🙌 hands up! 🙌

“I beseech youtherefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
Romans 12:1-2 King James Version (KJV)
 
If you want to know God’s good and acceptable and perfect will, it all starts with one decision: to be a living sacrifice. This is the essence of success – to know God, to know His will and live it out.
 
The verse here says that you present yourself as a living sacrifice. God is not going to force His good and acceptable and perfect will on you, you have to choose it, and it starts by presenting yourself.
 
“Beloved friends, what should be our proper response to God’s marvelous mercies? I encourage you to surrender yourselves to God to be his sacred, living sacrifices. And live in holiness, experiencing all that delights his heart. For this becomes your genuine expression of worship.”
Romans 12:1 The Passion Translation (TPT)
 
You’ll never be truly successful, nor will you live the significant life that God has for you unless you’re continually choosing to offer yourself as a living sacrifice to God. Being a living sacrifice means that you’re willingly choosing what God wants above what you want – you’re not asking God to bless your plans but rather you’re saying yes to His plans which are already blessed. God’s plan for your life is much better than your plans for your life. Many people freak out at the thought of praying something like, God, I’ll do whatever you want me to. They freak out because they think that God is going to tell them to do something they hate when the truth is that God is your loving heavenly Father and He has your best interests at heart. His plan for your life is what will truly satisfy you and cause you to be successful. When you feel God leading you at first, you may want to kick and scream because you had other plans but as you surrender yourself to Him you will soon be asking yourself, why didn’t I do this earlier?!
 
I like how the writer says that being a living sacrifice is your reasonable service. God will never call you to do something unreasonable. You may think it’s unreasonable, but it isn’t. The Passion Translation says that surrendering yourself to God is your genuine expression of worship. Genuine worship isn’t singing an anointed song while a tear rolls down your cheek; it’s living a life of surrender to God and His will. Surrender means to yield to someone else’s will like if you had a gun pointed at your head and you stick your hands up and do whatever you’re told. That’s surrender – but God isn’t threatening you with a gun to your head! Surrendering to God is a free-willed choice that you make. Surrendering to God means that you’re living a life of doing whatever God wants, it’s embracing an attitude of “God, whatever You want, I will do it”. This attitude is our genuine act of worshipping God. Therefore by implication, if we aren’t living surrendered lives we are not genuinely worshipping God. I’m not saying that you aren’t saved or that you aren’t a nice person, and I am certainly not saying that God doesn’t love you. What I am saying is that if you aren’t living a life surrendered to Jesus, then you aren’t genuinely worshipping Jesus.

Even Jesus lived a life of surrender:

“For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.”
John 6:38 King James Version (KJV)

“And I have come out of heaven not for my own desires, but for the satisfaction of my Father who sent me.”
John 6:38 The Passion Translation (TPT)