So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, 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. (12:1-2)
In some ways, it seems so simple; in other ways. it seems so hard. God wants everything. I think that's what I want to give him, but part of me holds back. I don't want to hold anything back, Lord.
I"m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me (12:3)
"God doesn't want a tithe from you, minced out of the pocket change of your life. He wants all of you. All of your heart. All of your mind. All of your time, your energy, your resources. All of your hopes and dreams. Every bit of who your are and what you have, he wants you to put on the altar as an offering to him.
How should that change the way you live your everyday life, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life?" Eugene Peterson, Conversations, pg. 1761
"Dear Lord, help me to place my life - all of my life - before you as an offering, let me be a living sacrifice, knowing that it's the most worshipful way I can live my life. I realize though, that the tendency of living sacrifices is to crawl off the altar. Keep me there, Lord. On that altar. Keep me totally surrendered to you. May that sacrifice provide daily nourishment to the body of Christ, giving a blessing in place of a curse, forgiveness in place of revenge, peace in place of strife. And may those small, sacrificial acts of worship change me from the inside out." EP, pg. 1761-2
1 comment:
Romans 12 is blowing my mind in the Message. A chapter of scripture that I thought I knew so well is piercing deeper places in my heart.
"The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him. " (!2:3)
How incredibly freeing! After being with extended family, it means so much to know that who I am is not defined by where I come from or what I don't come from but solely by God. Ahhh. (Sigh of relief.)
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