Your Story

I want to hear YOUR story. Do you have a testimony in relation to presenting your body as living sacrifices to God as your spiritual act of worship? I am inviting you to respond and share with us part of the journey you have been on.............

My Body on the Altar

"Present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship." Romans 12:1

I am reminded that today is yet another day with many opportunities to worship God. My body is to be given to God on this day - whatever condition it is in. I will have opportunity to pray, to praise, and to let the members of my body be used for God and by God. Even if I am sad or worse - in agony - I still have this directive from God to present my body as a living sacrifice to Him. This is not to say that I cannot pray for healing, or cry out to God in my pain, but we have the choice before us: to worship Him in the midst of a diseased body or not.
This is a mystery: to worship in spite of darkness and evil which appears to prevail. "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known." 1 Corinthians 13:12

A Little Tin Box

I was going through boxes and I came across some things that belonged to my grandfather. There were newspaper articles about him, poems he had written, geneology, and sermon notes. My grandfather was a Methodist minister in the early 1900 s. There was a lot of information about him and by him. But not that much when you consider that he lived to be almost 90. Now - at this time in 2011, my grandfather's life has been reduced to a metal tin and its contents, and a box containing the high points of his entire life. But the choices he made during his life time, and the actions that he took, are still effecting the world, mostly in ways we are not aware of.
I began to ponder what this meant to me. I remember in Scripture we are compared to grass that is here for a day, then withers. I suddenly feel the fact that I am not the center of the world, but I belong to the One Who is. I wonder......if my grandchildren should find a box that contained tidbits of my life, what would they learn?
Would they find evidence of a character weathered by things once life changing (like Parkinson's Disease) but now insignificant? Would that box point the curious onlooker to the God who shaped me, molded me, made me fruitful, then carried me tenderly through old age to the end?
Or would that box be filled with junk? Would it be proof of a life spent on selfish pursuits and fruitless deeds? Would the focus of that box be disease and death ending it all, or would it be the beauty that had been brought forth from the ashes of yesterday.
Today's sorrow will bring about tomorrow's legacy. I pray that legacy is an honorable one pointing to the One Who matters.