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)
Paul writes these words to a community of resurrected people. It’s God’s word for you now. As a resurrected creature, you are no accident going somewhere to happen. Your life isn’t just a loose web of events and circumstances. God has resurrection life plans for you. “As you fix you attention on God you’ll be changed form the inside out.” Transformed from selfishness to giving, from judgment and control to compassion and mercy. Love is the shape of resurrection life.
I pray in this Easter season that my life and yours be reckless abandon to love in the face of death. Oh, may our lives and our witness be lavish in love, like Jesus’.
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.
We resurrected creatures are invited to offer ourselves as living sacrifices, an every moment of everyday life. It’s all worship. Love, at its core, demonstrates itself as service and obedient giving. It’s a duty and a delight! This love, passionate and extravagant, will not be denied.
Life wins! Love wins! That is the good news of Easter. Surrender to that and amazing things will unfold in the spirit of the one who is the way, and the truth, and the life, Jesus, our risen Lord.
~ Pastor Steve
