At the risk of offending a lot of well meaning, sincere folks who profess to be Christian, can I just tell you that if your personal ‘walk of faith’ has been characterized more...by ‘bumpy roads, tire blow-outs, nightmare-ish detours and flat out engine failures’…there’s a good chance that you missed the very first and most critical requirement of what it means to become a ‘Christian’.

And that would be the need for a total surrender of your life to Jesus, up front. That is, after all…what it means (or is supposed to mean) when we ‘give our heart’ to Him. Failure to do so can lead to far more struggles and heartache than what God ever had planned for us. Christianity simply does not work when we insist on remaining in the ‘driver’s seat’.

Living a surrendered life to God is not ‘hard’. WE…make it hard.

Yeah, read that statement again. It’s only ‘hard’ when we say we have ‘given our lives’ to Him, but then refuse to surrender to Him….and hold on to ‘flesh’ (Luke 6:46). I can assure you that living for God is very hard and quite challenging, not to mention near impossible…if/when we resist and refuse to ‘die’ to flesh. You could say that living for and walking with Jesus is ‘hard on the flesh’. That is a factual statement. Have you never been told, or maybe said to others, like a stubborn child: “You are only making this hard on yourself.”?

Jesus invites us to “come to Him…all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and He will give us rest.” (Matt. 11:28). He goes on to say: “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (29-30). And then He tells us that ‘IF…we love Him, we’ll keep His commandments.” (John 14:15). The one who wrote that, His beloved apostle John, would later write: “This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3)

Yeah…I’ll be the first to admit that we can sure make it hard on ourselves. And it only gets worse for us when we insist on being ‘one of His’…but by our actions/fruit…we deny Him. (Titus 1:16) Now don’t take this to think I’m saying we don’t have ‘challenges’, or that ‘no suffering’ is involved when we truly ‘take up our cross’ and begin to follow Him. There is indeed some ‘suffering’ that takes place when we put this ‘old man’ (flesh nature) to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5-6). 1 Peter 4 offers come valuable insight to this idea, reminding us that ‘since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, we too should arm ourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, that we no longer should live the rest of our time in the flesh for the lusts of men but for the will of God’ (1-2). Need some more scriptural evidence? Check out Romans 8:5-6 and Galatians 6:7-9.

I want to pivot here and reshare another one of those ‘defining moments’ that I have had in recent years, a ‘teaching moment’ that stayed with me, and one that I have shared with others multiple times. This September will be five years since I had this particular ‘encounter’, because that is when my twin grandsons will turn 5, if you can believe that.

After being out here for their arrival in 2021 and having a few days to bond with them, I had to return home and get started doing school pictures. Kathy stayed behind for five weeks to help Lisa adjust to a ‘new way of living’, and what a blessing it was for her to be able to stay. But I will never forget that early morning departure I had to make from their home, standing out front waiting for my Uber ride to take me to the airport.

My heart was hurting, bad. I did not want to leave those boys given how I had ‘fallen for them, and fallen hard’. If you know, you know…what I’m talking about. I stood out looking up to a clear, early morning sky and my eyes were brimming with tears as I pleaded for God to extend some grace to my mushy, aching heart. I remember whispering to Him that those two boys had burrowed deep holes into my heart already and I didn’t know how I was going to cope not being around them. And that is when I heard that one silent word whispered in response from my loving Father above, just one word…and immediately I ‘heard Him’ and knew exactly what He was conveying to me.

“Careful.”

And with that word, there was the slightest sense of the Holy Spirit gently tugging on my shirt sleeve, as if He was nudging me back into my ‘proper lane’. Yes, the message was loud and clear, and I received it immediately. What was that ‘message’? It was God’s way of reminding me to not let any thing, any place,  or any person to ever take that place in my heart and become a source of pleasure and joy…that only He can provide. I mean I knew exactly what He was conveying to me in that moment.

As Paul reminded Timothy…we are to place our hope and trust in God alone…”who gives us richly…all things to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17). God doesn’t mind us having things (which He gives or brings into our lives), He just doesn’t want those things to ‘have us’; Hello? Does that make sense? Now don’t get me wrong, but there are lots of things in our lives/hearts that ‘need to go’ and stay gone; but why not let God be the One who brings those to your attention in His timing?

So as my ride picked me up and I took one final glance back at the house before heading to the airport, I heard a passage of scripture run through my mind, a passage I was vaguely familiar with but was not one that I thought of often or ever quoted: “No good thing will I withhold from those who walk uprightly before Me” (Ps. 84:11). I mean, those words settled deep within my soul, and as I ‘received’ that promise, I thanked the Lord and pointed out to Him that those two boys were indeed…’a good thing’. And I could sense His loving smile shine down on me in agreement. 

So off to the airport I went, praying silently that God would enable me to walk…’uprightly’ before Him. Can I just tell you I was clueless in that moment as to what He had in store for us, as a family? The very LAST thing I would have ever imagined ‘having on my radar’…was to uproot from Texas and move here to be closer to them here in California. There are simply no words to convey what an ‘impossibility’ that was to me in my limited way of thinking or believing. My wife can testify to how convinced I was that was not even a conceivable option for us.

But God…

Meet me back here tomorrow?