If God were calling me to a  temporary fast, I could do it. Give up sugar? Ice cream? Television and technology? Foregoing those things wouldn’t be easy, but I could do it. But this, what God’s calling me to surrender, indefinitely, feels more harder than anything He’s asked of me before. This thing cuts to the core of my hopes and dreams, triggers insecurities and fear, and ultimately, reveals where my heart truly lies.

So what is this thing that God calls me, persistently, to relinquish?

Control.

My agenda. My time and my to-do list. Whatever I’m striving for that keeps me from saying, at each moment, “Not my will, but Yours, Lord Jesus, be done.”

When I’m sitting with my Bible, reading of His love and care, meditating on all He’s done for me, surrender comes easily. Or perhaps I should say, easier. “Take everything, Lord. And help me to obey You. Help me to give up everything to follow after You.”

But then the day begins, and pricks of selfishness weaken my resolve and hinder my obedience. My prayers sound more like complaints and long-winded requests than commitments to my Savior.

This is my greatest, most fervent and frequent battle—the battle against self, saturated in pride and selfishness.

But Christ calls me to love—not with the conditional, temporary, convenient love our world offers, but the kind He demonstrated when He stripped Himself of all His heavenly glory, took on flesh, and died in my selfish, prideful place. (Phil. 2:5-11)

For over a year now, I’ve been praying about some things, and He’s answered, but not in the way I expected. I’m looking ahead at all the lives I long for Him to touch through me, but His focus is zeroed in on something of utmost importance, something that enables great ministry to occur and true love to flow, and that’s my heart.

If I want to be used by God and touch lives for eternity, my life must be touched first by the transforming power of God, the God who shows me how to love, to surrender, and to give all of myself no matter the cost.

Even if it means surrendering everything I hold dear.

In Romans 12:1, Paul urges us to “offer [our] bodies as living sacrifices.” In other words, to live sacrificially for Christ, not just today, or when it’s urgent or convenient, but always. To put God’s agenda above our own.

This is the call. The first step to greatness, and it begins with a quiet, yet desperate plea, “Change me, Lord. Help me. Do whatever you need to

within me to make me pliable in Your hands, a cleansed and open vessel always and ready to do Your will and Your will only.”

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Let’s talk about this! Did anything resonate with you as you read today’s post? Is God asking you to lay down, or perhaps pick up, anything? What makes that hard? Share your thoughts and stories with us in the comments below, because we can all learn from each other!

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Scripture taken from the Holy Bible New International Version, Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.