Posted on by Abe Austin

Seeking Signs- How Far Will You Pursue?

Waste of a Miracle)

There are those that say they will only believe in God if He will show them an irrefutable sign of His existence. They say, “If God is real, and He really cares about having me believe in Him, and He knows me perfectly, then He knows that I need physically observable evidence of Him.” They suggest things like a message written in the stars, or God descending to the earth in all His glory, or a booming voice sounding from heaven. Those would be strong, undeniable proofs of God’s existence, and surely that would bring many more people to accept Him as their Lord, so why not just do that?

To that I say: And what will you do if God does not show up with these great, undeniable signs? Will you continue to pursue the knowledge of Him?

The answer: I will do nothing, and I will pursue no further.

And to that I say: Why would God ever waste His time on someone with that attitude? Why manifest Himself to someone so fickle and disinterested? Frankly, you don’t seem to actually care all that much whether God is real or not. Are you genuinely quivering on the edge of remaking your whole life to follow Him just as soon He shows you a miracle? I find that hard to believe.

Pattern for Belief)

People hear that God wants us to believe in Him, and from that they assume that the onus is on Him to do the convincing. But two things can be true at once. God can both want us to believe in Him and also be perfectly willing to let us go if we don’t care enough to take the first step.

To be clear, I do believe that God pursues on His end, but I also believe He always stops short of making us believe in Him. In my experience, He always requires us to make at least one step in total faith. We have to do something because we believe it is right, not at all sure that it will turn out well, and that is when He appears to us.

If, on the other hand, we see that step before us and say, “no, God, not until you show me a sign,” He will let us go.

Posted on by Abe Austin

How to be Good Enough

You will never be enough so long as you hold part back.
You have to give your whole heart to Him,
And then you’re already enough.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- Summary

The Journey We’ve Been On)

In the course of this study, I have argued in favor of Jesus’s claim in Matthew 11:28-30

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Through this study I have made special effort to address the two groups that might disagree with this claim: the unbeliever who sees the commandments of God as a terrible burden, and the believer who struggles every day to be worthy of God’s expectations. Here were the main points in my study:

  1. The liberation of the commandments. I examined how the true purpose of God’s restrictions is to free us from the demands of addiction and vice, which are the great taskmasters of humanity. Yes, God requires us to surrender to Him, but it is a surrender into rest and peace.
  2. Refutation of self-made perfection. I discussed how God never intended for us to perfect ourselves through sheer moral grit. Through that act of surrendering to Him we open the door to a miracle: effortless change.
  3. Surrendering will and autonomy. Yes, achieving a state of rest, peace, and effortless change is possible, but only at the cost of unconditional surrender to God. The one truly difficult task that God requires of us is to give up our autonomy and submit to His will.
  4. The easy way. The scriptures are full of examples of those who made this surrender, then found that God shouldered their burdens, accomplished miracles in their lives, and gave them easy victories. We talked about Gideon’s army, but also consider the examples of Peter fishing, the widow’s cruse of oil, the parting of the Red Sea, and the siege of Jericho.

The Great Secret)

Speaking for myself, I am not yet done surrendering my will to God. I am still very much a work in progress. This is because even after having had some practice at it, surrendering is still hard to do. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.

As difficult as surrender may be, it is still easier than the alternative lifestyles of grit or appetite-satiation. And once that surrender is made, everything afterward is weightless. I have learned these facts for myself, personally.

So, surrender is easier, but it does not at first appear so. I believe this is by design. It ensures that no one accidentally stumbles into that better way. They have to take what appears to be the harder path, by faith, before they can finally discover for themselves that it is actually much, much easier.

This is the great secret. Many people live and die, never understanding what it was all about. They are perpetually frustrated, always searching for success and satisfaction, but never finding it, and yet the answer was there in front of them all the time. Hopefully you and I can do it better.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- An Easy Task

An Impossible Task)

Christianity calls us to accept Christ as our master, and modern society would go further and say that he is an overbearing taskmaster, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Perhaps Christ’s demands are seen as heavy because he does at times asks us to do the impossible, but in practice they are actually very light, because we don’t actually do any of the heavy lifting for thme.

I cannot think of a clearer example of this than Gideon in the Old Testament, Judges 6-8. God called Gideon to accomplish a few things in His name, but the greatest of all was to stand against the Midianite horde with a small band of Israelite men. At the outset, Gideon had only 32,000 men, while the Midianites had approximately 135,000. As if that wasn’t mismatched enough, God then commanded Gideon to send home over 99% of his army, leaving him with a mere 300 men! The task seemed absolutely impossible.

But then, remarkably, the fulfillment of that task could hardly have been any easier! Once Gideon’s army was sufficiently small, God instructed the 300 men to surround the Midian army in the dark of night, then each soldier broke a pitcher, lit a lamp, and blew a trumpet. The sudden manifestation of sound and light on all sides drove the Midianites into a panic, and unable to properly tell friend from foe, they slew each other until only a fraction of their forces remained! Then, Gideon and his men dealt with the rest.

Easy to Bear)

So, too, the true Christian who has committed his whole soul to the Lord may make incredible transformations in his life and accomplish wonderful things for the Lord. So much so, that it might seem superhuman what he has accomplished, and cause people to mistakenly believe that his effort was extreme. But this is not the case. Like Gideon, the true Christian accomplishes the impossible not by his own effort, but by the Lord’s.

We live in a world that demands strength and genius. In our vocations and communities, we are given a never-ending stream of demands, and we must constantly strive to meet them. God, however, requires so very little of us. Like Gideon, we do not have to be mighty, and we do not have to be brilliant. All we have to be willing to do is stand where God tells us to stand and perform the little things God tells us to do, and the victory will fall into our lap.

This is how God has “chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty,” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The foolish and the weak are sufficient, because so very little is required of them. All they have to be willing to do is surrender to the Lord, and anyone can do that.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- The Beginning of Good

The Greatest Commandment)

Yesterday I shared scriptures which assert that refusing to surrender one’s will to God leads to all manner of evil, selfishness, and causing harm to the world. Today, I wanted to consider one other passage, the one where Jesus is asked which is the greatest commandment in the law:

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
-Matthew 22:37-39

Loving the Lord with all of one’s heart, soul, and mind involves offering each of those to Him, which is elsewhere summarized in the scriptures as our will “being swallowed up in the will of the Father” (Mosiah 15:7). Jesus listing this as the first commandment suggests that it is of a higher priority, but that it is not all. By putting it first, he is suggesting an order. Devotion to God naturally comes before loving our neighbor as ourselves. Thus, if not surrendering one’s will to God leads to harming the world, then surrendering one’s will to God leads to healing the world.

While the world may no longer be convinced of the importance of submitting to God, we do still value helping and treating one another with kindness. We value it, but also we are really bad at it. By inverting the proper order and putting self and fellow-man before submission to God, we have broken the entire sequence. We want to be good to each other, but we don’t want to submit to God, and so we end up treated each other horribly instead, violating our own ideal. Any cursory glance at the contention in our modern society will bear that out. The only way to get back to civility and compassion will be by putting things back in their proper order and first loving the Father and submitting to His will, just as Jesus taught.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- The Consequences of Refusing to Surrender

A Scriptural Condemnation)

I have spoken at length about the importance of surrender in the gospel of Jesus Christ. To put things simply, there is no such thing as being a true disciple of Jesus Christ and also not surrendering your will and autonomy to the Lord. Jesus surrendered himself to the Father, and every follower of him must do the same, or they are not really his follower.

But why is surrender such an essential part of the gospel? Why did Jesus need to do it, and why do we need to? What cosmic or fundamental principle requires it? That’s an excellent subject for another series, one that I may try to tackle later. Today, though, I want to point out how the scriptures make clear the negative consequences that follow if we will not surrender our autonomy to the Lord. Let us look at a few verses.

For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. 
-James 3:15 (NIV)
Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.
-Proverbs 18:1 (ESV)
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
-2 Timothy 3:2-4

Each of these passages begins with those who set their own, autonomous self above all else. They are focused on their own desires, their own love, and their own ambition. Rather than surrendering their will they have set it upon the highest pedestal, and in each of these passages it is clear that what follows is harm and evil. The unmistakable message of the scriptures is that those who do not surrender will inevitably cause hurt and suffering.

We live in a society where people constantly speak of waking up to the notion that they “need to put themselves first.” That may sound nice and affirming, but anyone that follows it should know that they are embarking on a path that the scriptures have declared to be ruinous. One may, of course, reject that assertion, but if they do, at least they will know that the consequences that follow were foretold.

NOTE: In the process of editing this post, I accidentally published it twice before it was ready. I apologize for any confusion caused to my email subscribers.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- The Core Disagreement

The Outsider’s Perspective)

I began this study focused on the secular humanist, who balks at the idea of God’s commandments restricting his pursuits of pleasure. Afterwards, I shifted to the confused Christian, who is frustrated by his attempts to obey God while still holding part of his heart back. I’ve spent some time in that latter category, and would like to briefly shift back to the secular humanist, and how he often misinterprets adherence to the laws of God.

From the secular humanist’s perspective, God and His commandments are understood as a checklist, one series of behaviors that are forbidden and one series of behaviors that are required. Thus, an individual’s level of obedience can be measured by a simple comparison to that list. The more points where you align with God’s law, the better you are in His eyes. If you get enough points right, Jesus will cover the rest and you get to go to Heaven, but if you are off on too many points, God will send you to Hell.

Thus, many secular humanist say they reject Christianity because they are not willing to conform to lists of rules that they don’t believe in. Many of them believe that God doesn’t exist, or that if He does that Christians fundamentally misunderstand Him, and that He really want people to be true to their own autonomy. Or if the Christian God did exist, the secular humanist concludes that He is a tyrant, and being true to one’s own autonomy and being damned for it would still be more noble than subservience to a cosmic taskmaster.

Autonomy as a God)

In short, the secular humanist sees autonomy as the ultimate ideal. It is the highest god that it would be blasphemous to sacrifice for anything else. Any discussion about commandment-following is therefore a distraction. True, the secular humanist might not want to adhere to those commandments, but the deeper, core issue is that they worship the autonomous self over any creator God.

To the secular humanist, the following of the commandments would be torture, because they would refuse to let go of their sense of autonomy. Every commandment would be like a shard, cutting deeply into them, fundamentally opposed to their most-precious ideal.

I think if Christians and secular humanists understood this, they could actually discuss the real issue, instead of quibbling over this side business of following rules. Yes, the true gospel of Jesus Christ leads to obeying God’s commandments, but that’s not really what it’s about at its core. It’s about letting one’s will be absorbed into the Almighty’s, and the Christian who isn’t willing to do that is outside true theology just as much as the secular humanist.

I won’t take the time to exhaust all of the reasons why the surrender of autonomy to God is essential in Christian theology, I am only interested in making the point that this is the true disagreement between it and secular humanism. I will, at least, use tomorrow’s post to share one of the reasons that the scriptures tell us that surrender is essential, but beyond that I would have to do a separate study to truly explore the matter.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- Surrendered Autonomy

An Acceptable Offering)

In the last post we discussed how God has given to man his autonomy, but that the proper use of that autonomy is for man to then surrender it back to God. This was the example that Jesus set for us, where he had power that no man could take his life from him, and even personally desired that the cup of his sacrifice might pass from him, yet he surrendered his autonomy, submitting his will to the Father’s.

It is remarkable to me how lifelong Christians still don’t recognize the need for following this pattern in their own lives. I made this mistake myself for many years. I spent nearly three decades trying to be “good enough,” while still reserving as much autonomy as possible. I wanted to follow God, but only in my own way, and only to the extent that I was comfortable with. The rest I would hold back.

How did that work out? Not at all. I put in so much effort into trying to do so much good, but it just never felt like it was enough. I felt like I was cursed. I felt like Cain, where I made offering to the Lord, but they just weren’t being accepted. I could tell that something was missing, and I would try to fill that void with more “doing good,” but it was all in vain. What I wasn’t realizing was that it wasn’t a quantity problem, it was a quality problem.

Trying to be “good enough,” while still reserving as much autonomy as possible, is still withholding part of the heart from Jesus. And that’s a fundamental problem for us, because “the Lord looketh on the heart,” (1 Samuel 16:7). No matter how much else we put on the altar, while trying to conceal the part we won’t offer, we’re still not all His. There still remains a part of us that we don’t trust Him with, and that leaves a gulf between us that nothing else will fill.

Obsessed With Autonomy)

The western world is obsessed with autonomy. Total autonomy is actually a good thing, when it is used for a total surrender to God, but typically, that is not what we actually do. Instead, our society trains us to seize our total autonomy, and not to surrender it to anyone else, ever. Not even to God.

This only sets us up for a lifetime of always feeling insufficient and empty. We try to make ourselves fully good without giving ourselves fully to our Creator, which is only an exercise in frustration. It sets us up for a life of pushing and trying, but never actually being made better.

How great the revelation when we realize that we don’t need to worry about how to make ourselves better, we can instead let go of the ego, the need for control, and the appetites that drive us. When we let those things go, we don’t even have to make ourselves better, we just are better naturally.

Where effort only ever led to defeat, surrender is the path to victory. Where making better choices never works, capitulating all choice to God always does. Where the giving of strength never breaks shackles, the giving of the heart brings true freedom.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Grit vs Surrender- Autonomous or Not?

The Mixed Man)

Yesterday I shared about my personal struggle with addiction, and how I only found liberation as I surrendered my will to God, taking the steps that He set before me and not my own. Then, true healing and freedom blessed my life, but I want to be very clear that it did not, and never could have, come about in the way that I wanted it to. I had to do things that I didn’t want to do, but that God chose for me.

This points to an interesting paradox in the gospel. Autonomy is essential to God’s plans for us. Right from the beginning, God created a man and a woman who were designed with the capacity to make their own choices, and He even gave them a tree to exercise their choice one way or the other.

“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee,” (Moses 3:17).

If God did not mean for man to make his own choices, God never would have set things up this way.

But also, part of God’s plan is that man should surrender his will. Thus, we are all meant to have the ability to choose our own path, but to then give it up to the Father.

“Submit yourselves therefore to God,” (James 4:7).

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service,” (Romans 12:1).

The Ultimate Example)

Notice how Jesus followed this pattern perfectly. His autonomy was supreme and no one else had any power over him:

“I lay down my life. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again,” (John 10:18).

Of course, when it actually came time to lay down his life, Jesus’s own will, his autonomy, pulled him from it. It was his desire that “this cup would pass from him.” Even so, he surrendered that autonomy, declaring to his Father, “not as I will, but as thou wilt,” (Matthew 26:39).

Tomorrow let us think some more about what this means for us personally. We will consider questions such as, how do so many of us, even Christians who fully believe the message of the Bible, fall into this false belief that we can satisfy God while holding onto our autonomy? And what does it look like to truly surrender to the will of the Lord?