Romans 12:1, 2
“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.”

I never imagined this scripture would become so real in my life. How must you place your ’sleeping’ before God? Your eating, and going to work? …your daily regular life – and place it before God as an offering?

What does that mean?

Well…sleeping, is just something I have placed before God. This title came to me at 3am, and instead of going back to sleep, I just got up and wrote it…because I decided long ago, my sleep doesn’t belong to me. A very long time ago I realized that in order to write a good article, I have to get up when the article hit my mind & my head - and not when I feel like getting up, because I lose the content and the essence of it. (I believe that captures the ’sleeping quote’ of this verse.) In order words – this passion I have deep inside of me is worth getting up for. I realize this dream I have to write, and to make a living at it, is a gift and that gift-   given back to God – can create a miracle in the life of someone else, if they can sacrifice the way God would have them to sacrifice, because of  MY sacrifice.

The writer says the best thing you can do with this life, is to embrace what God does for you. How can you embrace what God does for you, even before you do it? Well, let me explain. Yesterday, I took a leap of faith. (At the last minute). Something came to me, and I stepped out believing God for something I wanted.  It was a huge dream of mine. I figured it must have been God’s will, because I wasn’t even thinking about it.  Yet, it was also my heart’s desire. (And I knew God knew that about me.) Have you ever felt like God dangled something in your face to see what you would do?  It may be just because — He really does want to see what you would do.

So I sacrificed several hours to do something I believed in strongly, (I sacrificed the time I would’ve possibly been watching TV or something else…), and I just said: “I will take the risk. “I don’t know the outcome of that risk (yet), but here’s what I did do: I reminded God of His promise unto me, and that it involved such special things. I communicated to Him gently, that if he gave me this dream, I would use it for His glory. All I know is this:  This was a dream that I strongly believed in, and an opportunity arose to fulfill it, so I stepped out in faith. Peter did that. He said to Jesus, on a boat in the middle of a sea, “If it be thou, Lord - bid me come unto thee on the water… And He said, Come.” Now, Peter’s friends must have thought it was a ghost… because that’s what Matthew wrote, in this passage. (Yet ghosts don’t reach out and save you when you are drowning.) I think to myself when I read this, Now…what made a grown man defy the odds – and step out of a place of comfort and security, to step out and defy all gravity!

The answer: His faith in God.

Faith in God is what gives you the audacity to believe.

Here’s the key to walking in true faith: Even if we don’t trust God through circumstances, we need to take steps as if we did.

James 2:17-24, 26 says “In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”  Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do. You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? Was not our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called God’s friend. You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone….as the body without the spirit is dead, so is faith without deeds is dead.”

Take a step today… it may lead to a miracle.

Selah.