Worship As Sacrifice
by Dan Jones, M.D.
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 – this is your spiritual act of worship.
The feeling of spiritual depth, spiritual joy, and spiritual peace was so strong in this church it swept over me. I had never been in a worship service like this one. Our family was visiting friends in Moscow, Russia in 1991. This was a time of very difficult economic circumstances for that country and city. There were lines everywhere - people seeking food. Most stores had empty shelves where there should have been food to buy. Everyone was poor. The city was gloomy and shabby.
But, the contrast inside the only Baptist church in Moscow was startling. The sanctuary was gorgeous. And on this Sunday morning, it was packed far beyond capacity. During the more than two hour worship service, those standing in the aisles would rotate with people sitting in the pews every 20-30 minutes, so that all had an opportunity to sit some and stand some.
I wanted to understand what made this worship service, this church, these people so different from most Christian experiences. What I learned was that most of these church members had first hand experience with sacrifice. For years, each Sunday as they would enter this church, members of the KGB would stand at the door taking names. Those worshippers were very aware that attending church, having their names on these lists, meant they would have the worst jobs, the worst housing, and the worst opportunities for education for their children.
Among those who had sacrificed much and suffered most was our host family. I had met Dr. Victor Grischkevich a year earlier in Seoul, Korea at the meeting of the Baptist World Alliance. As part of the gradual improvement in liberties experienced under President Gorbechov, for the first time in many decades, a group of Christians had been allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union.
In Victor, I saw a man with a faith and spiritual joy beyond what I had experienced in my own life. For years, this highly skilled surgeon not only had faithfully attended church in spite of instructions from his superiors not to do this, he also openly prayed with each and every patient before he performed an operation. He, and countless others, during those hard years of communist rule, chose to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of their families, for the sake of their faith. They not only attended church under very difficult circumstances but, from their very meager resources, they supported their church financially – enough to maintain their beautiful church building - at great personal sacrifice.
In Victor and others in this Baptist church in Moscow, I saw a spiritual experience I wanted for myself. I came to learn from these people that their special faith and special spiritual joy existed because they had chosen to take on sacrifice in their lives.
Just as God has blessed my friend Victor and his church friends, God also holds out these spiritual blessings to us. We simply need to seek appropriate opportunities for sacrifice in our own lives.
Lord, help me to see the next opportunity for sacrifice you bring my way, not as an obligation or burden, but as an opportunity for Christian growth, an opportunity for seeking and following God’s will, and, importantly, as an opportunity to seek a new level of faith and spiritual joy that can only be achieved through sacrifice.
Dan Jones, M.D., MACP, FAHA, a board-certified Internist, a former medical missionary to Korea, professor of medicine at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, Dean of the School of Medicine, and Chancellor of the University of Mississippi until 2015. Dr. Dan Jones is a member of CMDA.
Dr. Jones welcomes any comments or questions about what he has written and can be reached at - djones@umc.edu
Rounds with the Master, Spiritual Pearls from the Great Physician Devotionals are released every Monday and Thursday.
Photo by Jaunt and Joy on Unsplash
