Place Your Life Before God
Launching out in our yellow kayak, the memories of years gone by flowed back across my mind as I thought of 4th of July weeks on this wonderful lake since childhood. At 7AM there was little left on each dock signaling the rods cast, cannonballs let loose from the boathouse roofs and laughter exploding from the day before. An occasional wet towel, a tube or kayak hung in wait for another day's activities and on one dock an empty bottle of Jim Beam and a squirt bottle of mustard. It would probably be afternoon before those fellows rolled out of their home to greet another day.
How do we greet an ordinary day? Check out what Romans 12:1-3 has to say in The Message.
Place Your Life Before God
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.
I'm speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it's important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. 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.
What are we offering Him today?
