“Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever dreamed He would be” (Oswald Chambers).

Romans 12:1-2 talks about us offering ourselves as a living sacrifice to God as our act of worship. As the old joke goes, the only problem with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off of the altar.

I think dying to self is a daily thing. Jesus died once and for all, but we don’t. We must put our flesh to death every single day or we will give in to it. We also must take up our cross daily and die to our own expectations of how our lives should go and how we want to live instead of how God calls us to live.

The good news is that God doesn’t see the imperfect sacrifice that just crawled off of the altar yet again. He sees the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, accomplished once for all time. He doesn’t see all the times I failed but the sinless life of His Son Jesus.

The irony of the gospel is that it’s those who seek to lose their life who get to keep it. Those who try to hold on to their life end up losing it. Those who try to become their authentic self become a shallow parody of someone else. Those who live in surrender and try to become more like Jesus really do find their truest selves in the process.

It’s about dying to live. It’s about surrendering to become truly free.