“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 MSG)
REFLECTION
Once, while on my way to church, the song “I surrender” (Hillsong Worship) rose up in my heart. I put in my AirPods and and sang it quietly from my heart. A while later, in church, during worship, the song “I surrender” started playing — the same song that rose up in my heart on the way to church — I was so moved, with a profound feeling of reverence for God, that I immediately got down on my knees, lifted up my arms and fully surrendered to God, with my whole heart, as best as I knew how to do… deeply aware of the ways my Maker had spoken to my heart leading up to that moment.
Studylight.org describes SELF-SURRENDER as follows (with reference to Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible): 1 . The military metaphor underlying the idea of ‘surrendering oneself’ is suggestive. The keys of the citadel of self are handed over to the rightful Lord, whose most powerful weapons of attack have been the entreaties of His love. The surrender is not for demolition, but for restoration in beauty and strength. It is a voluntary act, implying the ‘presenting’ of ourselves unto God, and involving the ‘presenting’ of our ‘members as instruments of righteousness unto God’ ( Romans 6:13; cf. Romans 12:1 ).
Our time here on earth is so short, in light of eternity, so let’s draw near to our Maker and ask Him to enable us to truly surrender to Him and His perfect will, and to open our spiritual eyes to perceive what that actually looks like in our daily life.
PRAYER POEM: In Step with You
Lord, I’m painfully aware of my weakness and long to be perpetually at peace in Your perfect process. I want to want Your will and nothing less, so please grant me grace to stay in step with You, in everything I do, every day, come what may.
