Romans 12:1 (NKJV) I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
I hope that by God’s abundant grace that this would eventually become a series. Service to God is a very vital issue for every Christian. A proper understanding of what our service to God is makes it easier to serve God better. Note that this would not take away the trials and hurdles that often try to make it difficult to give God a reasonable service, but it gives you a certain kind of Joy that makes the trials and the hurdles a walk in the park.
Recently, the Holy Spirit taught me a very valuable lesson about our service to God and I’m about to share that with you. We shall take our anchor scripture from the book of Romans 12:1, whilst looking through various translations. Using the New King James Version as the starting point, we see that there are two major things to note: “living sacrifice” and “reasonable service”. There is such a thing as a “reasonable service”, the Amplified Bible describes it as your reasonable (rational, intelligent) service and spiritual worship! Which means that our service can be unintelligent and irrational. This happens when our service to God is not born out of a sincere heart-a right heart! Rather it is from a heart that seeks to please men-the Bible describes this as “eye service”. We would be just like Amaziah, who did what was right in the sight of God but not with a perfect or loyal heart (2Chronicles 25:2). We work things out with our head and intellect and decide on the things to do or not do for God. Hence Paul also describes our service to God as “spiritual” (AMP). So it is not spiritual when it is not done in the spirit (from the heart) or by the Spirit! We can easily identify such people when they complain about every little task they are given in the house of God. They complain about time, about not having enough resources and so on and so forth. They are never willing to make sacrifices. This brings us to the other point: living sacrifice. Paul admonishes us to give ourselves as “Living Sacrifices”. Before we look at the implication of that let us take a look at The Message translation of Romans 12:1:
Romans 12:1 (MSG) 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.
First we see that the part of our lives that we are to offer also includes those things that we probably had thought before now were unimportant-he says your everyday, ordinary life- not just the activities in church! Now here’s the part I love most-he says place it before God as an offering! We all know that no one places an offering before God and takes it back. Also the offering that has been placed down no longer belongs to you! Therefore to effectively serve God there must be total submission and surrender to God’s will and instructions. If your life is now His, as a result of you placing it before Him-as an offering, then He should call the shots and not you! The time you claim to not have enough of is actually His, not yours but we end up giving the smallest fraction of His own time. Haven’t you noticed how we tend to give God the smaller part of most things, take for example our tithe. Out of ten fractions He asks for just one yet some of us struggle to pay up!
If we were to properly examine our attitude, we would discover that God is far more faithful in the relationship and deserves a better attitude of worship and service from us. A life of total surrender and sacrifice. A life were we are willing to give our all-our substance, our time etc.
In subsequent articles we will look at how we can render this kind of service to God! God bless!
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