The Message paraphrase for Romans 12:1-2 reads as follows:
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.
Hopefully this brings to new light what is familiar to us about “not being conformed to the world”. I fear that we as Christians maybe too well adjusted to our culture. So much of our effort is given in trying to “fit in”. It seems to me what Paul is urging us is that it should always be uncomfortable for us to “fit in” with our culture because at its root our culture is against God. When our primary thought is for God, His Word, His Truth, His Love, then when we are in our culture those thoughts will compel us to show something that is unusual in our world. I believe transformation occurs when that which we have been taught and believe, is what others see in our words and actions. May each one of us strive for this daily in our lives.
Singing His Praises!
Mark