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. [Romans 12:1-2 (MSG)]

New Year’s morning, I opened my email to be greeted by an ad from my favorite clothing store telling me, “It’s a New Year – Here’s to a New You!” There was a beautiful model attired in the latest fashion color. If only a “new” self could be gotten by a little on-line shopping, plastic surgery, a change of jobs, a different hairstyle, a new house, or other external changes, but it can’t! Romans 12 tells us that make-overs certainly are possible. The transformation, however, is internal not external. The acceptance of Christ and the presence of His Holy Spirit in our lives will make us new, not from the outside in, but from the inside out!