Take your everyday, ordinary life – your eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life- and place it before God as an offering.
Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.
Instead, fix your attention on God.
You’ll be changed from the inside out.
Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.
Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity,
God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Romans 12:1 vs 1-2 the message
—————————————
When I read this it stirred in me a new thought.
It is saying to us that our lives are an offering to God.
Dictionary.com says the meaning of offering is: ‘a show of intention.’
So this means we intentionally offer our lives to the Lord.
Dictionary.com said; ‘deliberately or willfully, done with intention or on purpose, by choice.’
So we choose to give all that we do, to the glory of God.
Is that possible always? Some days are not so good.
We all have bad days, I certainly do.
The verse says to us “you will be changed from the inside out.”
So as we choose to fix our heart and attention towards God, and embrace what HE wants for our lives; we grow and we change.
We become mature in our thinking.
We become discerning in the ways of the world and culture around us.
Yes we have to live here, yes we have to work and do every day things,
the challenge for us, is to decide what do we want to embrace?
What values do we want to hold onto.
The verse said “readily recognize”, that means we choose to look with our spiritual eyes.
To recognize something, we would have to know it already.
Like someone we have known or a place we have been before.
To be changed from the inside out is an intentional act.
Our choice to embrace the good and learn from the bad.
God desires to help us but We can’t receive help unless we are willing to accept it.
I think we all can relate to our ‘cultures desire’ to pull us down.
Turn the TV on and you will see and hear all kinds of messages.
They are not necessarily positive or good for us, especially now in this political climate.
If we embrace those messages we loose the message of God’s truth.
In our maturity and our growth let us not compromise the intent.
God is helping you to learn as he says,
Here is what I want you to do.
Take your ordinary every day life and place it as an offering.