Offered
Bill R. Morrison. Bloomington, Indiana; WestBow Press. 177 pp. (Paperback).
Everything we do that is not offered to God as worship is idolatrous and therefore sin. A person’s life is either given to God in its entirety, or it is not.”
They’re straightforward words from Bill Morrison, director of Baptist Campus Ministries at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In his book, “Offered,” Morrison comes out of the gate with the “all or nothing” viewpoint and then methodically explains how worship is designed to happen in every shred of the believer’s life.
For decades, many Christians have thought of God in a hierarchical mindset, he wrote — “God is No. 1, family No. 2 and work or country No. 3.” But that gets “Christians caught in the futile struggle of trying to live a balanced life,” he wrote. “The key to a life offered as worship is not to prioritize God above all things but to dedicate each and every area of our lives to God as worship.”
Morrison begins by explaining who the God is whom Christians worship.
He then walks through the different ways in which that worship works itself out in everyday life — through a commitment to deny ourselves to give everything to God; to have self-control, discipline, etc.; and to worship God through hope, love and forgiveness, among other things.
He also talks about how these work themselves out through all of life, from starting block to finish line, whether that be through parenting, rest, marriage, school, work or doing tasks like buying groceries.
Morrison’s book isn’t new material, but it is pulled together in a comprehensive way that’s fresh and readable for Christians desiring to look at how and why their life should be offered on the altar — and stay there.
—By Grace Thornton, The Alabama Baptist
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