I know what is best for you.” The more we grasp at happiness and try to achieve things without Christ, the more we will be let down. He does not force us to let him into the driver’s seat, but he says, “Trust me. God gives us the freedom to control our own lives. Realizing that You are Not Self-Sufficient We want to do the will of God-but to do his will, we have to let go of our plans to accept his-which are much better than our own. We like to have plans for our future and want to be successful with our gifts. Trusting what we can’t always see is so hard. Love is pursuing us and desperately trying to win us over! We need to believe in his goodness and mercy. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). If we ever had a doubt about who God is, Jesus revealed him to us:
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He is so, so good! God is not a tyrant as some people suggest. God wants us to surrender to him, not because he’s this narcissist or a domineering person, but because he knows what is best for us! To surrender, we need to come to grips with a few things: 1. The fact is, God’s ways are not our ways. This doesn’t mean my life will be easy, because God never promised us an easy life. Letting go and giving him control of my life is what will fulfill me the most and ultimately, what will lead me to heaven. He knows every hair on my head, knows me better than I know myself, sees beyond what I see.
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Ultimately, I forget how God designed every part of me. So often I push him away because I’m afraid to give it all over to him, but then I end up falling flat on my face anyway. To my embarrassment, this spills over into my relationship with God. I love being in control, I hate the feeling of being pushed out of the driver’s seat of my own life, I always think I know what’s best, and I think I’m the only one capable of achieving my own happiness, so I try to do everything myself. Surrender means giving up control to submit ourselves to the perfect will of God. That means letting go of our plans for the future, our hopes and dreams, and even the people we love the most yes, even the good. It means giving God everything we are-including the good-and watching that transform as well. He reminded me that to surrender to Christ means more than just giving up the bad in our hearts that needs to be transformed. But that doesn’t even scratch the surface of true surrender. For most of my life, I thought surrendering to God meant letting go of all the bad: my sin, my mistrust, my fears and anxieties, my pride. The host priest for the week led us all through many prayers of deep surrender, but God went beyond what I have become accustomed to.
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It was a beautiful week! Besides being saturated in the theme of Mary’s fiat-reflecting on her openness to the will of God-we spent a significant amount of time talking about what it looks like to surrender, because a fiat to God, like Mary’s, must always lead us to let go and let God in. This past week I had the privilege of leading worship at a Life Teen camp in Medina, Texas.