Living Sacrifice

"Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship."-Romans 12:1 (NASB)

 As I was praying yesterday, I said "Lord I offer myself to you as a living sacrifice today" (it's a fairly regular ingredient of my prayer times).  He responded with "being a living sacrifice is willing to be consistently uncomfortable". While we most certainly are aware of praying to "be living sacrifices" or to "take up our cross daily", the concept of what we have been praying is oftentimes foreign to us.  I noticed that while my heart and spirit meant this wholeheartedly, I had been neglecting the conscious willingness to follow up the prayer with the actions.  When we say things like "Lord I offer myself as a living sacrifice" we are declaring that we intend to submit our will to His. 

To be a living sacrifice, always means giving up our selfish desires in exchange for adopting the Lord's desires.  One example of this is having a willingness to pray for others, regardless of agenda.  Personally, this was a sacrifice when I started doing it, but is now a frequent practice and subsequently no longer a sacrifice.  My agenda when I used to go shopping at Kroger or Walmart never included other people.  I was going with intentions of groceries, not God.  However, as the Lord began challenging me to simply "Do What Jesus Did" I was confronted with the concept that my intentions had excluded His (yes even regarding shopping malls).  So what did "being a living sacrifice" entail in that scenario?  It meant I was to being very uncomfortable approaching strangers and asking them if I could pray for them (initially).  My will was to get some ground beef, His will was to heal the sick.  After all, Christ and all of His followers had no problem going into strange towns and preaching the Gospel, healing the sick, raising the dead, and cleansing lepers so how obscure is it to awaken to the fact that His desire for that hasn't changed? The more we are willing to lay down our lives for His sake, the more we take up His life... and His motives.

Walking out this life as a living sacrifice is a yielding of our will to His, but even more than that.  The degree with which we yield to Christ's will for our lives is the degree to which our hearts are conformed to His.  I rarely struggle with apprehension about approaching people to pray for them anymore.  It has been engraved in my heart, that now I truly love to do it!  So instead of being afraid of this "scary prayer", perhaps we should pray it but also respond to the implications of sacrificing ourselves for His sake.

Growing in God Exercises

The Lord has been giving me a couple exercises to help me grow in intimacy with Him as well as growing in love.  The first exercise is to grow in discernment of His voice.  Hearing God's voice is something that must be practiced regularly.  If the concept seems foreign to you, I highly recommend How to Hear God's Voice by Mark Virkler.  His book accustoms you to one method of hearing God (He speaks to us in a plethora of ways).  The exercise I have been doing is as I wait upon the Lord, I journal everything He says to me.  I ask open ended questions about my life/circumstances and note His responses as they light upon my spirit.  Then after I've written down the conversation, I ask the Lord to confirm it through His word.  This practice has actually changed the way I study the Word, it is a much more dynamic relationship since the Lord continues a conversation with me through the Scriptures.  Sometimes I'll ask Him where I should study, but most of the time I wade through the various bookmarked chapters I am going through (I usually read several chapters and have bookmarks in the Torah, the Prophets, SoS, Psalms, a Gospel, an epistle, and Revelations).  If I heard His voice correctly, He always confirms it with His Word!  Doing this validates what we hear and gives us confidence in what we hear Him say.

The next exercise is one the Lord suggested to me this morning, but I have yet to practice.  He said, "This is my 5 step plan: go to a public place and every 5 steps talk to a stranger."  Before I proceed, a major part of my calling is to publicly minister in power and love (I believe this is the calling of every Christian, but some have more of an aptitude for it than others).  Myself and a few others will regularly go to malls, hospitals, supermarkets, flea markets, etc. to find the sick and pray for them or just give prophetic words to strangers.  The Lord's 5 step plan is a new challenge for me, since I have historically waited until I had a complete revelation & interpretation from the Lord before approaching an individual.  Alternatively, I would approach people with visible illness/injuries.  This exercise will propel me out of that comfort zone, away from relying on the gifts, and into moving more in love.  Not everyone needs healed.  Not everyone will receive a prophetic word.  Everyone needs Jesus and the love of Christ is what we have that others do not, if we don't share it... the salt is losing it's saltiness.