Roma 12:1

Consecration of the Believer’s Life

12:1 Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, ¹  by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive, holy, and pleasing to God ²  – which is your reasonable service.

Roma 14:7-8

14:7 For none of us lives for himself and none dies for himself. 14:8 If we live, we live for the Lord; if we die, we die for the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.

Filipi 1:20

1:20 My confident hope ³  is that I will in no way be ashamed ⁴  but that with complete boldness, even now as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether I live or die. ⁵ 

Ibrani 11:37

11:37 They were stoned, sawed apart, ⁶  murdered with the sword; they went about in sheepskins and goatskins; they were destitute, afflicted, ill-treated

Wahyu 12:11

12:11 But ⁷  they overcame him

by the blood of the Lamb

and by the word of their testimony,

and they did not love their lives ⁸  so much that they were afraid to die.

¹ tn Grk “brothers.” See note on the phrase “brothers and sisters” in 1:13.

² tn The participle and two adjectives “alive, holy, and pleasing to God” are taken as predicates in relation to “sacrifice,” making the exhortation more emphatic. See ExSyn 618-19.

sn Taken as predicate adjectives, the terms alive, holy, and pleasing are showing how unusual is the sacrifice that believers can now offer, for OT sacrifices were dead. As has often been quipped about this text, “The problem with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off the altar.”

³ tn Grk “according to my eager expectation and hope.” The κατά (kata) phrase is taken as governing the following ὅτι (Joti) clause (“that I will not be ashamed…”); the idea could be expressed more verbally as “I confidently hope that I will not be ashamed…”

⁴ tn Or possibly, “be intimidated, be put to shame.”

⁵ tn Grk “whether by life or by death.”

⁶ tc The reading ἐπρίσθησαν (ejprisqhsan, “they were sawed apart”) is found in some important witnesses (Ì⁴⁶ [D* twice reads ἐπίρσθησαν, “they were burned”?] pc sy^p sa Or^pt Eus). Other mss have ἐπειράσθησαν (ejpeirasqhsan, “they were tempted”), either before “sawed apart” ([א] L P [048] 33 81 326 1505 pc sy^h), after “sawed apart” (Ì^13vid A D¹ Ψ 1739 1881 Ï lat bo Or^pt), or altogether in place of “sawed apart” (0150 vg^mss Cl). Since the two words ἐπρίσθησαν and ἐπειράσθησαν are so much alike in sight and sound, and since the position of “they were tempted” varies in the mss, it seems best to say that ἐπειράσθησαν is an accidental corruption of ἐπρίσθησαν or an intentional change to a more common word (the root of ἐπρίσθησαν [πρίζω, prizw] occurs only here in the NT, while the root of ἐπειράσθησαν [πειράζω, peirazw] occurs 38 times). The best reading here seems to be “sawed apart” without any addition before or after. (See TCGNT 603-4, for a discussion of emendations that scholars have proposed for this difficult problem.)

⁷ tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “but” to indicate the contrast.

⁸ sn They did not love their lives. See Matt 16:25; Luke 17:33; John 12:25.