Day 1 – Offering Ourselves to God
If you run a business, you periodically evaluate your productivity. If you own a car, you periodically perform a maintenance check. If you’re concerned about your health, you periodically check your weight.
Likewise in our spiritual lives, we periodically assess our “full surrender to God”. One concrete way to do this is by offering our bodies afresh to God. (In the next five devotionals, I’ll explore what this means about our eyes, ears, mouth, hands, and feet.)
Many, many Scriptures make references about our bodies.
For example, Romans 12:1 says, “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
To be sure, when Paul says “offer your bodies” to God, he’s talking about your whole person, your whole self. At the same time, let’s not miss the fact that our “bodies” themselves need to be offered to God.
Paul also wrote, “The body . . . is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord” (1 Corinthians 6:13). Your body belongs to God.
You can’t live any way you please. Your body isn’t meant to be a container for sin. It’s meant to be a container for God. So we give our bodies to God that Christ by the Holy Spirit can live through us.
Using an athletic metaphor, Paul further says he disciplined his body, so that he may compete and win and not be stripped of his awards because he had violated the rules.
“No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize” (1 Corinthians 9:27).
Finally, he writes, “Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness” (Romans 6:13, NIV84).
Retired college professor and pastor, George Thompson had offered his whole self to God. He told me of a time his mind was stuck when he was planning a huge missions presentation. He specifically gave God his mind, and he said for the next three hours he wrote the entire presentation.
As we offer every part of ourselves to God, Jesus lives through us.
Prayer: “Lord God, I offer my whole self afresh to you, every part of me, that you may live through me.”
~ Pastor Dave
