March 20

Today's sermon was about surrender. I think that's the word I was looking for yesterday...surrender and give God all those doubts and fears. 

"Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." Matthew 10:39

Pastor John made a good point...we are comfortable with Jesus in the car with us, as long as He's in the passenger seat. So the question is- who's driving our life? Do we let God into the driver seat? It's easy to surrender and let Him take control when we're at the end of our rope...like when I literally couldn't do anything. So many nights I laid in bed, physically unable to move anything and unable to speak, but knew God could hear me...it was easy to lay everything down and ask Him to take control. It got harder to give up control as I got stronger. Matthew 16:24 says we need to surrender daily... DAILY. "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." 

We have 3 options:

1- live with a rebellious heart towards God

2- live with a divided heart

3- live with a surrendered heart

Letting go of control is hard, but we often find that nothing we lose is worth keeping anyways. A good way to think about it is to ask myself daily who's in the driver seat? I never thought of myself as being selfish, but I've always liked having control- I've always had a plan, always known what the next step in my life was going to be. But those were my plans. That was my timing, not His.