“Oh, what a wonderful God we have! How great are his wisdom and knowledge and riches! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods! For who among us can know the mind of the Lord? Who knows enough to be his counselor and guide? And who could ever offer the Lord enough to induce him to act? For everything comes from God alone. Everything lives by his power, and everything is for his glory. To him be glory evermore.

And so, dear brothers, I plead with you to give your bodies to God. Let them be a living sacrifice, holy – the kind he can accept. When you think of what he has done for you, is this too much to ask?” (The Living Bible)

“Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It’s way over our heads. We’ll never figure it out.

‘Is there anyone around who can explain God?

Anyone smart enough to tell him what to do?

Anyone who has done him such a huge favor that God has to ask his advice?’

Everything comes from him;

Everything happens through him;

Everything ends up in him.

Always glory! Always praise!

Yes. Yes, Yes.

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.” (The Message)

One of our incurable human obsessions is that we want to know all the answers to life’s problems. We have plenty of questions we would like to ask God. All too often we are like the prosecutor in a trial, putting God in the dock, and grilling him for his apparent shortcomings. We are like the mouse interrogating the eagle; or like a deformed pygmy taunting an Olympian athlete. St. Paul reminds us that we do not have the capacity to plumb the depths of the wisdom and knowledge of God, or to follow God’s judgments to their conclusions. We don’t know the mind of the Lord. We cannot counsel God, or tell him what he should do. God is never in our debt. It is from him, and through him, and to him that all things come and go. For everything comes from God alone. Everything lives by his power, and everything is for his glory. So we must never think that we can live autonomously, without God. Anyone who thinks they can is a fool. We cannot take one step unless God enables us to do so. We cannot think one thought unless God makes it possible. We cannot breathe one breath unless God provides the air, and our lungs. Yet he gives us enough freedom to respond to him – to choose for or against him.

Therefore we are brought to our knees in humility to worship him in his greatness, and his mercy. Worship begins with an awareness of the worth of God. To know the worth of something or someone is to value it or to appreciate them. We value our possessions, and our family members and friends. How much do we value God? We acknowledge his glory and bow down before him. We offer our bodily lives to God as living sacrifices, knowing that we come from God, we exist solely by his gift, and we are advancing toward the goal of meeting with him.

Church buildings are designed to help us to worship God. They are meant to convey to us something of the truth about God. In them we learn about God, and his ways with us. In them we come to God, and he speaks to us. In them we bring our ordinary lives, and place them before God as an offering. He accepts them and transforms them into something extraordinary – a life that is consecrated, and so useful in the fulfilling of his purposes. In so doing he takes the common currency of our lives and magnifies their value to eternity. What seems inconsequential to us becomes something that is infinitely important to God and the building of his kingdom. The values of the kingdom of heaven are not the values of the world. What seems to be important to us in this life is nothing in the life to come. When something becomes important to us we need to step back and question its value to God and to eternity. That is why we must be careful not to take ourselves too seriously, to delude ourselves into thinking that we are more important than we are. God has a sense of humor – he is not deadly serious all the time. He wants us to relax and enjoy the life he has given us, and to find time to give to others the attention they deserve.

I was worshipping in a church I used to serve in, and the preacher was one of the younger clergy who reminded me of myself forty years ago. He preached for 32 minutes with unrelieved intensity, leaving us all exhausted at the end. He did not know how to communicate personally, and with humor, so that he could connect with us in a way that would enable us to appreciate and assimilate the truth he was trying to convey.

Our lives are consecrated when God takes the offering of who we are with all our foibles and pretensions, and incorporates them into the stained glass and tapestries of, what he calls, holiness. He takes our personality defects, our genetic predispositions, and all our anxieties, and paints a masterpiece to his glory. Jesus comes alongside us to show us the way, to comfort us, to encourage us, to strengthen us, to lift us up when we fall, and carry us when we can no longer walk by ourselves. All he asks is that we trust him, come to him, and risk everything for him – give him everything, for everything comes from him. That is our spiritual act of worship and the salvation of the world.

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