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 The Message paraphrase
The message paraphrase of the Bible is helpful in articulating what God desires for us to live responsively to God’s great love for us. God doesn’t expect perfection. He is fully aware of the imperfections of man. God wants us. He wants our affection, our worship, our attention, and our adoration.
The world around us and the enemy are always going to tell us the opposite — don’t trust God. But where we find life and life everlasting is in that very posture — trusting God because “embracing what God does for you is the best thing that you can do for him.”
