Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to God as we understood [God].
—Step 3 of the Twelve Steps
For Father Richard, surrendering our lives to God is the very essence of a spiritual life:
Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it’s the necessary path to liberation. It takes each of us a long time to just accept—to accept what is; to accept ourselves, others, the past, our own mistakes, and the imperfection and idiosyncrasies of almost everything. Our lack of acceptance reveals our basic resistance to life. Acceptance isn’t our mode nearly as much as aggression, resistance, fight, or flight. None of these responses achieve the deep, lasting results of true acceptance and peaceful surrender. Acceptance becomes the strangest and strongest kind of power. Surrender isn’t giving up, as we often think; it’s a giving to the moment, the event, the person, and the situation.
Our inner blockage to turning over our will is only overcome by a decision. It will not usually happen with a feeling, a mere idea, or a verse from religious Scripture. It is the will itself, our stubborn and self-defeating willfulness, that must first be converted and handed over. It doesn’t surrender easily, and usually only when it’s demanded of us by partners, parents, children, health, or circumstances. From the time we were young and according to our ability, we have all taken control and tried to engineer our own lives in every way possible. In fact, our culture doesn’t respect people who do not “take control.” [1]
Author Nadia Bolz-Weber describes her path to sobriety as less about following her own will than God’s:
When I stopped drinking, when I stopped going to bars every night and instead went to church basements, it felt like it was not a matter of will. It was against my will, actually, and I was furious about it. I seethed about having had booze taken away from me when it was the one thing I could rely on to even slightly loosen those muscles in my chest that knot up from the fear and pressure of just being human….
Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward self-destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and [cursing]. God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, “that’s adorable,” and then plunked me down on an entirely different path. [2]
Richard continues:
Bill W. was wise enough to make surrender a clear Step 3 in the program. Jesus made it step one: “If any want to follow me, let them renounce themselves” (Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; Matthew 16:24). I’m pretty sure that Jesus meant exactly what Bill W. meant: a radical surrendering of our will to Another, whom we trust more than ourselves. [3]
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| Focus on the Father |
 Click Here for AudioThe climax of Jesus’ parable occurs when the father finally speaks to his older son. This is the first and only time in the story the father speaks to one of his children directly—and it’s what Jesus’ audience would have been waiting for. “When are we going to find out why this Jewish father acted so strangely,” they must have wondered.The older son had just delivered his angry defense. His argument was that he’d always obeyed his father and served him faithfully and therefore deserved a party far more than his immoral younger brother. The older son believed he’d been cheated. We read the son’s diatribe as an expression of his anger, but Jesus’ audience would have seen something more shocking. The older son was indicting the father on the charge of being dishonorable—the worst possible accusation in a shame-based culture like ancient Judea.Surprisingly, the father never addresses this accusation. He did not defend himself or give any validation to the charge of being dishonorable. Nor did he affirm his older son’s years of faithful obedience. By ignoring these culturally important aspects of the story, Jesus was implicitly saying to his audience that their focus, like the older son’s, on honor, obedience, and rewards was misplaced.Instead, Jesus cuts past these lesser cultural values to reveal what is central to the heart of God. “Son,” the father said, “you are always with me.” By focusing on his relationship with the older son the father was saying, Have I not been enough for you? Were you just working to receive a party or to earn your inheritance? Have you found no joy in being with me all of these years? What brought the father delight was not the older son’s service, but simply his presence. More important than obedience, or honor, or wealth was having his son near him.Like the older son, we get distracted by a great many things, and we seek our fulfillment in lesser joys. We want honor and acknowledgment, and sometimes we seek this by sacrificially working for Christ and his kingdom. In our striving, we forget that our Heavenly Father desires us, not our sacrifices. He is focused on his children and longs for us to discover the joy that is found in a life with him not merely a life for him. DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 15:11-32 ROMANS 8:31-39 WEEKLY PRAYER. By Thomas Dekker (1570 – 1623) O God, the true and only life, in whom and from whom and by whom are all good things that are good indeed; from whom to be turned is to fall, to whom to turn is to rise again; in whom to abide is to dwell for ever, from whom to depart is to die; to whom to come again is to revive, and in whom to lodge is to live: take away from me whatever you will, so that you give me only yourself. Amen. |
