You Won’t Believe What God Did in Lysa’s Life!
The pathway to enduring peace and effectiveness in Christian life requires mastering a critical spiritual shift: moving from a mindset of control to one of stewardship. According to the sources, God’s plan is to complete the good work He started in believers. This confidence is rooted in our partnership in the gospel. When believers become overly attached to specific outcomes, they inadvertently create pressure, anxiety, and spiritual confusion.
The Trap of Control: When Everything Depends on You
The speaker confesses that a natural tendency is to become “very attached to outcomes” when difficult circumstances arise. This attachment often manifests as an attempt to “run ahead” and imagine the best possible result, holding God accountable to that perceived good.
This mindset is identified as a form of control, even if motivated by a “good heart”. The core mantras of control are self-reliant and limiting:
- “Everything depends on me.” The believer feels they must “keep steering the bus” or the entire effort will fail. This pressure leads to excessive strategizing and controlling the narrative to ensure the desired outcome.
- “I’m only willing to accept the outcome that I think is best.”
Consequences of the Control Mindset
Operating in control mode leads to spiritual degradation and chaos:
- Anxiety and Frustration: Constant worry over steering the narrative.
- Emotional Exhaustion: Being worn out by trying to fix and figure out everything, which hinders spiritual effectiveness.
- Spiritual Confusion: Emotional exhaustion often leads directly to spiritual confusion.
- Disobedience: Being “stirred up” and angry causes believers to lose their distinctiveness, leading to behaviors that do not reflect Jesus.
The enemy desires this state of chaos and division because it distracts believers from the “greater landscape” of gospel partnership.
The Freedom of Stewardship: Trusting God with the Outcome
The alternative to control is embracing the assigned role of stewardship. Stewardship removes the pressure of self-reliance and redirects focus back to God.
The liberating mantras of stewardship are based on trust:
- “I will trust God with the outcome.” This is an acknowledgment that the believer “absolutely have no control ultimately of the outcome”.
- “I will be responsible to manage that which is within my ability to manage.” Stewardship is not “let go and let God” in the sense of neglecting responsibility (like leaving a baby unattended); it requires being a responsible manager.
Stewardship Leads to Peace and Surrender
Stewardship leads directly to surrender. Surrender is defined not as “giving up,” but as aligning job descriptions: “My job is to be obedient to God; God’s job is everything else”.
This complete surrender and trust leads to the “peace that passes all understanding”. While Jesus guaranteed that trouble, relational tension, breakups, frustrations, bills, and diagnoses will occur in this world, He commanded believers to “take heart” because He has overcome the world. By operating through the Spirit, believers have the opportunity to bring “peace into every atmosphere” they enter.
This peace costs the believer the self-reliance that insists “everything doesn’t depend on me”.
Partnership in the Gospel: The True Vocation
The ultimate goal of overcoming control and embracing peace is becoming an effective partner for Christ. As followers of Christ, we are meant to look “a little bit different than the rest of the world”. When believers are caught in their own anxiety and frustration, they are distracted from this greater calling.
- Shining the Distinctive Light: Believers are commanded to lift their eyes and see the bigger picture. People in the world need to see the love, hope, gentleness, and grace of God, and the believer might be one of the only visions of that hope they ever encounter.
- Acknowledging Miracles: Every connection God engineers—bringing one person across another’s path for a purpose—is a miracle of God and “rich evidence of his goodness and his faithfulness”.