(Please read the passage cited above first.)
My sisters and brothers,
“Is anybody here? Nobody seems to be here.” Body in both the question and statement means person, not simply a body. When St Paul wrote, “I urge you by the mercies of God to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. Holy and pleasing to God.” He was referring to people, not bodies. This is more evident in the Spanish, which translates bodies as “ustedes mismos, you yourselves.”
As a community, we have to offer ourselves to God. All of us who form the community of the Church must offer ourselves to God. In everything that we do, we have to offer ourselves to God. Each one of us must offer herself or himself to God by doing good things.
In our breathing, we offer ourselves to God, When we walk, run, do, see, hear, eat or drink something, or sleep, pray, are in school or at work or taking it easy, each one of us can offer self to God. We have to offer to God all that we are and all that we do. Nothing belongs to us; it all belongs to God.
There is a danger that we work for ourselves and not for God. We have to do what we do for God and not for ourselves. St Paul advised us not to conform ourselves to this age, but to be transformed from the inside out in a new way.
Now we have a new way of thinking and behaving. We are not for ourselves but for God. It is as the Lord Jesus said in the Gospel, that we have to deny ourselves and take up the cross after Jesus.
Our work for our family, our studies, our leisure time with family and friends, our eating and drinking, our down time, our friendships, our associations, the clothes we wear: all of this we have to be about the glory of God. Through all these things we offer ourselves to God as a living and sacred offering. All these things, make up true happiness.
We have bodies because without bodies we could not do anything. It is through our bodies that we are able to do all that we do as an offering acceptable to God. Our bodies stand for us. We use our bodies so that we can give to God an offering acceptable to God.