The body is not only the recipient of impressions.  It is the possessor of appetites and necessities.  See to it that these are indulged, with constant reference to God.  It is no small attainment of the Christian life ’to eat our meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God.’  In a hundred directions this characteristic of our corporeal lives tends to lead us all away from supreme consecration to Him.  There is the senseless luxury of this generation.  There is the exaggerated care for physical strength and completeness amongst the young; there is the intemperance in eating and drinking, which is the curse and the shame of England.  There is the provision for the flesh, the absorbing care for the procuring of material comforts, which drowns the spirit in miserable anxieties, and makes men bond-slaves.  There is the corruption which comes from drunkenness and from lust.  There is the indolence which checks lofty aspirations and stops a man in the middle of noble work.  And there are many other forms of evil on which I need not dwell, all of which are swept clean out of the way when we lay to heart this injunction:  ‘I beseech you present your bodies a living sacrifice,’ and let appetites and tastes and corporeal needs be kept in rigid subordination and in conscious connection with Him.  I remember a quaint old saying of a German schoolmaster, who apostrophised his body thus:  ’I go with you three times a day to eat; you must come with me three times a day to pray.’  Subjugate the body, and let it be the servant and companion of the devout spirit.

It is also, besides being the recipient of impressions, and the possessor of needs and appetites, our instrument for working in the world.  And so the exhortation of my text comes to include this, that all our activities done by means of brain and eye and tongue and hand and foot shall be consciously devoted to Him, and laid as a sacrifice upon His altar.  That pervasive, universally diffused reference to God, in all the details of daily life, is the thing that Christian men and women need most of all to try to cultivate.  ’Pray without ceasing,’ says the Apostle.  This exhortation can only be obeyed if our work is indeed worship, being done by God’s help, for God’s sake, in communion with God.

So, dear friends, sacrifice is the keynote—­meaning thereby surrender, control, and stimulus of the corporeal frame, surrender to God, in regard to the impressions which we allow to be made upon our senses, to the indulgence which we grant to our appetites, and the satisfaction which we seek for our needs, and to the activities which we engage in by means of this wondrous instrument with which God has trusted us.  These are the plain principles involved in the exhortation of my text.  ’He that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.’  ’I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection.’  It is a good servant; it is a bad master.

II.  Note, secondly, the relation between this priestly service and other kinds of worship.