"I know. Lord, that our lives our not our own. We are not able to plan our own course." (Jeremiah 10:23-24 NLT)
It’s no secret that I am a child of the 80’s. Cabbage Patch Kids, Oregon Trail, and Pound Puppies were all a part of my upbringing. I wasn’t cool and we didn’t have cable, but still the messaging of that decade is branded into my being. “You can grow up to anything you want!” That was the mantra of the 80’s classroom. STEM and GT were suddenly including girls and it seemed the world was wide-open with possibility. All 42 of my classmates were raised to believe we could do anything we set our minds to. We might even be running around around on the playground with a future president or two, according to our teachers.
Scripture offers us a vastly different picture. Here, Jeremiah acknowledges that the course of our life belongs to God alone. Our days are divinely appointed. Paul actually insists:
"Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. so you must honor God with your body." (1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NLT)
It’s so un-American, it hurts. This allegiance to God over allegiance to self is dizzying, difficult to wrap our minds around. But the sooner we surrender, the sooner we appreciate the all-surpassing sovereignty of our God. We are a stubborn people stuck in prideful flesh; ever bent on going our own way.
As a child of the 80’s, I read a lot of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I don’t know if they are made anymore, they’d be impossible to point and test for the Accelerated Reader program. 🙂 But when I was growing up, they were all the rage.
Choose Your Own Adventures all started out like normal books: establishing a setting, characters and maybe even rising action. But just a few pages in, the reader got to make a personal choice about the storyline. It could be an innocuous decision like coke or Pepsi, pool or beach, OR it could be a major plot point; confront the bully or take a walk? You’d make your selection and flip to the part where your decision determined, skipping past the portions of the story that no longer applied. By the end of the book, you’d made two dozen choices leading to on of 36-48 potential endings.
While reading these books, I realized right away my tendency to take the safe route and my plot lines would wrap up quickly and neatly. I’d ultimately be disappointed with the briefness of the story and flip back in the book, looking for a little more adventure. The crazy part is, there were always whole sections of the story that I could not access, choices I wouldn’t voluntarily make and outcomes I couldn’t appreciate.
Looking back at my unremarkable adventure book experience, I see a metaphor for my walk with God. I still tend to stick to the safe route; the measured, appropriate path. But the real adventure begins when I trust the Lord enough to let go of my personal plot-line and follow along as He reads aloud. There are, in fact, whole pages of faith that we will never turn to unless He is the sole author of our story. Which brings me back around to Paul:
"And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting Him, He endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now He is seated in the place of honor beside Godo's throne." (Hebrews 12:1-2 NLT)
We could even say, let’s read the page that God has laid in our path. Sometimes it’s hard to follow, tough to keep reading, but even our Jesus experienced the anguish of surrender. Even He learned to submit to the pages His Father had carefully penned. Jesus resisted the right to self-protect and instead surrendered to the perfect will of God for His story. In His yielding, Jesus accessed the adventure of salvation for all who would believe in Him.
"Abba, Father," He cried out, "everything is possible for You. Take this cup of suffering away from Me. Yet I want Your will to be done, not Mine." (Mark 14:36 NLT)
Lord, please forgive us for our fight of self-preservation. Our will is such a stubborn muscle to relax. Today we see how there are some places of faith we can’t possibly access of our own volition. We are challenged and intrigued as we consider the possibilities availed through surrender. Once again we wave our white flag:
Thy will be done. Amen.