Surrender to Abundant Life
Jesus is mesmerizing. There is no more compelling figure or force in all of history. Everything about His story – who He is, what He does, why He does it – shatters any and every category you can create to try to contain Him.
You just can’t nail Him down. Not when reading the Bible or following Him in life.
Whenever you think you have figured out what He will do, He does something different. He miraculously heals crowds of people – but He also seeks out individuals within those crowds to heal just one person.
People flock to Him like sheep to a shepherd. He feeds them to care for them. But He also withdraws when massive audiences start forming.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise us when Jesus shows up in our lives in ways that keep us on our toes.
Especially since He’s not a God of disorder or chaos. While He can’t be nailed down, He is more reliable and consistent than anyone or anything else in all of creation.
He always provides. We just may not know when.
He always leads. We just may not know where.
He always protects. We just may not know how.
He always loves. We just may not know why.
One Bible story displays this reality well. Jesus walks on water, invites a guy to do the same, calms a storm, and leaves everyone breathless.
Surrendering to a Water-Walking God
Check out Matthew 14.
This story is astounding in its own right. But when you see it in its context, it gets even more wild.
At this point in the Biblical story, things aren’t going particularly well. Jesus was just dismissed, minimized, and rejected by the people in His hometown.
Then, His cousin and colleague, John the Baptist, is executed in prison without a trial. The masses flocked to Jesus to see how He would respond to this threat.
He has them sit down in green grass by still waters and feeds them miraculously until their plates overflow, all in the shadow of their enemies. Reverberations of Psalm 23 could be felt by those picking up the leftovers.
When the sun sets, the scene changes. The disciples hop in a boat to make their way to wherever Jesus told them to go next. Even though He didn’t go with them, yet.
While the disciples are alone on the sea, storms blow in, derailing their progress and threatening their survival.
Jesus walks into this situation - on the water. And Peter, for some reason(s), asks Jesus to invite him for a stroll on the sea.
What in the world is going on?
I don’t know about you, but if I’m all kinds of seasick, barely surviving a storm, the thought of walking with anyone on water does not come into my head.
And don’t forget that Peter was a fisherman by trade. So was his brother. And at least two of the other guys in the boat.
A minimum of one-quarter of the people in the boat were professional sailors. Objectively, the safest place in this scene is in the boat.
Walking on Water with God in Life
At this moment, Peter's decision to join Jesus on the sea was a zero-sum call. Sink or stand. We all face these moments. Often, however, Jesus invites us to walk with Him in more nuanced ways.
In some areas of our lives, we find it easy to walk with Jesus completely. Other areas of our hearts may be so bruised and battered that we are afraid to let anyone touch them – even God.
Most of life, though, turns out to be a mixed bag of faith and fear, surrender and self-sufficiency, instinct and intentionality.
We can be fickle. We experience moments of trajectory-shaping victories and boneheaded blunders.
Now that I’m in my 40s, I’m recognizing that growing in my faith is often as much about UNLEARNING as it is about learning.
Peter had to unlearn a lifetime of professional, cultural, and spiritual training to take a step of faith on the water.
In the ancient world, the sea symbolized chaos. It’s easy to see why. You can’t control it. It can be unpredictable. And dangerous. Even with all the technology and resources of the 21st century, we still have yet to mine the depths of the sea – it continues to hide secrets and surprises.
Jesus wasn’t just pulling off a magic trick to entertain His buddies when He walked on the water. He demonstrated to all creation that He is sovereign over the sea. He reigns over chaos. And amazingly – He invites us to rule and reign with Him.
I can’t even wrap my mind around this.
Stepping out of Comfort Zones to Walk by Faith
Peter’s situation in this story articulates what I feel when I wrestle with yielding and surrendering to God.
In the midst of a storm, Peter was in the most secure place possible: an expert, professional sailor on the sea with other professionals on a boat.
However, circumstances barged into the path that caused them to lose confidence in their skills and resources.
Instead, they were forced to rethink what they understood about themselves, the world, and this water-walking God.
It’s not that their training was useless or that the boat was futile. Furthermore, this particular event didn’t establish a new, dogmatic system.
In Matthew 14:32, Jesus hops in the boat. They ride in it together the rest of the way. And people take boats from here on out.
Walking with Jesus, walking in the Spirit, opens doors to strength, resources, and abilities that we cannot muster up or manufacture.
Accessing those resources, though, requires surrendering to the King of compassion and the Lord of love. What else can we do? What else would we want to do?
We don’t actually have an ounce of the control over our lives that we deceive ourselves into thinking we do.
The 2020 pandemic is likely still fresh enough to remind us that the entire world can shut down without our permission.
You don’t get to control how fast other cars drive, how much eggs cost, or how people perceive your intentions.
Like the rest of the human race, we get scared, worried, and calloused. You brush up against enough people with sharp edges and instinctively start avoiding people and guarding yourself.
It’s into that pain, fear, doubt, worry, and failure that Jesus asks us, like He asked Peter, “Why did you doubt?”
I don’t think that’s a rhetorical question. Jesus regularly asks people incisive, penetrating questions.
“Why do you doubt…..
God’s goodness?
God’s love?
Your place in His Kingdom?
His desire to be in relationship with you?
His uncontainable delight over you?
Your ability to stand in and enjoy His love?
Jesus invites us to hand Him those doubts. It’s not that He doesn’t know why we doubt. It’s that we don’t.
Fear can control us, anxiety tries to shackle us, pride will blind us, and selfishness can suffocate us.
Jesus sees it all. He comes to us in the middle of raging storms to rescue us. He asks questions like – why do you doubt – not to shame us but to liberate us with the truth of His love.
Why do you doubt? What do you fear? What do you need to unlearn about God? Yourself?
Can’t Nail Him Down
Jesus knows how devastating it can be to love this world tenderly. Everything we are afraid of, everything that taunts, jeers, and sneers at us, intimidating us to shrink back in fear instead of stepping out in faith – He faced to the death.
Jesus didn’t step out of the false security of a fishing boat in the middle of a storm – He stepped out of the eternal security of the Kingdom of Heaven.
He didn’t risk sinking in a sea of chaos; He gave Himself to be submerged by the forces of chaos on the cross.
Jesus did all this, not because He thought we might need a little help to make it through a temporary storm, but because He knows we need complete rescue in every way.
His love for us compelled Him to surrender Himself to God’s wrath against sin so that we could be eternally secured by God’s love.
Three days after Jesus was crucified in weakness, the Holy Spirit of God raised Him in power. Now we see that nothing in all of creation has any claim on Him – not even death. He can’t be nailed down.
Jesus invites us to walk in this love, power, security, and hope. Not just theoretically. But in deeply personal, intimate ways.
He invites us to hold His hand through every storm, season, twist, and turn in every moment of our lives.
Nothing is Sweeter than Surrendering to Jesus
No one and nothing can love you like Jesus. A boat in the middle of the sea can provide a sense of safety during a storm.
But it is even better to be alone with Jesus – a couple of steps away from familiarity and security – than to be anywhere else without Him.
God invites us to personally see and intimately embrace His love for us poured out on the cross, secured by the resurrection and ascension, and showered upon us through the Holy Spirit.
Through God’s unquantifiable love for us, we can bring all of who we are into God’s presence.
This includes what we’re proud of, ashamed of, confused about, concerned with, amused by – everything about ourselves.
God takes this, and little by little, He chips away at the false self we’ve created to protect or promote ourselves.
He gently helps us unlearn who we are not, but are tempted to strive to be, so that we can step more fully into who He’s created us to be and redeemed us to become.
What does this look like practically? Personally?
Here’s one step the Holy Spirit has invited me to take recently. I envision myself walking on water toward Jesus. Whenever fear, worry, anxiety, selfishness, or sin of any kind pops into my head, I hand that particular thing to Jesus.
In my imagination, it looks like giving Him an anchor. Or stone. It feels that way in my soul as well.
Jesus gently takes the weight and throws it into the water. There’s no shame. Only compassion. He doesn’t want me – or you – to drown under the weight of our worry or shame.
This simple practice has been so enlightening and liberating. I have been shocked by how shackled I’ve been to so many things.
For the life of me, I don’t know why I’ve held on to so much, trying to muscle and grind my way through life when I can surrender it all to Jesus.
Maybe I just assumed or believed that self-sufficiency was my only option? Or perhaps I wanted the petty satisfaction of feeling like I have an upper hand?
Could my instinct for self-preservation simply have overpowered my ability or desire to abide in God’s love?
It’s probably a bit of all of these – and more – that I can’t put my finger on yet.
What weights is Jesus inviting you to hand over to Him so that you don’t have to carry them anymore?
When we do, we find that He is entirely trustworthy. He has promised to shape us into the absolute best version of ourselves – the version that reflects the person of Christ in ways that no one else can.
He is making you into someone more beautiful, strong, generous, compassionate, patient, joyful, and radiant than you can imagine.
Surrender is the Only Way
All we can do is surrender to God’s love. His love is the source and substance of life. It’s the means and the end.
I think this may be one of the reasons why Jesus keeps us on our toes – so that we stay on His heels.
Demonstrating control of water is something of a theme in the Bible. It kinda happens a lot. And each time, God does things differently.
In the beginning, the Spirit hovers over the waters.
Jesus walks on water.
Moses stands on the banks of the Red Sea and raises his staff to part the waters.
Joshua, though, sends people into the Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant before that river parts.
Elijah and Elisha slap a river with their coat.
Why the variation?
I’m sure people far smarter than me have a more profound answer than I can offer. But from my simple perspective, it seems that God is inviting us to trust a Person more than a plan. He invites us into a dynamic, vibrant, supernatural lifestyle.
God knows what we need when we need it. He won’t give us more of Himself than we can handle.
He made that clear when He told Moses that Mo could only see God’s backside, not His face. Otherwise, Moses would die.
Jesus told the disciples that He had more to tell them, but they couldn’t handle it at the moment.
He’s infinite. We’re finite. We get to spend all eternity discovering more of His consuming goodness.
Still, we must be prepared to take God on His terms, not ours. The Holy Spirit does not need permission to disrupt our lives.
And whenever He does, He breathes goodness and beauty into the caverns of our souls that have been long devastated.
Surrender is all we can do. And when we surrender to the God who is love, we experience the richest of fare.
In Jesus is everything we most deeply desire – it’s all fulfilled in, to, through, and for Him.
May the God of abundance keep you on your toes so you stay close to His heels!
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