in sacrifice. The sacrifice cannot be holy unless it
first lives; that is, unless it is slain before God, and slain in its
own consciousness, and thus does not seek its own honor and glory.

16. The Old Testament sacrifices were not in themselves acceptable to
God. Nor did they render man acceptable. But in the estimation of the
world--before men--they were pleasing, even regarded highly worthy.
Men thought thereby to render themselves well-pleasing in God's sight.
But the spiritual sacrifice is, in man's estimation, the most
repugnant and unacceptable of all things. It condemns, mortifies and
opposes whatever, in man's judgment, is good and well-pleasing. For,
as before stated, nature cannot do otherwise than to live according to
the flesh, particularly to follow its own works and inventions. It
cannot admit that all its efforts and designs are vain and worthy of
mortification and of death. The spiritual sacrifice is acceptable to
God, Paul teaches, however unacceptable it may be to the world. They
who render this living, holy sacrifice are happy and assured of their
acceptance with God; they know God requires the death of the lusts and
inventions of the flesh, and he alone desires to live and work in us.

17. Consequently, Paul's use of the word "body" includes more than
outward, sensual vices and crimes, as gluttony, fornication, murder;
it includes everything not of the new spiritual birth but belonging to
the old Adam nature, even its best and noblest faculties, outer and
inner; the deep depravity of self-will, for instance, and arrogance,
human wisdom and reason, reliance on our own good works, on our own
spiritual life and on the gifts wherewith God has endowed our nature.

To illustrate: Take the most spiritual and the wisest individuals on
earth, and while it is true that a fraction of them are outwardly and
physically chaste, their hearts, it will be found, are filled with
haughtiness, presumption and self-will, while they delight in their
own wisdom and peculiar conduct. No saint is wholly free from the deep
depravity of the inner nature. Hence he must constantly offer himself
up, mortifying his old deceitful self. Paul calls it sacrificing the
body, because the individual, on becoming a Christian, lives more than
half spiritually, and the evil propensities remaining to be mortified
Paul attributes to the body as to the inferior, the less important,
part of man; the part not as yet wholly under the Spirit's