Just my thoughts after reading Romans 12:1-2 – and hearing many people wanting to know “God’s will” but yet clinging onto their own!
Romans 12:1-2 (The Message):
“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.”
It requires a deliberate decision by me to leave the old ways behind:
1 Corinthians 13:11 (NLT):
“When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.”
If I want God’s perfect will (and his promises) in every area of my life, it requires a conscious decision to leave my “old ways” behind, for good. It’s not a case of putting it on the shelf, and come back to it when I feel like. The children of Israel did this, and the moment they faced any hardship, they would run back to their comfort of the past, even though their past was a life of hard slavery in Egypt!
We sometimes find it hard to let go of what we have become familiar with, to trust God that He is leading us to a new place of freedom by His grace. And, in that freedom we find the fulfilment of His promises over our lives, which is a place of victory.
The last two weeks has been tough for us, with many battles, and it seems non-stop. It’s been hard to hold my head up and say “I’m trusting God to see me through this” – just being honest. But there is a difference between being in a battle and being defeated. A BIG difference. We need to know, that we might be in a battle, but we have already won the war, through the work Christ did on the cross, so victory is ours already!
We change the way we think, act and talk, to change the way we live. If we want to live God’s way – the kind of life that Jesus said we will have in John 10:10 (MSG):
“A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.”
:chriskan: 