We have to present ourselves each day before the Lord

Due to the mercies of God, we must present our bodies as a holy sacrifice, pleasing to God. It is a very specific and very graphic way of making that call that the Bible makes over and over again to Christians to the life of holiness.

If we want to please God, if we want to live a life that corresponds to the great and the plan of salvation and to the holy character of God, what do we have to do, how can we ensure that kind of behavior? well Paul says here: presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This idea of presenting our bodies is loaded with meaning and we are going to unpack it a little bit.

The word that Pablo uses that translates into Spanish "present you" is the word: parastesai, parastesai in the original Greek and it means to take something and it would be like taking it in your hands and carrying it and putting it in front of someone, in this case God. It refers for example to when the priests took the sacrificed animals and presented them before the Lord. It could also refer to when the Hebrew children were taken and presented before the Lord or we could also think of a wave offering before the Presence of the Lord and presented with all deliberation, with all care before God so that He would look at it.

It's like when we say it occurs to me right now in a restaurant, have you seen those scenes in the movies in which the waiter comes and presents a bottle of very expensive wine to the diners, the customers at the table and the waiter with his towel on the arm and comes and presents this bottle of wine to the client for him to examine it and determine if it is what he has ordered and if it is exactly what he is going to pay because it is expensive and he has to confirm if it is exactly what he wishes and that they are not actually cheating or something like that, so the customer looks at the bottle, reads the label and then nods and says: yes, go ahead.

It is this idea that we should take our life and as a very serious and valuable object to present it before the Lord so that He can do something with it, right? So we see here that Paul continues with this idea that the Christian life requires deliberation, you have to do things with great intentionality so that they can truly have meaning. What I was saying before is that to live a holy life we have to make a holy purpose to live as God calls us.

So what we children of God have to do is present ourselves before the Lord every day. Present our life, our struggles, our contradictions, our sinful tendencies, the ties that we have, the bad habits that we have, present ourselves before the Lord and say: Father, here I am, I need You to touch me, that You receive me, that You deal with me, that you cleanse me, that you heal me, I recognize who I am and therefore I am here Lord touch my life and do with me what You want, fill me with Your Holy Spirit.

We have to at some point in our life and at every occasion in our life also because it is something that we do once perhaps as something solemn and a purpose and a promise before the Lord but then we must continue day by day doing these same purposes that today I am going to present my life before the Lord again so that the Lord continues to work for me and do with me what He wants.

There has to be that surrender, there has to be that letting go of the Lord and saying: Father, here I am, deal with me, transform me and make me a new person in Christ Jesus, if there is no such commitment, it will not happen.

So as the great prophets on other occasions presented sacrifices or children or even kings to be anointed by God, we have to present our lives before the Father so that He does what He wants. Parastesai is a very beautiful word and it is what we have to do, present ourselves every day before the Lord and say to the Holy Spirit: today Lord deal with me and do what you want from me, I present my life to you and please continue working on her and perfecting and purifying me.

Hopefully that is the meaning and the desire and the feeling of each one of us. May the Lord bless you and we will continue to explore this wonderful passage in our next meditations.