Place Your Life Before God

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 12:1-3, The Message)

Those few verses speak to me on so many levels, about this addiction, about where my spiritual life is right now, about the nature of the culture we live in...

The same passage in the NIV urges us to offer our bodies 'as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God' - which hardly allows space for habitual MB, I'm sure. It also says:

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by
the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12:2, NIV)

That's been a favourite verse of mine for a while, but it really means something now - now I've realised how messed up my mind has become, and how badly it needs renewing. I need to get out of the pattern of this world, too - the pattern that says casual sex is good; all guys look at naked women; it's natural, don't be ashamed of it; if it feels good, then it's alright.

I never wanted to be part of that world. But I very nearly did, and still it calls me.

Placing my life before God - body, mind and soul - is something I've let slip recently, with stupid consequences. I need to do it afresh now, after falling, and to keep doing it if I'm to regain the upper hand over this addiction.