Surrender

Recently God has really been laying on my heart the true sacrifice of life. In Romans Paul tells us how our lives should look. Romans 12:1 says "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God- this is your spiritual act of worship." Basically what Paul is trying to say is broken into two parts.


     The first thing he says is, hey guys, look at what God has done for you! He sent His son to die on the cross for your sins and He set you free from captivity. Once Paul finishes with that he moves on to what we should do in light of that. He tells us that we ought to offer our lives as living sacrifices to God. What is interesting about the wording here is the fact that a living sacrifice, doesn't really make sense. In the Old Testament the priests would offer sacrifices to temporarily cover the sins of the people. So these sacrifices were stone dead. But Paul tells us to be a living sacrifice.


     What he means is that in ourselves we are dead. We should realize that we would still be sinners without Christ, but through Him we have life. I don't know about you but that makes me want to live for Christ in a big way. I know that we can never repay Him for what He has given us, but I still want to thank Him by giving my life to Him in any way that He wants to use it. That is what Paul is trying to convey to us. He wants us to see what God has done and let us realize that all we can do is offer our lives to Him.


    I want to challenge you to really think about the verses here in Romans. Read around it. Read the whole book! Just think about it though. Is God calling you to give your life to Him as a sacrifice? I can't promise that it will be easy. It takes faith and trust and it is gonna be risky at times, but in the end, I can tell you that the reward will outweigh the hardship. God is good.

Worship... or worship?

Something that I have really been thinking about for the past couple of days was brought up to me by someone. They said that when we worship in our Sunday morning services or even at chapel on Fridays that we so easily get distracted. It is hard for the worship leader to pick right songs and do the best they can when they don't truly understand what their goal is. Obviously everyone says to worship God and to lead other people in worship. But, as this person pointed out to me and how I have noticed, these services have become more and more distracting and less and less God centered. 


We get caught up in the music and making it sound good. Am I saying we should do a terrible job when we go up on stage as a leader. No way, but it is absolutely vital to not be a distraction. This person told me that our goal should be to be as transparent as possible. It is not our job to make the worship interesting or to gratify our own personal desires. Worship is solely for God's pleasure. I do not have a right answer of how to solve this problem. I've been thinking about it for awhile now and still haven't come up with a solution, but I challenge you to give this thought. How much of our worship is to seek spiritual gratification for ourselves and how much of it is simply telling God how awesome he his. Are the songs we singing truly bulging with truths from the Word of God, or are they simply fluff and cherry's that sound nice?