Live Your Life as an Offering

We are called to live by #faith, but how many times have you heard people say, "It's MY life and I'll live it the way I want." Do you feel like it's YOUR life? Do you own your life?

Have you given your life to God? If yes, then you don't own it. Don't try to take that gift back by living for you. We are here to live for Him--for His glory--even when we don't understand why things are happening to us, to loved ones in spite of our prayers, and to the world around us. God never said we would understand everything. Instead, He asked us to trust Him. You can't truly trust someone without a measure of faith. That's why we feel so betrayed if someone breaks our trust--because we had to sacrifice something in order to give it.

In the Old Testament, they were required to live by the law--to give sacrificial offerings of physical animals. After Jesus died as the one true sacrifice for all mankind, we no longer have to offer physical sacrifices. Our sacrifices of today, in the New Testament, are spiritual. We sacrifice things we can't see--not a physical life--but a spiritual life. 


We are to live our whole life as an offering to the Lord. Life isn't about us. It's greater than that. It's about the one true Holy God. 

Do you love Him? Then trust Him. 
Do you love Him? Then give Him your life. 

I'm reminded of the movie Jane Eyre. For those who may not know the story, Jane is a governess who falls in love with the master of the house, but ends up leaving him when she feels betrayed. She returns a year later after circumstances change and tells him that his life is not his own, but hers. How easy we can understand this concept in a romantic love between two people in the flesh, yet we've struggled since the beginning of time to understand this same concept between our individual life with God. 


If you're a Christian, your life is not your own. Someone who loves your life even more than you do, owns it--enough so--that He sacrificed His own (in the flesh, His Son) for it.


"For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." (Romans 8:13)