Romans Chapter 12 cont'd
In thinking about the first "reformational" point for the western church in the 21st century, A More Holistic Spirituality, I don't think we could improve upon the way that Eugene Peterson translates these first two verses in The Message. (I have already commented extensively on these verses and this first point in my previous blogs on Chapter 12.)
"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."
The "ordinary-ness" of most of our hours and our lives is not an automatic hindrance to engaging and enjoying a genuine interactive friendship with the holy Trinity in real time, or...true biblical spirituality The Father, Son and Spirit all promise to "be with us" and "go with us" in the full range of our being and activity. We are not called to strive to be "extra-ordinary", when it is sufficient for us to live fully human lives (with all its joys and sorrows...blessings and trials) and "let" God be his extraordinary Self to us. This kind of approach, in the end, does indeed lift us up to live lives that are supernaturally natural.
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