Stop and Surrender

I wanted to share this with you, this was my devotional this morning and I thought it is so true in my life, I don't know about yours. I find it so easy to say, OK, I can do this, I will get through this on my own, but than another thing happens and than another and soon I am so spent, I can't tell which way to face in the storm. I believe God allows certain things to happen, because if we are so lost in the storms of life, we look right and left, straight ahead and behind and don't know which way to turn, because He is saying look up, let Me be your strength Geoff, stop trying to do it on your own. "I" am here to help you, to carry you through, but you have to stop fighting and let Me do it. Oh man, I just want to keep fighting, keep trying to keep my head up, I pound my hands into the water around me because I want to be in control, but God says no you have to stop fighting, allow Me. Soon another storm comes in and I am sinking fast, if I just say Lord it is Yours and give up, He will be my strength, He will guide me and my eyes will gaze at heaven while I do the back float because no longer is it about Me, but about God. A little piece of knowledge that pertains to this: They say with quicksand when you get into it, we want to struggle to get out, the struggling creates more suction and pulls you under faster, but if you just relax you will get out. The relaxing is very hard to do, because we don't want to drown. In life are you drowning? Maybe it is time to look up and give it to God.

Stop and Surrender
by Chuck Swindoll

Acts 18:1-17; 2 Corinthians 11:22-28

So much for Paul. How about you? Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Are you afflicted and burdened excessively? Do you feel as if you're under such intense pressure these days that you, too, are close to despair? I have some surprising news: you're exactly where God wants you to be. It took all these years to get you this low, this needy. Now, look up!

Are you feeling crushed and confused, misunderstood and beaten down? Resist the temptation to roll up your sleeves and muster a self-imposed recovery plan. This is your opportunity! Rather than fighting back, surrender. Embrace your weakness. Tell your heavenly Father that you are trusting in the strength of His power. If Paul could do it, so can you. So can I.

At this moment I am facing a few impossible situations. No doubt, so are you. To be honest, I'm too weak to handle any of them. So are you. I'm often near tears. I'm frequently discouraged. There's hardly a week that passes that I don't slump into a mild feeling of discouragement. Sound familiar? Admit it! Some nights I don't sleep well. There are times that I absolutely weep out of disappointment in some individual's failure . . . or my own. You too? You and I need to face the fact that we will never be able to handle any of these pressures alone. When we acknowledge this, and not until, His strength will be released in us.

Are you ready to face the next battle with a new strategy? Okay, start by surrendering. Instead of returning to your same-old method—doing a month of mental push-ups, talking yourself into looking strong and acting brave, putting on the gloves and stepping into the ring with swagger, relying on your own strength to win and succeed and impress. Stop and surrender. Drop to your knees and cry out to God. Admit your inadequacies, and declare your inability to keep going on your own.

If you're finally ready to step aside and let Him have His way, say so; then do it. He will honor your admission of weakness by showing Himself strong through you. But if you don't, He won't.

It's your call.

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Another devotional just got today, God is speaking, are we, Am I listening??

No Pit to Deep

Graham Cooke

Years ago, I prayed “I want to go deeper with You, God.” What transpired next is a result of His twisted sense of humor.

Shortly after praying this, I ended up losing my ministry and the only job I could find at the time was digging graves in a graveyard.

One day, I was digging a family grave that went down sixteen feet deep.

I had a ladder, a spade, and a bucket, and all day long, I went down, filled the bucket and brought it up the ladder. Needless to say, it wasn’t the highlight of my career. 

In the midst of digging one day, my co-workers thought it would be hilarious to steal my ladder and leave me in the clay for the day. Of course, it started to rain and I was covered head-to-foot in clay.

I was standing in twelve inches of water. I’m freezing cold & hungry. I can’t work because everything had turned to soupy clay. So, I just began worshiping the Lord because there was nothing else to do.

Of course, all that was going through my mind was, “Is this your (God’s) idea of going “deeper? Literally, putting me in a pit?”

At the end of the day, the guys brought the ladder and got me out of the hole chuckling. (The next day, I brought some rope and tied that ladder around my waist!)

Several years later, I was listening to a song called “I Will Always Love You” by Joe King.

This song declares who God is for us in harsh times, and as I listened to one particular line, my mind went straight back to that moment of being in the grave and the Lord gave me an epiphany retrospectively.

“No pit is so deep that I’m not deeper still…”

If you’re in low place, He would love to be in that place with you. He won’t let go of you because things are not working, and He won’t walk away from you because you are not getting it. He will never leave you.

He will never forsake you, and He is unchanging. He never changes, and so it doesn’t matter what you’re like. It doesn’t matter how well you’re doing or how badly. He never changes. He is the same towards you on your worst day as He is on your best.

Meditate on the words of Romans 8.

Here is a whole list of things that are difficult, yet none of them can separate us from Him:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It’s a funny thing about us. We always seem to ask the Lord, usually in a good moment, to take us deeper into Him.

As I learned, these kind of prayers are really just setting us up to experience the power of His love no matter what comes our way in life.

I hope you feel His love lavished over you today, no matter what you are going through.

Giving Account

Matthew 12:36 "But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken." That is what the Bible says. We will have to give an account for every word, not just spoken, but those we think, write too. Because God knows our hearts.

Would you be so kind to me to take a trip with me to the giving account room?

I enter this great room and before me is the Creator of the universe, God. This room is huge and I am this little person standing before God. The room isn't full of people, it is just me standing there alone. I don't have people around me, I don't have my wife, my parents, my siblings, my coworkers, the person that cut me off in traffic. I am there alone before God.

God says "Geoff, you are standing before Me to give account for your actions, for your words, for your thoughts."   I pause, thinking back on my life knowing that my words have traveled not just through my voice, but those written, those thought. Thinking of all the foolish things I did, thinking of all that I said but at the time didn't give it a second thought because I could blame someone else, but here I have no one to blame but myself.

God says "Geoff you said some very hurtful things to your wife. Why did you say this or that? You made a vow to Me to love her unconditionally."

I stand there unable to speak, because the realization of the very points that I had tried to make when I was living was that it is someone else fault I said, I thought, I hurt others. I no longer can blame anyone else, because they were my choices. I have to give God an account of them. He said I would, but I didn't think twice about it when I was on earth, but here I stand before Him speechless, because I did it, it was me that said it and in the Bible I remember reading in Matthew 15:18 "But the things that come out of a person's mouth come from the heart, and these defile them." And I also remember the verse in Ecclesiastes 5:4 "When you make a vow to God, do not delay to fulfill it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow."

I say "Lord" I stutter, I babble knowing full well I have no excuse for my actions, I can't blame it on anyone else. I stand there realizing how I was wrong in how I was, because I didn't read what was written in the Bible or maybe I didn't really believe it, but here I stand with no words to say, because I can't blame it on my circumstances, I can only stand there realizing what a mistake I made. I say "Lord, it was because of what someone did to me." And I know full well that the Bible talks about that very thing.

God says "Geoff those are feelings, I wrote about all that in the Bible that I gave you to learn from, to guide you along the way of truth. For example, look at what I put in the Bible in Luke 6:31 "Do to others as you would have them do to you." I wrote about this all, because I love you Geoff, I wanted you to pick the right way to deal with people, but here we are, because you chose to blame others, instead of standing how I told you to stand."

I say "But Lord, I felt wronged."

God says "Geoff, I sent My son Jesus to die on the cross to set you free, so that you could live in freedom, to live in forgiveness, to do just as Jesus did and that is to just turn the other cheek, but did you do that? Did you look at what I called you to do? Did you seek Me first, because when you seek Me first and love Me more than yourself, than you wouldn't treat others how they treat you, you would have treated them the way I treated you. I have given you choices so that you can learn from them, yes there is bad things, but I gave you wisdom to get through them. There was nothing that I gave you, that through My power you couldn't handle, but did you seek Me first?"

I stand there literally without words, because no longer can I blame others for my actions, for my reactions, for my words, because God has written about how to avoid this, He has covered it all and my actions are inexcusable. They were choices I made, not to do what the Bible has told me to do, not to walk how it told me to walk, I did it on my own, instead of doing it through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Now come back with me to today. You are reading this, because I am alive, I am here and so are you. I have a choice to make as you do as well. Do we want the above to be our giving account room or do we want it to go differently. I know for me, I would love to hear "Well done my good and faithful servant!"

Today is a new day and God has given us another day to do it His way, it comes down to what do we want to do. Do we want to stand before Him alone with nothing to say, but realize all that we should have done or said? Or do we want to hear well done my good and faithful servant. It comes down to do you believe that God is really real and if so, than put all your trust in Him, for He will guide you, give you strength and so much more. Give Him a chance and do it His way.