Well to start with, so much has been happeing at youth, we are in our fourth month and it's awesome!! April and May is our second term (you could say) out of five. This lot of 8 weeks has had the focus of offering. The last focus was Visionary... V.O... I spoke at the start of April on Offering and titled the message, Place yor life before God. Here is part of what was spoken about...
Romans 12 (msg) 1-2 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.
The first point is, PLACE IT.
The best part about life is that God is helping us. Philippians 4:13 says that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength. God also says that he will never leave us or abandon us. We know we are not doing this thing called life on our own so let’s look at this verse more closely.
An offering; some versions say a living sacrifice. So what does this mean? When you look up the route meaning of offering: it means to offer up/ present unto/bring/lay forward.
It is a form of worship – and expression of devotion and respect. Throughout the Old Testament they had different offerings. The most common one would be the Burnt Offering. This offering would be taken up daily. To make payment for sins, a worshiper voluntarily brought an unblemished animal to the priest and laid his hand on the animal’s head to express identification. The priest then killed it and burned it up completely, symbolising the person’s total devotion to God. God took pleasure in these offerings, or sacrifices of worship because they foretold of Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross.
The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary says that offer-ing: thing offered as sacrifice or in sign of devotion.
Now being apart of the new promise that God made through Jesus we don’t have to burn a lamb every time we want to show God that we love him and worship him. We can take our everyday, ordinary life—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. God is pleased with different sacrifices of worship: thanksgiving praise, humility, repentance, offerings of money, prayer, serving others, sharing with those in need.
We can make a decision to give these areas of our life completely to God – it doesn’t mean we can’t do them, because between you and me I love shopping. But when we do them God can speak to others through us. Personally living this Christian life at 90% is just not worth it. When we fully realise that our life is better in the hands that created and planned it than our own we will live much more fulfilled lives.
The Second Point is EMBRACE IT.
Romans 12:2 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.
The NIV says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Transformed is like the word metamorphosis like the lifecycle of a butterfly. Renew in the Greek means ‘renovation or to renovate.
- Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking... so what does this mean. It’s like those books that asks you to find the pink surfboard with the yellow flower on the beach. You think it would be easy but when you look at the page there are like 50 surfboards and half are pink and have yellow stars or other shapes and it takes forever to find it or you just give up.
- But then you have the ‘where’s wally’ show. Again you have to find him but he has red and white strips and he is amongst cave people. He is still sometimes hard to find you most of the time you can pick him straight away. We went to the tennis...ect
Personally though I want to one who lives my life and people don’t have to search my life to find out that I’m a Christian, I want them to just know. I want to get to the point where I don’t have to even think about the positive things I do, that people just ask, ‘hey there is something about the way you live your life... it’s different but better.’ We live in a world where people don’t know what Christianity is anymore. I intend to change that.
This can only happen when we fix our attention on God and are changed from the inside out. So how do we do this?? One step is just do what we were talking about before. Place our life at Jesus’ feet and embracing what God has done for us. This change that is taking place is like a renovation. We knock down walls in our life, re-paint ect.
It is never easy doing this and it doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a work in progress as we Place our lives before God and Embrace what he has done for us.
- Michelle
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment