed, “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children” (Matthew 11:25). Paul made this observation to the Corinthians, “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:20-21). In testing a teacher’s teachings, the right answer to the question, “Where does it come from?” is not, “From some respected school.”

Where, then? “Jesus answered, ‘My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me.’” With these words Jesus does not deny that he agreed with his own teaching, believed it, and claimed it for himself. He is talking about the source. His teachings were not new teachings. He did not make them up independently during his earthly ministry. Truth is never something new, though it may be forgotten and rediscovered. Truth has a long history behind it. In fact, truth is eternal.

We live in an age that idolizes the new and the trendy. Christians also suffer from this disease. When people make some preacher or teacher popular, because, “Here’s something we haven’t heard before,” we can be too quick to jump on the bandwagon. Has he dusted off some Biblical teaching that has been neglected for too long? Then feel free to follow. But is his teaching some creative new idea spun out of his own imagination? What did God say to Jeremiah about the prophets who “dream their own dreams”? “The product of his own creative genius” is the wrong answer to “Where does his teaching come from?”

Instead, it needs to come “from him who sent me.” Jesus was a true teacher because his teachings agreed with those of his heavenly Father, the one who created the world, the God of the Patriarchs, and Moses, and the Prophets. Jesus’ claim that his teachings come from the one who sent him was not a claim that defied contradiction because there was no way to investigate it. Everyone present knew the way to check it out: compare Jesus’ teaching with the Scriptures. When testing to see if someone is a true teacher, “From God through his Holy Scriptures” is the best answer to the question, “Where does his teaching come from?”

Romans 12:2 “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

By nature we are all conformists. We want to be just like everybody else. Even if we think we are trying to be different and breaking from the crowd, there is probably some smaller group of friends we are trying to be like. No one I know wants to be so different and original that they are like no one else at all.

Many times our desire to conform is harmless. Whether you and your friends prefer an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy makes no difference from a spiritual point of view. There is no sin involved if you cheer for the local sports franchise because that is what everyone else does in your city or state. It’s okay to change your mind about that if you move away someday.

But we know that the desire to conform can also get us into a heap of trouble. There are groups waiting to lead impressionable teens into drugs, pornography, vandalism, picking on others, or cheating in school. Adult Christians are tempted to conform to the same politics and backstabbing at the office, taking things home that don’t belong to them, or messed-up materialistic priorities of their unbelieving neighbors.

Breaking away from the pattern of the world around us requires more than a good set of rules to follow. We know the rules. Many of us have been able to recite them since first or second grade. There may be no part of the Bible more familiar than the 10 commandments.

The world around us knows the commandments, too. Maybe they don’t know them by number, but they know the general content. Sometimes those commandments even scare them enough to get them to do the right thing.

But God doesn’t want to control us by way of fear. Those of us with younger brothers and sisters may have used fear to keep them out of our things. We threatened to do something to them if they messed with our stuff. Did it make the family feel closer to each other? It may have been an effective way to keep their hands off our property, but it didn’t make them love us more. It didn’t stop them from wanting to get into our stuff, either. If you were the younger brother or sister on the receiving end of the bullying tactics, you know what I mean.

God doesn’t want to bully us into behaving. He wants us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. He wants us to change our mind about all things sinful. He wants our tastes to change, so that more and more we find sin as disgusting as he does. You wouldn’t drink raw sewage. That’s disgusting. You wouldn’t even be tempted. The Lord wants us to be transformed, to be changed, so that sin doesn’t look like getting a big, creamy milk shake to drink. It’s more like someone offering a glass of stinky, slimy raw sewage. Yuck!

That’s why Paul began this chapter of Romans by reminding his readers that God’s mercy was in view. The commandments can make us afraid, but the gospel changes our hearts. Keep looking at God’s grace and mercy. The more we realize how much Jesus forgives, the more aware we are of the depth of his love for us, the more we comprehend the sacrifices he made to save us, the more our heart is filled with love for him. Then his Spirit is busy changing our tastes. We truly desire to serve others, and we become a new person. The sight of God’s mercy transforms us by the power of his love.

Romans 12:1   “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God…”

When Paul says “…offer your bodies…” here, the picture is not of a sacrifice right away. That is coming. The word he uses rather refers to someone offering him- or herself to the service of a king. If you need a picture, think of the last of the “Lord of the Rings” movies. The Hobbit Pippen offers to become a servant to the Steward of Gondor, the ruler of that kingdom. Why would someone give up his freedom to serve someone else? In the movie it is because the ruler’s son gave up his life to save Pippen.

In Romans Paul suggests we do this with God’s mercy in view. Our Ruler’s Son also gave up his life to save us. There is nothing we could pay him for this. We certainly can’t take the place of his Son. But God’s mercy moves us with gratitude and love to offer our bodies, our whole selves, to God’s service. You and I are members of God’s court, soldiers in God’s army, not because we have to, but because we want to. It’s part of the way we live life with God’s mercy in view.

Now Paul comes with the part that makes this hard. “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices…” We have grown up with worship services that are free from the mess and the smells of blood sacrifices. If we were to reintroduce them, most of us would find that weird, and our neighbors would probably start getting worried. Fortunately, Jesus put an end to that with his own sacrifice at the cross.

But those sacrifices still offer a vivid picture of total dedication to God. You may know the old joke about the chicken who suggested to the pig that they repay the farmer for feeding and taking care of them with a bacon and eggs breakfast. The pig objects, “That’s easy for you to say. For you it requires only a donation. For me it means a total sacrifice.”

Paul isn’t necessarily saying we will die for Jesus, though it could mean that. But here he calls us living sacrifices. This doesn’t hold any more appeal for our sinful natures. We might be content sending in an occasional donation, throwing a few dollars in the offering plate, showing up to help with some church project. Then we get to spend the rest of our lives doing what we want to do.

That’s not what Paul is urging. Living sacrifices means God gets our whole life, not just part of it. For some that could mean full time work in the church as a pastor or teacher. But offering ourselves as living sacrifices does not start and stop at the church doors. Offering ourselves as living sacrifices means that we go to school, and study, and do your homework at night to serve God. If one winds up as a mathematician or engineer, a proof reader of dictionaries, a full time mommy, or even president, our Lord wants every moment lived in service to him, lived his way.

Anything we hold back, any place we insist on our way instead of God’s way, only erodes our faith and jeopardizes our salvation. There are going to be times when we go our way instead of God’s way along the way. That’s why we need to live life with God’s mercy in view. There we see the never ending supply of forgiveness flowing from Jesus’ cross, washing away our unsteady, halfhearted service. There we see the love that changes us and leads us to keep offering yourselves to God, because that’s what happens when his mercy is in view.

2 Timothy 1:9-10 “This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

Jesus did not reveal God’s grace as a teacher of theoretical theology. He didn’t come as a prophet to tell us about “Providence,” or the “Divine,” or abstract “spirituality.” He is God. When Jesus came into the world, God was saying, “Here I am. I am living in your world. I am getting involved in what you call history. Look at me, because the things I am doing, I am doing to save you, because I love you.”

Those things God did to save us culminate in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Paul describes Jesus as the one “who has destroyed death and had brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” Paul also wrote in Romans, “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came upon all men, because all have sinned.” But when Jesus died on the cross, he paid the penalty that our sins deserved. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. By paying for our sins and bringing us forgiveness, Jesus has said to death, “You’re fired! You are no longer the everlasting jailer of my people. You are no longer the executioner who makes them pay for what they have done. I have declared them all innocent. You may go now–we will no longer be needing your services.” So it is that Jesus himself rose from the dead to show us that death was done.

But doesn’t Paul say that he has destroyed death? Don’t people still die? How can we say that death has been destroyed? It hasn’t gone away. Answer: To destroy something does not mean that it completely ceases to exist. If we destroy a building the pieces of wood, steel, and concrete don’t disappear into nothingness. The “raw materials” are still here, but it sure doesn’t function like it used to anymore.

Since Jesus has destroyed death for us, the raw material is still here. People stop breathing, their bodies become motionless, and then they decay to dust. But death surely doesn’t function like it used to! There is no eternal separation from God, no eternal corruption of the body, no endless agony in hell.

Jesus has brought “life and immortality to light through the gospel.” We’re not going to die forever. We’re going to live forever. That’s not an endless extension of life as we know it now– slowly watching our powers fade and health decline as one body part after another becomes weak and unstable and finally shuts down altogether. A million years after our resurrections we are not going to be virtual zombies, little more than skeletons wishing we were dead. We will be just as alive, just as healthy, just as strong as the day Jesus gave us our lives back again. We will spend eternity in our prime, because Jesus gives us life and immortality.

That is the end result of God’s grace, the product of his eternal and unconditional love. Can we put a value on that? Look at what we pay just to put death off for a little while. When the bill came for my son’s first three weeks of cancer treatment, it was over $100,000. Jesus destroys death and gives us life and immortality by his death and resurrection, and he gives it to us for free! But it isn’t cheap. It’s priceless. Nothing else we have could be more valuable, no matter how much we pay.

1 Peter 2:2-3 “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

When Peter compares us to newborn babies , he is not criticizing our lack of spiritual maturity. The term is used that way other places in Scripture, but here he puts a positive spin on the idea. Nor is he opposing growth and maturity, as though we should remain spiritual infants forever. He specifically tells us that he wants us to grow up in our salvation. More about that in just a moment.

His one point of comparison between us and newborns is this: There is only one food appropriate for newborn babies (at least, before the development of infant formula). That is their mother’s milk. It is the only thing the baby wants. It is the only thing the baby’s body can handle. Variety may be the spice of life, but variety is no good when it comes to feeding infants. They need nothing but their mother’s milk.

In the same way we who are God’s newborns by faith need only one thing on which to feed– the pure, spiritual milk of the Word. It is the only thing our faith wants. It is the only thing our faith can handle. Any variety mixed in from human philosophy, false doctrine or theology, or human speculation threatens to make us sick or could even be fatal.

And in order for that spiritual milk to be truly nourishing for our souls, to truly grow us up in our salvation, it must contain God’s word of Gospel, his good news in Jesus Christ. A favorite used bookstore of mine has a large religious books section. There you will find a few shelves with Bibles, Bible commentaries, church history, and various world religions. But what fills row after row and shelf after shelf are books on “Christian living.” I won’t say that those books contain no useful information. Maybe you can find helpful hints for dealing with some issue in your life.

But without the gospel of God’s love for you in Jesus, such books cannot grow you up in your salvation. Without God’s promises detailing what he is doing for you, there is no food for your soul, no nourishment for your faith, no matter how helpful the words may be for solving problems. You don’t grow closer to God when he is telling you what to do. Your trust in him doesn’t become more secure when you are concentrating on how your life matches up with his commands. Your heart’s intent to do things his way, your willpower to avoid sin and pursue love, doesn’t come from doing what God demands.

God is drawing you closer, making you stronger, and driving faith deeper, when the words on which our faith is feeding are about the things he does for us. That good news is not a limited subject that fits into a few paragraphs or a chapter in a book. It spans all the love that God has had for you from electing you to be his own child even before he created the word; to directing the course of human history to prepare the way for Jesus; to Jesus’ whole life of love; to the events of his trial, cross, and empty tomb we know so well; to his running the word for us from heaven; to his promise to return to take us there.

It is expressed in his promise to forgive our sins, declare us not guilty of them, reconcile us to himself, come to us in word and sacrament, give us his Holy Spirit, and ultimately raise us from the dead. The Gospel of God’s love for you is a gem with many, many facets. There are far too few books whose expressed purpose is to help us mine the Bible’s riches in exploring each one.

This is the spiritual food our hearts need. Let’s crave and consume this pure spiritual milk, so that we can grow up in our salvation.