/Therefore, I encourage you, brothers, thru God's compassion, present
your bodies--a sacrifice, living, holy, pleasing to God--your reasonable
service. And do not be formed to this age, but be metamorphized in the
renewal of the mind to your proof of what the will of God is-the good,
and pleasing, and complete. For I say, thru the grace, the one given to
me, to all among you, not to over-think beyond what is needful; but to
think into sound-mind, as to each God has imparted a measure of faith.
For just as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not
have the same activity, so we are the many in the body, in Christ, and
the one, according to one another, members. /
Just exactly how does one go about serving God, correctly? This would
"seem" like an easy question to answer, but not always. How should a
child serve God correctly?, we might ask... Well, by following the
parents God gave him, right? Yet Jesus *doesn't* follow his parents home
to Nazareth after the festival. He stays in the Temple, asking
questions, and astounding men with his teaching. Jesus serves God
correctly, even though it doesn't follow the expected thinking of his
parents!
The same thing is true with how you serve God. It doesn't necessarily
follow the conventions of the day, or the common thinking of people, or
even what *you* think is reasonable. But your serving *does* follow from
faith. Your serving comes from following the God of all compassion,
pity, and mercy. It comes when you present your body as a sacrifice that
is living, that is made holy, that is made pleasing to God and
acceptable in His sight! This way, God produces your reasonable service.
As an example of "reasonable service", let us take the one mentioned in
the General Prayer of the Church. We give our offerings to the Lord as
our "reasonable service". This does *not* mean that we reason in our own
minds that we will have only a pittance left over after going out to
dinner a couple times a week and buying new clothes, and so we'll try to
get away with giving as little as possible in the offering plate. What
it does mean is that, *in faith* we consider setting aside a portion,
even a 10% tithe or more to support God's church and its pastoral ministry.
So, the first error we tend to make when trying to serve God is to be
"formed to this age", that is, to follow the ways of this world. How
quick we are to forget that this world is deteriorating and will someday
end. Yet we put our stock into storing up treasures here where moths,
rust, and rot destroy. How foolish! The prince of this temporary world
is the devil, remember. Following His ways leads nowhere good.
That's why you are given by God to present your body as a sacrifice that
is living. Yes, I know sacrifices are dead, but God does the impossible!
He takes your dead body and raises it up alive again in Christ Jesus.
You know that you were baptized into Christ, into His death, and that
you were buried with Him. Sinful you is long gone, so that a new you
made complete rose on Easter to walk in newness of life, a life of
service to God now, and a life everlasting with your Savior in paradise!
A 2nd mistake is to follow popular opinion. Even "common sense",
remember, it is at best only common, or average. "Everybody just lives
together nowadays," "all the young people experiment with drugs",
"everybody shares gossip", "outside of church it's just expected that
you cuss". And so you fall into the trap of the common thinking of
fellow-sinners like yourself, making excuses for your sin.
That's why God reveals *His* uncommon will to you in the Bible, so that
you can test and prove what real service to God is. While people want
sin tolerated, God wants only that which is *good*. Only God is good, so
only what He makes "holy" can be truly good in His sight. That's why He
sent Jesus to die for you, in His compassion, to give up His holy body
on the tree, and shed His blood on Calvary. He feeds you with that same
body & blood for your forgiveness to make you holy and righteous now, in
His sight!
The 3rd error we make is to over-think things, ourselves. You probably
think, "I'm a reasonable person, and what I think makes perfect sense to
me." You like your opinions and wrongly assume there is nothing wrong
with them. But when you think too highly of your own notions, that's
when your sinful flesh tempts you to close your mind to those things
that God, Himself is thinking and planning.
That's why when man makes a plan, God laughs. People make decisions, and
God thwarts their efforts, because He has a different idea. Jesus came
for the metamorphosis of your mind. He who created a new heart--His Own,
within you also renews your mind to be like His. He does this by leading
you to confess your sinful thoughts and opinions, and have Him remove
them by the absolute forgiveness He proclaims to you, through the voice
of your Pastor, and sometimes from others. He then replaces your
thoughts with His Own, revealed in Holy Scripture!
All these things your God does for you so that you can present to Him
something in your body that is actually pleasing in His sight. He kills
you and raises you up. He forgives you and changes your hearts and
minds. All this because He took pity on you, knowing you couldn't serve
correctly on your own. So He transformed you into a new creation in the
body of Christ, for His reasonable service. Amen!
John C. Drosendahl, Pastor
[email protected]
