We must begin by Surrendering to Gods will in the small things, or the day to day aspects of life. This is what will prepare us when we are dealing with the “Big” traumas.
It is those daily irritants, such as when a person does something that rubs us the wrong way. It’s when the refrigerator quits in the middle of a heat wave. Or we are called in to work on our birthday! Surrender begins when we trust God through the moments of our lives.
Most of you are familiar with the “Lords Prayer”
“Our Father, who art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy Kingdom come, THY will be done.”
Pause there. Jesus taught us this simple act of surrender right there in the prayer He taught us to use as a model. This is what Rick Joyner was talking about.
Thy Will be done.
Sometimes we mix up prayer with having a genie in a lamp. But we are not Alladin, although God could surely say, as the Genie did in Disneys version, “You aint never had a friend like me!”
A genie does our will when we rub the lamp the right way!
Gods will does not change when we rub the lamp. We can’t get what we want just by saying the right words, leaping through the right hoops, or being a “good person.”
God the Father Son and Holy Spirit have a plan, and their own will. Sometimes they use little irritants like a fluffy cattle prod to get our stubborn souls moving in the right direction.
Our part is to lean in close enough to know the Fathers will, and through obedience to see it accomplished. It is a partnership. As a school bus driver, I don’t tell my boss when I want to take a break, or which road I want my bus to travel on. I have to succumb to my route sheet in order to complete my part of the mission and get the kids safely to school each day.
Its funny, because recently I have balked a number of my bosses decisions. So… this is speaking to ME right now!
Let me give you an example from own life. I have been wanting a video projector in our elementary Sunday school. I am not techie enough to know what to get, or how to set it up. I approached a number of people who all offered to help, but never really did.
Man, I was getting frustrated!
I would like to say that I recognized my frustration was NOT of the Lord, because the wisdom that comes from above is full of peace. Nope. I was getting angry and stressed, but bottling it up.
See… that is exactly how we know we have not surrendered to the Lord. We are agitated. We lack peace. We get frustrated. We blame others on our expectations not being met.
I would like to say that I took it to the Lord and surrendered to His will.
But I did not.
Nope. Instead I expressed my frustrations to the church administrator. A couple standing nearby overheard my complaint and offered to help;.
It turns out… I did not really need or want a projector at all! The couple helped me create a better, more efficient system for showing videos with a large TV.
That is when I realized that God was actually the one keeping me from being able to move in the direction that I was just so certain was necessary.
I should have let go of control and trusted HIS plan all along.
If you are hitting dead ends and the going is tough, it could be you are fighting God and trying to force your own way!
But let me also share a story from my own life when I did surrender!
I had been immersed in the book “Experiencing Jesus Christ” by Jeanne Guyon, I’ll share more about her in a minute.
Her story and life encouraged me to give each detail of my day into the Lords hand and trust Him with what He chose to bring into my life.
Early the next morning I went to work. I did what we call a “pre-trip” on my school bus. That is when you test all the lights and levels to be sure your bus is will be safe out on the road. I do this at 5:00 am when no mechanics are at the garage yet. While I can take a sub bus if there is a problem, its a big nuisance to run back for a pair of keys and begin the process all over again in a bus I am less familiar with. Especially in the cold. Where I live, some of those early morning pretrips are bitterly cold!
Usually all is well, but THIS particular morning, I had one of my flashing red lights out! There was no mechanic on duty, and there was no time if one was available! I had to run back to the bus garage, find the keys to a sub bus, and start the pre trip process all over again. I was immediately stressed and agitated because I knew this would cause me to run late.
I saw NO way this could be a good thing for me, but because I had committed to trusting God in my every day life I thanked Him for the light being out and told Him I trusted Him with my life. It took a bit of determination, but I set my face to trust and not stress.
Later that day the mechanic approached me. “Its a good thing you didn’t take your bus this morning,” he explained. “When we brought the bus over to fix the light we noticed the alternator wasn’t charging! You probably would have been stranded out there somewhere if you took it.”
That was a great little lesson from God.
Even though we won’t always see a reason for an irritant thrown into our paths, surrendering means trusting God has a reason and we accept His will.
Surrendering 0ur will does not always produce positive results.
Paul asked God three times to remove a thorn. We don’t know what the thorn was, but we do know Gods response was “My grace is sufficient for thee, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 CORINTHIANS 12:9)
Paul had to learn how to abide with a thorn. Surrendering his own desire for relief, and letting God be glorified somehow.
The musician, Jeremy Camp, played in our city the other day. I have never heard him live before and I was impressed with his worshipful heart and his humble spirit.
Camp told the story of his own “thorn.” The thorn of grief when his beloved wife died mere months after their honeymoon. He told the crowd how he questioned his own faith as the pain of her loss overwhelmed him.
“I had to reach the point of my own surrender,” he said. “Its ok to ask why. I asked “Why,” but finally had to let it go and trust God. 2 weeks after she died I wrote the song “I still believe.”
The lyrics to his famous song I still Believe say “I still believe in your faithfulness, I still believe in your truth. I still believe in your Holy Word, even when I cannot see, I still believe.”
Like Peter who said to Jesus “Where can I go? You have the words of eternal life.” Jeremy Camp realized that despite his personal pain, God was still God and He would leave his questions in Gods capable hands.
This is the essence of surrender. It is not that everything WE want comes to pass, but that as we spend time with the Lord we allow Him to do what HE wants, without fighting, complaining, and crying.
Here is an important reason to learn how to surrender:
My brother and I were talking about this topic. He told me that sometimes what we call prayer may just be “worrying out loud.”
Since then I’ve checked myself when I am sharing my need with the Lord. Am I just feeling stressed and worrying about it before God? Or am I truly entrusting this thing to the Lord? Lets say a person has fallen desperately in love with someone else! They are so smitten with this individual that they are certain God has assigned that one to be their future spouse!
When they go to pray about it, they really only want one answer from the Lord. They will only accept one, because they have pre-determined the answer and cannot bear to picture life without their beloved.
In order to truly hear Gods voice and not our own (at times) overbearing emotions, it is good to sit before the Lord and ask ourselves “Am I willing to accept the answer even if its not what I hope or think it should be?”
Sometimes I have had to sit and wrestle with my own heart for a season before I am ready to truly seek God for HIS answer.
This idea would also apply to say, feeling called to move or go to a certain school. It can apply to a job opportunity you really really want! I feel the last one has caused me to wrestle more than once. When I first moved to Marquette I had a fantastic interview at what I would have considered my dream job. Surely that was Gods will for me. I battled and fought to contain my own expectations and entrust the outcome of that interview to God.
I was pretty hurt when I was passed up.
I had to revisit the Lord and dump out my frustrations.
In the end, I still found myself singing with a trust that rose out of the disappointment “I still believe.”
You may also ask: Why pray at all then if God is going to just do what He wants?
Without getting too deep in the theological weeds of the sovereignty of God, Ill share a simple thought:
God IS answering your prayer when it’s a No, or when He sends you in a different direction, or withholds what we so desperately want.
In fact, His hand is directing your destiny as you partner with Him in prayer. He is answering your prayer by keeping you from something you may have forcefully taken had you not prayed. Raise your hand if you desperately wanted to marry someone once and now think “Thank you Jesus THAT didn’t happen!”
King David once lay on the ground and fasted for 7 days, refusing to eat or bathe until God spared his child. On the seventh day God answered that prayer by taking king Davids son to heaven.
Davids servants were sure he would flip out, so no one wanted to tell him! But David saw them whispering and perceived the answer.
2 Samuel 12:20 tells us “David then arose from the earth and washed and anointed himself, and came into the house of the Lord and worshipped.”
Worshipped? Yes.
He gave God the glory due His name even when things did not go his way despite his many tears.
The story goes on: “Then his servants said unto him ‘What thing is this thou hast done? Thou didst fast and weep for the child while it was alive, but when the child was dead, thou didst rise and eat bread!”
And he said “While the child was yet alive, I fasted and I wept: for I said Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.”
So we see, David was prepared in his spirit to accept Gods answer, but while there was yet hope, he prayed with all his heart.
Yet, we see God did hear and answer Davids prayer in a different way. Even though one child was taken to heaven, Verses 24-25 of the same chapter tells us God comforted the child’s mother by causing her to bear another son. That son was Solomon. The wisest man ever.
“How can I tell if I am surrendering my will?”
We may be trying to control God and situations, but not being aware of it.
My brother also wisely shared how taking control does not always look aggressive .We may be wanting to be liked by others, so we will not confront or deal with something when God asks us too. We may humbly turn down a ministry opportunity God calls us to, because we actually don’t believe God would want such a flawed soul. But if He calls you and you say No, that is really telling God He doesn’t know what He is doing and trying to steer from the passenger seat!
RECAP:
- We learn to surrender by giving God not only the “large” problems, but the small, daily irritants
2) Surrendering does not mean we do not battle in prayer, but we battle as a partner WITH GOD, in accordance with His will
3) We can know if we are still trying to control a situation by our lack of peace when we believe there is only ONE good answer.
4) While God may not give us what we want, He will often answer our prayers in an unexpected or different way.
Let me close with one more example of a surrendered life:
Jeanne Guyon, a French woman in the 17th century, lived a life of continual submission and surrender before the Lord. She was considered a heretic by the Church in her day, and spent 8 years in the damp and dank infamous Bastille prison. All because she believed God could and would answer even the lowly who turned to God in personal prayer. She was willing to suffer and even die for the Lord. She accepted her sentence as a gift from God. While there, even her prison guards died or grew ill from the terrible conditions. Yet Jeanne Guyons depth of surrender was such, that after 8 years she was reluctant to leave the cell because she had so deeply come to know the presence of the Lord there.
Madam Guyon wrote a powerful book called “Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ.” What I am calling “surrender, she called “Abandonment.”
Madam Guyon wrote “What is abandonment? It is forgetting your past; it is leaving the future in His hands; it is devoting the present fully and completely to your Lord. Abandonment is being satisfied with the present moment, no matter what that moment contains. You are satisfied, because you know whatever that moment has, it contains, in that instant, Gods eternal plan for you.”
