The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the LORD: but the prayer of the upright is his delight.
Probably, while reading the Bible, you have come across the event recorded in 1 Samuel 15 in which King Saul did not fully carry out God’s command under the pretext that he did it in order to offer a sacrifice to God. Upon learning of this, the prophet Samuel reminded him that no religious ritual could save him from a moral crisis and disobedience to God’s command.
God does not ask his people to glorify him by performing religious rituals, but by their lives. Remember the famous verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans where we read that we should offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, as a sign of spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1)
Those who gave themselves as a sacrifice no longer belongs to themselves, but to God. Finally, we need to understand that God does not want something from us – he wants us!
At the end of his thought, in our translations of the Bible, Paul says that if we get it right, it will be a sign of our spiritual worship. But in the Greek original it is not written spiritual, which would be pneumatikos, but logikos, which refers to something thoughtful, meaningful, and reasonable, i.e. logical. People have the ability, given to them by God, to think, and to come to the conclusion as beings of reason and logic that only He is worthy of our entire sacrifice as a true expression of worship.
Therefore, offering oneself as a living sacrifice is our reasonable and logical worship because it reflects our knowledge of who God is, and it also contains our response to what He has done for us. Prayer, as part of our meaningful worship, is a reflection of the understanding that it is God who moves the universe and not that the universe revolves around us.
Father, thank you for your final sacrifice on the cross, by which you reconciled the whole creation to yourself and brought us back to yourself – those of us who were separated from you by evil deeds. Help us to offer ourselves to you today as a pleasing sacrifice, holy and without blemish.