Have It Your Way

Be careful then, dear brothers and sisters. Make sure that your own hearts are not evil and unbelieving, turning you away from the living God…For if we are faithful to the end, trusting God just as firmly as when we first believed, we will share in all that belongs to Christ.
Hebrews 3:12-14

I have to admit that writing about surrender has really flowed from my heart. I am desperate to die to myself and let Christ live through me. My heart literally breaks with the want but surrender is no small thing. It takes a courage that is unknown to the intellectual man.  An act so foolish to the common Christian, to find a comrade to walk the journey or a mentor to encourage the process is a rare thing.  In a country where you can have it your way, surrender confronts the most dearly held Western ideals of rights and individuality.  Surrender has truly assaulted me.

The writing about surrender has definitely been easier than trying to live it out. I seem to be existing in Romans 7:15, “I do not do the good I want, but I do the very evil I do not want.” I have to confess that it’s been awhile since I have even tried to write about surrender, because I’ve been so challenged with living it out – and failing – that I didn’t feel adequate.  My flesh will not die. I still want my wants so much that I repeatedly choose them over the life of Christ.  My rights are “my precious,” and despite knowing they are killing me, my flesh still rules with an evil so very deep.

My inability to walk in surrender and to actually submit myself to His leadership is born of fear and unbelief.  My life is so riddled with unbelief.  I need to go back to when I was 6, and in my childish way, I simply and purely just believed who He was and what He said.   I hadn’t let doubt eat holes into my faith.  I understood God more in my innocence, and even in my ignorance, than I do in my maturity and intellect.

As an adult, I’m afraid of losing my sense of personhood, afraid to give up what I think I have to offer the world, afraid that the exchanged life will actually be the short end of the stick for me.  I grew out of my trust as I grew up.  Yes, I left behind the KNOWING that God is altogether good, and let the fear of His mysterious ways feast on my childlikeness.

I will not choose to lose my life at a perpetual rest stop of self-condemnation. I will not run myself ragged on the loop of fear and unbelief.  I choose to let the Lord show me my fear, my unbelief.  Instead of denying it or shying away from it, I will own it—only because it is the first step to being rid of it.

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.