A LIVING SACRIFICE
“Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear Him, and keep His commandments, and obey His voice, and ye shall serve Him, and cleave unto Him… Deuteronomy 13:4.”
New Year’s Day is a time to reflect on changes we want (or need) to make and a commitment to follow through on those changes. A New Year’s resolution comes from the fact such commitments normally go into effect on New Year’s Day and remain until fulfilled or abandoned.
There are religious parallels to this secular tradition. For example, during Judaism’s New Year, Rosh Hashanah, through the High Holidays and culminating in the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, one is to reflect upon one’s wrongdoings over the year, and both seek and offer forgiveness. The concept, regardless of creed, is to reflect annually upon self-improvement.
If we want to see self-improvement in our lives in 2026, there is no better New Year Resolutions than the six recorded resolutions in Deuteronomy 13:4:
“Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear Him, and keep His commandments, and obey His voice, and ye shall serve Him, and cleave unto Him.”
Collectively these resolutions involve sacrificing our right to choose and seeking the Lord’s life choices for us. It is choosing to walk after the Lord and not our own worldly desires. Such resolutions when lived out in a person’s life are best exemplified in Michael W. Smith’s Dove award-winning song, “This Is Your Time.” It was written in honor of Cassie Bernall’s brave “life choice” admission to the Columbine killers that she believed in God.
Cassie was a junior at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado, a typical teenager having a typical day when a classmate trained a gun on her and asked if she believed in God. When she said, “Yes”, she was gunned down in cold blood.
However, “This is Your Time” is not about Cassie’s martyrdom for her faith; it is about her life choices – a life God still uses after her death so many years ago to give new life to others willing to follow her example by turning from their sins and placing their trust in Jesus Christ.
“This is Your Time” captures in song Cassie’s life-giving decision to honor God with her life even in difficult and costly decisions. As the lyric from a Twila Paris song says in honor of such servants:
“How beautiful when humble hearts give the fruit of pure lives so that others may live.”
Oswald Chambers in his book, “My Utmost for His Highest” asks each of us to respond to this question: “Is My Sacrifice Living?” He says we make the mistake of thinking that the ultimate God wants of us is the sacrifice of death. What God wants is the sacrifice through death, which enables us to do what Jesus did, that is, sacrifice our lives. Not – “Lord, I am ready to go with You … to death” (Luke 22:33). But – “I am willing to be identified with Your death so that I may sacrifice my life to God.”
We seem to think that God wants us to give up things! But God never tells us to give up things just for the sake of giving them up, but He tells us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having, namely, life with the Lord Himself. It is of no value to God to give Him our life for death. He wants each of us to be a “living sacrifice” – to let Him have all our strengths that have been saved and sanctified through Jesus (Romans 12:1). This is what is acceptable to God.
Given these truths, we should challenge ourselves in 2026 to present our bodies as a “living sacrifice” for Our Lord not only for self-improvement but also to reach our world for Jesus Christ.
How beautiful our lives will be this year if together we do this; to offer this sacrifice that we will live just as Jesus died: willing to pay the price – to be broken bread and poured out wine for others