Holy Spirit, Teach Me to Truly Surrender and Be Transformed in Your Presence

• You know, I can look out across this auditorium tonight and I see something. I see it in the eyes. I see it in the way we sometimes hold ourselves so tight, so careful. It’s the same thing I faced in my own heart a thousand times. It’s the great quiet struggle of humanity. The one we whisper to ourselves in the dark hours of the night.
• It’s the desperate aching need to be in control. We think if we can just manage it all, manage our schedules, manage our families, manage our reputations, even manage our own holiness, then somehow we will arrive. We will have secured the blessing. We will have earned the peace. We will have built a life that is safe and predictable and ours.
• But oh dear one, that is the most profound illusion ever sold to the human soul. It is a mirage in a desert, promising water, but leaving you more parched than before. We clench our fists so tightly around the tiny broken fragments of our own understanding. Afraid that if we open our hands for even a moment, everything we’ve worked for will come crashing down.
• We treat God like a co-pilot in the airplane of our life, handing him the controls only when we hit turbulence. All the while keeping our own hands firmly on the yoke, sure that we know the best flight path. We come to the altar and we say, “Here is my life, Lord.” But we leave with a secret list of instructions tucked in our pocket. This is how you should fix my marriage.
• This is the timeline for my healing. This is the job I need you to provide. We want a divine consultant, not a sovereign Lord. We sing, “I surrender all.” With tears streaming down our faces, and we mean it in that moment with every fiber of our being. But then Monday morning comes and the diagnosis arrives and the financial pressure mounts and the relationship fractures and what do we do? We snatch it all back.
• We take the burden upon our own shoulders once more thinking, I must figure this out. I must solve this. I must bear this. And we walk through our days bowed low under a weight that God never ever intended for us to carry. It is the weight of self-reliance. It is the exhausting performance of pretending we have it all together. It is the crushing tyranny of the illusion that it all depends on us.