ROMANS 12:1&2

 

The Message (MSG)

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.

What Is True Freedom?

ROMANS 6

 So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind?

 

Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom.

 

 Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do.

 

But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!

 
I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had?

And how much different is it now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?

 As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now.

Where did it get you? A dead end.


 But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise!

A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way!

Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death.

But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.

Dear precious believer; Each day you bring an offering,  to the alter of God, your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. This will lead you to a A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way!


 Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act.   
                                     A dead end!

                                              
What will you choose ?  Life or death, your choice. What alter do you bring your offering too this day?