Romans 12:1 (NIV) - Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God - this is your true and proper worship. 

Romans 12:1 (MSG)- 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.

True and proper worship is generally understood to happen at church when we gather together and sing and pray. 

Worship may start there but it can’t stay there. It has to move outside the walls of the church and into our “everyday, ordinary life”. As we do this, our church, our sanctuary, gets much bigger!

“A living sacrifice”. In the old sacrificial system, the animal (offering) was killed and so made useless except to be eaten. In the new system the offering remains and offering, alive still, and therefore useful to God and to His church and the world. That seems like a much better system, don’t you think.

Prayer:  Father, if I am honest, being sacrificed is not an altogether appealing idea to me. I love my life, my self, my desires, my tastes, my opinions  I am reluctant to part with them. This is true even (maybe especially) when it comes to church. Father, help me to put the parts of me that are discontent with your church on the altar. Help me to put my expectations of what I think my church should look like on the altar. Lord, help me to put all of me on your altar as a living sacrifice - set apart, pleasing, and useful to You.

Help me to see your church more like you do.

For your glory and in the name of King Jesus.

Amen.