Romans 12:1
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.

Here’s something I can’t stop thinking about:

God created man.
Therefore, God has full rights over man.
An inventor can destroy an invention with no moral qualms or use it for any purpose he deems appropriate. He is the inventor.
Here we are, creation, at the beck and call of our Creator.

What did he ask of us?
Love, devotion, affection: our hearts—the very thing we long to give away.

What did we give him?
The opposite—we gave our hearts away to things created: worshiping money and people and ideas and idolizing everything but the one who is able to love us back. We became adulterers. We ignored God, hated him, or claimed he doesn’t exist.

His response was this: He came to live among the very people who mocked and reviled him. While serving his own creation, he was slapped, made fun of, and killed. He endured the wrath of the Father for the rebellion of the beings he created, from whom all he’d asked for was love.

In doing this, he allowed himself to die in place of anyone who would ask. He forgave and gave his own righteousness away freely to restore the relationship he created mankind to have with him.

He pleads with us to go and let those he loves know all about how they can be made right with God, find the love they’ve been created to long for, and find the reality and meaning of life itself.

Then—after we’ve allowed the God of the universe to take our hatred of him upon his own shoulders and die for it, and we try to come to grips with what that means and live to love him back—he rewards us! He promises eternal life and rewards to anyone who lives by faith, rewards on earth and infinitely more in heaven.

Life is stupefying. The love of Christ is almost too mind-boggling to believe to be true, except for the fact that the history of the world and indeed my own life point directly to it every single day. Whenever I think about this, and how in the future God promises I’ll understand his love more and more, my heart always seems to get caught in my throat.