Thursday, June 21, 2012

Surrender

It all started this past Saturday evening. We were having a Life Group hangout where some other ladies in my life group and I had a really good conversation about trusting God for everything.

God had already begun to challenge me to trust him, and to trust not in my own understanding like Proverbs 3:5-6 says. As were talking about this, we got on the topic of being led by the Holy Spirit and doing whatever God tells us to do.

One girl in my life group mentioned this cool quote that says, “How can we do anything radical for Jesus if we’re the ones defining what’s radical?” And so after discussing this, the 3 of us decided to challenge ourselves – to wake up every morning and to tell Jesus that we will do whatever he tells us to do, no matter how crazy it may sound.

I was expecting Jesus to tell me to do something really strange, maybe something like what Beth Moore was called to do in this story she tells about her being called by the Lord to brush an old man’s hair (watch the video by following This Link- it is totally worth it!) My friend Michelle showed me this video at the beginning of the summer, and ever since watching it, this is what I think of when I think of doing something radical where I have to trust in Jesus for everything.

So, those are the kinds of situations I was expecting, but Jesus had something else in mind. I can now honestly say that I had no idea what the heck I was getting myself into.

As you may know if you’ve been reading my blog, one of the things I want to learn how to do this summer is to fight against the lies that I believe that have been taught to me by Satan. They are lies I didn’t even know were lies, and this summer, I want to learn how to fight them.

But on Monday night, I was talking with my friend Michelle, the one who showed me the hairbrush video, and she was talking to me about the difference between focusing on God’s power and focusing on Satan’s lies. She had told me that a lot of her friends, whenever they were having problems, would focus on Satan and say, “he’s doing this in my life and I need to fight it!” And it made her wonder, why don’t we focus on God’s conquering power in these situations instead?

And that’s when I realized what I was doing wrong. Every time something would go wrong, I would focus on putting the blame on Satan and trying to fight him. I knew that God was more powerful than him, but I was forgetting that because I was focusing so much on trying to fight Satan.

I think this comes from my belief that you have to know what the problem is in order to fight it. I was focusing on knowing what the problem is, but so much that I was trying to fight it myself instead.

And I had begun to realize that I couldn’t fight it myself. This had been coming up in every other aspect of my life too. Again, if you’ve been following my blog, you’ll remember a post from April where I obscurely explained how God revealed something crazy to me. Because God had told me something that was going to happen in the future, I was trying to control what I learned and how I grew this summer so that I could be ready for when that time came.

Needless to say, it was not working. Trying to control everything and do it myself to hide my vulnerability was getting me nowhere.

And so with all of this, God completely broke me down on Tuesday night. I had come to the point where I didn’t know how to fight anymore. I didn’t know how to prepare myself for the future, which I so badly wanted to do, but I couldn’t. All this was producing was worry and stress.

On that Saturday night, I told God that I would do whatever he told me to do, no matter how crazy it sounded. And He told me to surrender everything to him, and to give him all the control.

Now that is what I call insane.

When this happened, I was like, how do I do this? I realized that you don’t surrender one time and then you’re completely surrendered forever. Because of our sinful nature, we will try to take control again, so in order to surrender, we have to wake up every day and give everything to God.

This is really challenging for me. It’s extremely difficult to do that when you may somewhat know what the future holds, but It’s lifted a huge weight off of my shoulders. So now, my challenge is to surrender. I’m giving the fighting and the control to God, and so far, it feels awesome.

And I’m also realizing that my mom was right. My mom doesn’t like it whenever I mention Satan, and I understood that, but in a way I also did not because of how important I believe it is to know what the problem is so that you can find a solution and fight effectively.

But now, I understand a lot more because I’ve learned that if we focus on Satan too much, we begin to lose sight of the power of God. And it’s much more powerful to trust in the power of God to conquer everything for us, because we can’t do it alone.

So that is what God is doing in my life right now. We’re almost halfway into LT, which means that the summer is almost halfway over! I’m personally not ready to go back, but I know that when I do go back, it is going to be awesome. And I know that God is going to use these remaining 6 weeks to do crazy things in my life and in everyone else’s life. I just have to surrender it all to him and let him take control.

“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”- Psalm 46:10

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