Love doesn’t demand its own way. Instead, love gives control away. Love is living in someone else’s preferences. Love is listening with the desire to know and understand God and people. Love isn’t being consumed with my thoughts or my feelings or my words or my wants or my needs. Love isn’t in a hurry. Love isn’t distracted. Love isn’t looking for personal gain. Love is dying to self. Love is saying “yes” to what God wants and what others need most.
When God becomes what and who I want the most, life begins to radically change. When I said “yes” to following Jesus when I was an eleven-year-old boy, I never realized how long it would take to surrender all the control centers of my life to Jesus. My thought world. My emotional world. My behaviors. My desires. My passions, hobbies, and talents. My finances. My relationships. My time. My addictions and dependencies. My work. My play.
Reorienting our lives around God involves a surrender of control. It doesn’t happen from external pressures or demands to think, to feel, or to act in a certain manner. The voluntary surrendering of control to God will only come in response to internally knowing, feeling, and experiencing being fully loved by the God who made and saves us.
Inviting Jesus to come into my mess to save me is a choice. Allowing Jesus to clean out the mess in also a choice. Engaging in a continuous process of yielding my control centers to the lordship of Christ happens when the love of Christ is what compels me to surrender what I’m trying to hang onto.
My pastor, Arden Gilmer, called it “a spiritual upgrade.” Here’s how Arden put it. “We don’t just will or deserve a deep heart and life change. God gives it to us out of His love for us. Deep heart and life change given by God moves us from having to do what God wants us to do to wanting to do what God wants us to do.”
Listen to the words the prophet Ezekiel used to describe this process. “I will give you a new heart with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony heart of sin and give you’re a new, obedient heart. And I will put my Spirit in you so you will obey my laws and do whatever I command.” (Ezekiel 36:26,27) Jesus used these words. “Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” (Matthew 6:33).
Here’s how I translate these words. As I learn to set boundaries by saying “no” to what I want to do and to what others want me to do, I reserve my “yes” to what God wants me to do. This only happens as I’m nurturing an intimate relationship with my loving Lord. As God’s thoughts and ways are becoming my thoughts and ways, He makes it increasingly clear what is driven by His Spirit, and what is driven by me or by others.
We’re only made to do what God designed us to do. Others may not like or understand how God made us or what He’s calling us to do. But life only makes sense when we are doing what God made us to do for Him and for the benefit of others. As we surrender control to our Maker, He gives us His peace that surpasses all understanding. His love will pervade our existence. And His truth will set us free.
How did God make you?
What did He make you to do that’s different from everyone else?
Are you doing it?