In Romans 12:1 it says “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.” to truly worship the Lord is surrendering who we are and our ways and putting on who He is and what He says about us. In our surrender, the only thing we lose is everything that is bad for us, and what we gain is the things that will follow us into eternity. How sweet is it that when Jesus says we must “die to ourselves” that the death we are experiencing is to all things that kill our soul and destroy every aspect of life and we are being reborn into true life full of peace, joy, and love? To live a life of worshipping the Lord isn’t necessarily singing all day long, but rather, it’s living in a place of surrender in understanding that we have a need and His name is Jesus.

As someone who loves worshipping with song, when I would consider worship, I always think of singing and playing instruments. But this week, the Lord was gracious enough to show and remind me how to worship Him without song. This week, our worship time looked like reading scriptures about truth, encouragement, and worship. We then simply sat in His presence, surrendered ourselves, invited Him in, and wrote encouragement from scripture to one of our teammates at random. It was so wonderful to just see everyone dig into what the Word says about each other to then in turn begin to see each other how Jesus sees us more fully. This is a kind of work that was only able to be done through surrendering our ways and asking Him to come and speak. Our true, authentic, worship. And it’s beautiful. How awesome is it that this is the type of life we get to live forever? In Romans 12:2 it continues by saying, “do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” to look more like Christ, through surrenderance is the sweetest gift we are able to be a part of, which is only through the death and resurrection of Jesus which has led to giving us the gift of the Holy Spirit to dwell within us to transform us wholly.