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. 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 12:1-2, The Message)
To change from the inside out, by fixing our attention on God. That sounds like the Christian Life. We are meant to change, to grow, to place our everyday, ordinary life before God as an offering.
Leo Tolstoy once wrote:
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing [oneself].”
Opening ourselves up to new experiences does not come easily to most of us. At least, that is true for me. I assume it could be true for you, too.
That’s why we are told that embracing what God does for us is the best thing we can do for God. Put your trust in the Lord. Let God work the miracle and open you up to new experiences—experiences that just might change you and the world at the same time.
Photo: Forest by Moyan Brenn is licensed under CC by 2.0.
