I have been sitting with the same three verses for over a week now, pen in hand, mapping out every word in the margins of my notebook; and this week, one small word finally stopped me cold.
You.
“Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is.” (Romans 12:2)
Not God will reveal. Not the will of God will arrive. You will be able to test and approve it. I had read this verse a dozen times before without noticing that the verb belongs to me. I always pictured God’s will as something handed down, something I simply wait to receive. But this verse says I have a job to do; to test it, to approve it, to actively engage with it rather than sit back and wait for it to land in my lap.
That single realization has quietly rearranged how I have been praying this week.
What does it actually mean to offer yourself?
“In view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” (Romans 12:1)
The word for mercy here is the Greek oiktirmos; deep compassion, the kind God feels for all of us and then powerfully shows and shares with everyone who follows Him. Not a distant, dutiful mercy. A felt one.
And holy comes from hagios; sacred, set apart, physically pure, morally blameless. Which led me to a question I wrote in the margin and have not stopped circling since: how do I actually make my body a holy and pleasing offering? Not as performance. Ephesians reminds me that impurity and greed have no place among God’s holy people (Ephesians 5:3), and that He chose us before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight (Ephesians 1:4). I did not become holy by working harder. I was chosen into it. My offering is a response, not an application.
Why is renewal a process and not a moment?
The word that unlocked the most for me this week was renewing; in Greek, anakainoo. It does not mean a flash of inspiration or a single emotional high at church. It means completing a process. Moving from one stage to a higher, more developed one, day by day.
Paul says it plainly elsewhere: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16) The renewing is not superficial polish on the outside. It penetrates the very core of who I am, and it is linked, Colossians tells me, to knowledge of the One who made me; “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” (Colossians 3:10)
That word knowledge stopped me too. Not information about God. Relational knowledge; the kind that comes from actually knowing Him, the way you know a person you spend time with, not a fact you memorized. “We all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed.” (2 Corinthians 3:18) Unveiled. Face to face. That is not a posture of waiting. That is a posture of presence.
What does “perfect” actually mean here?
I always read “God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will” and assumed perfect meant flawless; a will with no mistakes in it. But the Greek word is teleios, and it does not mean flawless at all. It means complete. Mature. Brought fully to its intended purpose.
Paul uses the same word elsewhere: “He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ.” (Colossians 1:28) God’s perfect will is not a flawless outcome waiting to be handed to me. It is spiritual maturity; mine, fully grown, fully His.
So what does testing and approving actually look like?
This is where it stopped being a word study and became something I have to live out.
If renewing my mind is a daily process, and if I am the one who tests and approves what His will actually is, then I am not meant to sit passively, waiting for clarity to arrive from outside of me. I am meant to be in the process; reading, meditating, offering, being renewed, and then genuinely discerning, testing what lines up with who He is and what does not.
That has quietly changed how I have approached this week. When a hard conversation came up that I needed to have, I did not just wait for peace to descend on me. I sat with the word, asked what was true, and then moved. When Allen and I knelt down with Adi in our prayer room again last night, I was not just hoping something would happen to us. I was actively choosing to be part of the renewing, on purpose, together.
God’s will was never meant to be a mystery you wait outside of. It is a process you are invited into, tested and approved by a mind that is being renewed, day by day, on purpose. 🌿
“Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is; his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2)
Where in your life is God inviting you to test and approve, instead of just wait? I would love to hear it in the comments. 🤍
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