BE TRANSFORMED!

Yes everyone it has snowed yet again and yet again there is no school. I guess this is probably snow day number 9 for our county school kids. That means another day of hanging around the house trying to entertain Katie long enough for her to let me do my school work today. Of course we'll have to get some sledding in a little later today and there's a snowman just waiting to be made in the front yard!

Life is full of interruptions. Sometimes they come in the form of small and beautiful things like a few inches of snow and other times it could be something much larger like sickness or family problems. Thankfully today we're just going to adjust our lives around those 3" that cover the grass and transform the world.

As I was typing the transform thing some Scripture came to my mind and I'll deviate from my original thoughts at this point..."Rom 12:2 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." This is from the Message Bible and I love the way it phrases what we know traditionally to read as "be not conformed of the world but transformed by the renewing of your mind."

Snow transforms our world. Just look at the photo above...What was once a tree is now barely recognizable! The snow falls so silently and steadily. If you look when snow falls it doesn't just cover the grass so that the grass is unrecognizable, but it falls on the largest of tree branches to the smallest of needles on a pine branch. Snow covers the mud and the gunk that you see around everyday and transforms it into something so neat so very beautiful. When I was little, I used to hate it when the dog or cat would go out in the snow and track through it or make a mess of it. I would sometimes try to leave one spot of the yard untouched by my feet or my snow forts just so it would still look pretty and fresh.

If you think about it, the snow is a picture of the power of the applied blood of Jesus in our lives. His blood takes what is otherwise a sinful and ugly nature and covers us so that we are clean and beautiful and acceptable in the eyes of God. His blood doesn't just cover us on the outside for all to see, but gets down inside of our every pore and covers us and changes us from the inside out. Sometimes I guess I'm not as careful as I should be when it comes to allowing the world to trample and throw its ways on me. What if I were as concerned about what affected my mind and my heart as I was about making sure no one walked on the new snow? What if I didn't care what everyone out there thought of me? What if I took care of this temple that houses the Holy Spirit of the living God!?

Today I guess I'm challenged with the message of the snow...I'm challenged to do what Paul says jsut before the verse I quoted above...:"Rom 12:1 And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him."

Under the old covenant sacrifices were dead animals that were slaughtered and placed on an alter and burned. In His new covenant through the sacrifice of a sinless, spotless Lamb of Jesus, the blood has already been offered and accepted. Now WE, that's me and you, offer OURSELVES up to the Lord as a LIVING SACRIFICE by the way we live and the choices we make. The world has no say so as to what is good and acceptable...the Word of God makes that clear and we follow that and when we do it is WE who are changed from the inside out, transformed. Our transformation then changes the WORLD!!!

Just some food for thought today...now go enjoy the snow!

Ron