669 Whose Time Is It? - Romans 12:1

If you get interrupted today, whose time is it? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for listening again today to the Follower Of Podcast podcast, we're grateful you're here. Today. I want to talk about Romans 12:1. And the reason is because this is day two of the second week of our Marketplace Mission Trip, and in the action week of the mission trip, we actually talk about making time for other people. That's part of our calling as believers is to make time for others. I'm interrupted so poorly. I get so focused on my own use of time that I have to remind myself with passages like this.

And I haven't talked about Romans 12:1 in a long time. I'm reading from the English Standard Version. "I appeal to you, therefore brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship." I come back to this phrase, living sacrifice.

My life was given to me by God. I owe it to him. He gave it to me and he had a purpose for it. He didn't just create me because it seemed like a cool thing to do. I'm not too sure if he was trying to do a cool thing if he would have created someone like me anyway. But he created each of us for a particular purpose. Ephesians 2:10 says "we are created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we would walk in them."

He created us and he saves us so that we can show the world what life following Jesus looks like. That's our job. And the living sacrifice means that we don't get to take this time for granted for ourselves. In fact, I believe that all of the world is set up so that we are free to choose. But when we choose ourselves, we choose away from God and we suffer the penalty, or we choose to follow Jesus and it fights against our flesh and the world that we live in.

And Jesus begins to work through us to make a difference in the world. The idea of a living sacrifice means that my time today doesn't belong to me. Whose time is it? It's God's time. Every breath that I take it's God's breath. What does he want out of this? It seems rather weird to try and give our entire lives to God. But when we realize that the interruptions that happen today in our work, the challenges that we face, the things that take longer than we thought these are all recurring problems for me. I'm extremely frustrated when things don't happen at the speed with which I believe they should happen.

And so I'm reminding myself today that even the air that I breathe, the beats of my heart, they were given to me by God. And I want to give myself back to him. When I do I'm set apart, that's holy and acceptable. I've been accepted because Christ paid for that. This is our spiritual worship. God basically uses our energy and our time to help other people see him.

That's the point. God's restoring a people for his own possession. He's bringing us back to him. Today you and I get to join him because we make time for other people. We put time in our schedule so we can be interrupted. Don't schedule yourself hour to hour, minute to minute. Don't book everything back to back to back if you can avoid it. Try and build time into your schedule so that other people can interrupt you and your available to bring grace, to serve them, to worship God, by seeing that interruption as something that happened at his hand. He's in charge and pleased to also remember, I'm reminding me.

Thank you so much for being a marketplace minister, let's be people who take grace into the workplace today. We want to be grace distributors. Our job is to let the world see Jesus Christ in us. We need to live our lives, such that it can't be explained unless you factor in Jesus. Thanks so much for being a marketplace minister.

And if you'd like to take part, if you don't know what we're talking about in the Marketplace Mission Trip, or these other things that we're talking about, maybe you just stumbled across our podcast. Go check out https://followerofone.org. You can join us, you can join our private online community and take part in the next Marketplace Mission Trip, all at no cost. Check it out at https://followerofone.org.

Thanks very much.