Place Your Life Before God
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.
~Romans 12:1-2 The Message (MSG)
PLATFORM – this was never a big deal where I grew up because the platform didn’t have a standard. Basically anyone with any form of musical talent or inklings of capability was allowed to get up there on a Sunday morning and lead worship, but when I got to Hillsong I found that standard of who was able to be on platform and lead worship was incredibly high. Understandable, because this is a global church and part of the reason it has come to the level it’s at now is due to the level of excellence, but has it created within church a class of people who appear to be better than the rest? Excellence comes second to heart, and a heart set on bringing honour and glory to God in everything will bring about excellence, but when excellence is trying to be achieved without the right heart people can begin to treat others as if they are less than themselves because they haven’t reached the platform level of talent or ability.
In Romans 12:1-2 Paul has written this passage addressing the social class system in Rome telling the Christians not to allow the culture around them to become part of the culture of the church. At this point in time there were well defined social classes in Rome and the Christians were allowing the way society worked to determine the way they treated each other within their gatherings. For example an event such as the Lord’s Supper would be served to the wealthy and whatever was leftover would be given to the poor, but Paul appeals to them to treat each other with the same love Jesus showed them. Jesus did what was unheard of in the social class system, a King coming and taking time for those who were seen as the “least” in society. He didn’t differentiate on the cross between the wealthy and the poor, those of high, middle or lower class, but died for the most successful businessman as well as the lowliest slave.
I wonder if the heart we bring before God is one of that same humility. John 13:34-35 says “let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples – when they see the love you have for each other.” The love Jesus showed went beyond the expectations of society.
Time for a heart check. What does the everyday look like for us? The times that no one sees or when we’re in a place where ‘no one knows us and they’ll probably never see us again so it doesn’t really matter’? How do we treat the people around us, the one’s we see every day, the people who are in our life for a season, and the one off conversations?
I think that the most ordinary, everyday, routine things we do should be the ones we are paying closest attention to. Platform is such a small part of what God is doing through the lives of His people. There are so many people out there who will never enter the church, couldn’t care less about whether you sing or play an instrument much less do it on platform and yet because you showed them love by asking how their day has been while paying for your coffee, or told them they looked beautiful at a bus stop, will have the opportunity to encounter the love of God. Let’s not allow ourselves to be deceived by believing that the platform is the biggest platform we will ever have. Each and every one of our lives is a platform and we will all spend far more time off stage than on it. Make the time off platform as much of an offering of worship as on.