Bringing out the best

I ran across a post today on Cheesehead in Paradise which discusses this scripture -- Romans 12:1-3 (although I'm just listing verses 1-2):

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. 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.

A couple of things jumped out at me. First of all, "take your everyday, ordinary life...and place it before God as an offering." We talked this evening in class about how difficult it is to surrender our problems, our worries, and our concerns to God. We hang on to them. Look at this sentence though -- God doesn't only just want our worries and problems. He wants even those parts of our lives that are ordinary -- our sleeping and eating. Everything.

The second thing (actually it was the first phrase I pinpointed) as that "God brings out the best of you." That's amazing to me. Why have I never thought of that? It could be a handy way to judge if an action is of God or not. What if we were to ask ourselves, "Does this action bring out the best in me?" We might not like the answers. We might not be ready to give up those things which are not of God.