Threshing Floor Tabernacle

¹So 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. ²Don’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. Rom 12:1, 2 The Message 

These verses put into perspective the basic format for daily Christian living. We are to give, surrender, or yield ourselves to Jesus as a living sacrifice. The sacrifice comes in giving up our lives to live for Him. We came to Him dead in trespasses and sins but God has made us alive in Christ Jesus (see Eph 2:1-8). Now that we are alive (free from the power of sin), we live to Him, for Him, and through Him. It is only when we come to the end of ourselves that we can truly experience the ZOE (life of God). If we live to ourselves we perish, but if we allow Jesus to live within us we triumph daily.

If we do our own thing or preserve our own culture and identity after receiving Jesus we will miss the mark of the perfect plan that God has in store for us. Jesus may be our Savior but He has not become our Lord. The plan of God is hindered because we are still alive to ourselves rather than being alive to God. There is a transition that we all must make if we are truly to be effective as the Church of the Living God. The more we try to hold on to our identity the more difficult it becomes to make that transition. We must die to everything we were prior to coming to Jesus. There’s nothing to be proud of, nothing worth clinging to. It’s all dung.