Surrender

Our church recently held a conference over a weekend about Living in Grace.  It was a very thought-provoking conference with an excellent speaker, but something in the lecture (and thankfully also in the outline!) stuck out at me.  I still think about it almost every day, and not much is able to so totally capture my attention and thoughts for so long. 

Friday night’s session focused on God’s unlimited and perfect love for us.  Saturday evening, it covered surrender.  I was having trouble paying attention, but when our speaker read this quote, my attention riveted to it as I found it on the outline in my lap.  Here’s the quote:

Surrender is believing that Jesus does not love me because I am good. In fact, as pleased as God is with obedience, my goodness can be nothing but self-centered outward compliance, based on personal resolve and determination.

I paid rapt attention after that, trying to take in as much information as I could.  Why?

Because those two sentences scared me.

Again, why?

It’s as if those lines were written for me.  I know, and have even said before, that obeying God’s laws in thought and action brings me happiness and satisfaction.  After all, if God’s commandments are the instruction manual for humanity, then everything will be better when we follow it.  I have a good deal of self-control, and I can pretty much make myself do or not do whatever I want. 

So basically, I have mastered “outward compliance” with my “personal resolve and determination”.  And by “outward”, it doesn’t just mean what we do; it means even our attitudes and thoughts and desires that are “good”.   All of those things are really outward things anyway, compared to the depths of the soul.  If my heart has not truly given up trying to be good to allow Christ to work in my heart, then any obedience is just me trying to make myself worthy of the salvation God freely gives. 

So, for about two weeks, I felt pretty down.  Anything I do eventually comes back to me trying to be good, when “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). 

Hopeless and helpless.  That was how I felt.  Not that I thought I wasn’t saved, but I just felt like I was disappointing God.  And for me, disappointing anyone is the end of the world, even if it’s someone whose opinion I don’t really care about.  If I thought that I had disappointed God, I would be crushed.

Then I looked at the first sentence again:  “Surrender is believing that Jesus does not love me because I am good.”  That reminded me of something from Friday night:

“There is nothing you can do today that will cause God to love you more.

  There is nothing you do today that will cause God to love you less.”

God’s love for me is so complete, so unlimited, so perfect that it cannot possibly grow.  How can something be longer than eternity?  Or how can there be more of something that is infinite?  How can anything be deeper than bottomless?  Or how can it be larger than something limitless? 

I’m not going to lie.  I still don’t have the whole surrender concept figured out.  But what’s better is that I know that it’s okay.  God still and always loves me…totally, completely, perfectly, eternally loves me.  And He loves you too.

[Quotes taken from Living in Grace by Paul Kooistra]

The Worry Challenge

I’m sure that if I asked everyone who has ever worried needlessly about a problem that didn’t yet exist to get on a boat, we would worry about the boat sinking.  And I know I would be the first one on.  I am extremely talented at making myself almost sick over things that really aren’t worth it.  I mean, these are things that won’t matter in a year, a month, even a week sometimes.  Even if they do affect my life beyond a week or two, I always get on the other side of whatever it was and wonder why I was so nervous. 

I will say that nerves before a performance, a test, or whatever else can be helpful.  They keep us awake and help our bodies concentrate on the task at hand (ever noticed that you don’t feel like eating before a performance but are starving afterward?  That’s why.)  If I’m a little nervous, I usually do well.  But if I’m so nervous that my entire body is shaking, it makes it hard to function.

And I honestly have no advice on how to keep from getting worried.  If you were expecting that, you might as well stop reading now (but please don't!).

Recently, I read a devotional about worry and resting peacefully in Christ, and I realized (again) that worrying is not only pointless but an expression of doubt in God. 

Stop and think about what that means.  When we worry, we essentially tell the Creator of the Universe that we don’t think He can handle our problem and are going to take matters into our own hands.  Of course, we know that He is powerful enough to do what we need Him to do, but we don’t trust Him enough to totally lay matters in His hands.  We’re afraid that His will for us in this situation won’t line up with the way we want things to go.

I think that worrying is a lot like being a “backseat driver”.  Not familiar with that term?  Get in the back seat of a car and tell the driver whenever there is a red light, a car coming up on the left, a change in the speed limit, and whatever else you think the driver needs to know, and you’ll find out.  Better yet, if you can legally drive, instruct someone else to do it to you.  For those of you who can’t drive, I’ll just tell you that it gets pretty obnoxious. 

The reason that it’s annoying is because the driver has, 99% of the time, already seen whatever it is the “backseat driver” is trying to tell him.  And if he hasn’t, he’ll see it soon enough to deal with the problem.  The driver is fully competent, and he won’t appreciate someone trying to tell him how to drive.

God has a complete and perfect plan for our lives.  He knows where it’s going and He knows how to get you there.   He doesn’t need you to sit in the back seat biting your nails and worrying about everything that seems to be going wrong.  He wants you to sit back and trust that He knows what He’s doing so that you can just spend time getting to know Him.  So trust Him.  He’s got this.  How do I know?  Well, He said so.  Check out Matthew 6:25-34 (ESV) and hear what Jesus has to say about worry.

²⁵ “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷ And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? ²⁸ And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹ yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰ But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ³¹ Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. ³³ But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

³⁴ “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

If you are seeking God’s kingdom and following His call on your life, you will never have to worry about anything. 

Easier said than done though, right?  But I want to challenge all of us, myself included, to try to let go of at least one thing this week.  I’m not saying not to go grocery shopping or not to do laundry or take precautions during a thunderstorm or anything like that; those things are means God uses to provide for us.  I’m talking about something you have no control over.  Think about things in your life that you cannot by any amount of worrying affect in the least.  I could probably find ten by scanning news headlines.  And let’s give it to God.  Let God, who has the whole world in His hands, take care of us as He has already promised us.  This is just a guess, but if we could learn to let go, I think we would have much more peace.  And that sounds like something that’s worth not worrying about.