TABLE READ: An Invitation to Surrender When You're All Alone (Ch. 4)

It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that surrender is only possible if you have some support--at least one, if not a whole group of people, that are willing to  surrender with you so that you can encourage one another when it's hard. But the reality is, God asks us individually to surrender, not to make it harder on us but to invite us into His next miracle. Today we'll look at Noah in a way you may not have considered before, and we will find encouragement for when we find ourselves all alone but knowing God is calling us to let go.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the mentors table, a place where you can pull up a chair for deeper discussions about spiritual and emotional health with an uncomfortable focus on surrender. My name is Joy, and I'm the host here at the table. But as always, I encourage and invite you to come and be a part of this conversation and not just let me do all the talking. One of the easiest ways that you can join the conversation is by clicking in the podcast show notes, send us fan mail, and with just a couple easy clips, you can leave us a voicemail. No typing or anything required. Super easy, and I love hearing from you. There's a couple of quick announcements I wanted to make sure I told you at the onset. First of all, yesterday, my most recent newsletter dropped. For those of you who don't know, I put out a monthly newsletter. It only comes out one time. I do not clutter up your inbox. It always comes on the last day of the month so that you can get a summary of the podcast and what we've talked about that month, as well as some other little tidbits or gold nuggets from me. This month, meaning June, I put in a book recommendation that I'm really excited about. I think that it is a beautiful companion to the book that I am currently writing about surrender. And I highly recommend that you sign up for my newsletter so that you can get all of those recommendations as well. If it is July 2026 and you're listening and you have not signed up and you would like that book recommendation, go ahead and go to joyabod.com, scroll to the bottom, and sign up for the newsletter. And when I see that you have signed up, I will go ahead and forward you June's newsletter as well so that you can get that book recommendation. Secondly, I just wanted to make a quick programming note. We are putting out two episodes a month in the month of July. And because of camping and summer and all the things, I am not going to put out the second July episode until later in the month. So just keep an eye on your inbox. This is a great time to make sure that you are subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts. So we'll auto-populate in your feed. But we will hit a Wednesday later on in July, not our usual every other week schedule. Okay. Before we move on, we always take a moment for silence and solitude. This gives us a chance to focus our mind and our heart into the proper attitude of listening and surrender before we hear the word that I believe God has placed on my heart. So if you could take a deep breath in with your nose and release it slowly out of your mouth. Lord, we just thank you for this opportunity to be here to listen and ultimately to obey. I pray, Lord, that not my words, but your words hit the ears of all these listeners, drop to their hearts, and provoke them towards the best life that you have for them. Take another deep breath in. Release it slowly. If it helps, you can put your body in a posture of surrender by opening your hands and putting your palms up in front of you, placing your feet flat on the floor, closing your eyes, and focusing your heart and your mind on God. One more deep breath in and release it slowly. Okay, now that we have our hearts and our minds in a good place and we have quieted our spirits, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about chapter four of the book that I'm writing about surrender. As most of you know, I have titled the summer series Table Read because I am bringing the subject matter of all the different parts of my book to you to read around this table so that I have a chance to focus and finish up this book that I've been working diligently on, and also so that we have a chance to flesh out some of those ideas that are in the book. If there are questions, concerns, holes that you notice in the things that I am talking about, that is the best time to click on send us fan mail and let me know. I would love to hear from you. And I really appreciate your feedback to make this book a richer and deeper reading experience for anyone who gets their hands on it. Last week we talked about how to surrender when God doesn't answer the big question, why? Why is this happening? A lot of what we talked about focused on the fact that our surrender is not based on our circumstances, it is not based on when we can understand what's going on, or we get at least a little bit of a grasp of what's going on, and then we open our hands and surrender because we can see where God is taking us. Instead, our surrender is only based on when God invites us and we do it. We're gonna dig into that a little deeper with chapter four today, talking about an invitation to surrender even when you're all alone. That word alone or lonely or loneliness is a really big word right now. It's pretty triggering, but also I think that it's also connecting. It connects all of us because I believe that it hits a heartstring that we all have in common. There's so many of us who feel the isolation that is around us. I believe that one of the enemy's primary moves to hurt us, to defeat us, to get us in a position where we are living our worst life as opposed to our best life is to isolate us. And you've all heard the statistics about how social media has connected us the most out of any time in our history, yet we are facing a pandemic of loneliness like we have never seen before. Loneliness is hard, loneliness is common, it's something that the enemy is consistently pushing us towards. And a lot of times it looks like us choosing it. Isn't that ironic that we choose to be isolated when we know that connection is actually the thing that is what our heart desires and what will help us the most, yet we still isolate, we still pull away because of insecurities, because of fear. You fill in the blank of why you isolate. But let's talk about how, first of all, you're not the first person to feel alone, and second of all, you can surrender even when you feel like you're the only one. In chapter four of my book, I go into multiple stories about people from the Bible who were all alone, circumstances looked dire and horrible, and they chose to surrender immediately. In fact, I kind of tease at the beginning of the chapter that it's our surrender that triggers miracles. It's when we choose to obey God no matter how much we understand, no matter who else is also obeying, that releases the miracle. We're gonna talk about one example today, and then you'll have to read my book to hear the other examples. I gotta say, is a little bit of a teaser to start with. We're not gonna get into it today, but chapter four might be one of my favorite chapters in the book. It's a chapter stockful of really important and helpful information that if you are facing a difficult situation in your life and you know the invitation is to surrender, but you aren't even sure where that starts. There's a lot of practical steps in this one that can get you on that road to surrender. But for today, we're gonna talk about surrendering even when no one else is. In fact, it's not just a matter of looking around and finding people who are inactive, meaning they were also invited to surrender and they are choosing to just sit there or not or ignore it, or they're somehow stagnant in their decision. We're talking about when you have an invitation to surrender and everybody around you is actively going the other way, actively disobeying in the face of God and his word and his instruction. And maybe on the surface, it even looks like they're having the better time, they have the better life. What do we do in those situations? So today we're gonna talk about Noah. Noah is one of my favorite characters in the Bible. I started to fact-check myself in real time, and I think that that's true. You guys all know that Peter is my man, he's my favorite, but I do find myself constantly coming back to Noah. And Noah has a really great and strong start, and then kind of a lackluster and humiliating end. But I believe that that can be taken as an encouragement that I don't have to show up perfectly for God, and he continues to use me. He is not looking for somebody with a perfect resume. If I make a mistake, there is always an invitation to repent, to turn around, and to be welcomed back into God's loving arms. Noah's a great reminder of that. Another reason I love Noah is because the word Noah or Noach in Hebrew means rest. That right there will tell you so much, right? I love that. He was born into a very difficult time in man's history. Ironically, we're only six chapters into the Bible, into the story of man's beginning, and yet he is born into a really dark and horrible time, and his father names him rest. In fact, in Genesis 5, verse 28 and 29, the Bible says, and I'm reading from the complete Jewish Bible, Lamech lived 182 years and fathered a son, whom he called Noak, which means restful. For he said, This one will comfort us in our labor, in the hard work we do with our hands to get what comes from the ground that Adonai God cursed. What a beautiful start to the story. What a beautiful name and really word of prophecy to speak over Noah's life and his legacy and promise to hold on to in a time of great darkness. But let's get to the story that we're all very familiar with, and that is the one of Noah and the Ark. I want you to take a moment and really flesh out some of these ideas with me. The Bible says that Noah lived in a time when everybody, everybody, was willfully disobeying God. It was a time of debauchery and darkness. It was a time where the sons of God, uh, little E Elohim had come down and were breaking all of God's rules. They were marrying and mating with women, humans. They were creating these giants that we call Nephilim. They were teaching the humans secrets from God's kingdom that were not meant to be revealed at that time. They were teaching them what I believe to be the roots of many acts of darkness that we follow still to this day, of sorcery and spells and curses and different things like that. They were taking their knowledge of the spiritual realm and they were bringing it to the physical realm for man to work for evil, not for good. And the Bible says in Genesis 6, starting in verse 5, again from the complete Jewish Bible, Adonai saw that the people on earth were very wicked, that all the imaginings of their hearts were always of evil only. Adonai regretted that he made humankind on the earth. It grieved his heart. Adonai said, I will wipe out humankind, whom I have created from the whole earth, and not only human beings, but animals, creeping things, and birds in the air, for I regret that I ever made them. And then listen to verse eight. But Noah found grace in the sight of Adonai. Whoa. But Noah found grace in the sight of Adonai. In a different version it says, But Noah walked with God. In the book, I encourage you to take a moment to really kind of flesh out what that looked like. What does that mean that Noah found grace in the sight of God? Or what does that mean that Noah walked with God? Does that mean something literal? I like to when I'm teaching a story like this to children, to invite them to use their imaginations and kind of picture this as a movie. And even actually more intimate than a movie, because I really want them to use all five senses to kind of get a picture of what that looked like. When we say Noah walked with God, do we mean literally? If we mean literally, what does that look like? Not only with our eyeballs, what does that look like? Do we see God walking beside Noah? And before I move on to another sense, let's consider that. Do we see preincarnate Jesus? So somebody in human form that is about the same size as Noah walking with God? Do we see God outside of space and time so big that he just kind of encompasses Noah with light as they're walking? Or perhaps just the hem of his robe is brushing alongside of Noah? If we are talking about the sense of touch, does Noah hold his hand? Does Noah touch his robe or his garment? Does Noah have nothing physical to touch, but instead is so consumed with the love and the light of God he can walk in that? Does Noah feel the earth under his feet, or does Noah kind of feel like he's floating when he's walking along with God? What is he smelling? Noah is as the Bible continues to paint for us in a garden. In fact, Noah's first act when he gets out of the ark is to build an altar and sacrifice to God and then to plant a garden. He immediately starts a garden again. So as he's walking with God, is he smelling pomegranates ripe and hanging off the tree? Is he smelling the warm sunshine beams that are dancing all around him? Is he smelling the dirt that is getting stirred up beneath his feet? Is he tasting the sweetness of the air? Is he tasting the sweat as it drips off of his lips? There's so many things that we can play around with in our imagination to create this picture of what it meant for Noah to walk with God. We're not making a doctrine or a theology out of what it may have looked like. But instead of just skipping over that verse, let's take a minute to settle in on that verse. And then remember that even as beautiful and idyllic as that picture sounds and looks and smells and tastes, look around at what is surrounding them. Every single person, giant, son of God that was around was committing evil, thinking about evil, following through on evil. What did that look like? How difficult was it for Noah to be in that circumstance and be the only one not performing sorcery, not performing these magic trips, not indulging in all of his sexual desires, not giving in to gluttony. The peer pressure was astounding. Can you even imagine? It was astounding. And he was all alone. Now we need to pause this story and put our own lives into perspective. There's so many times that we feel that we are all alone and God is calling us to surrender. There's so many times that we look around and we see that nobody else is answering the call. There's a lot of times that we look around and it looks like Noah's situation where not only are people stagnant in their obedience to God, but they are actively disobeying. And it looks like they're having a lot of fun. And it looks really tempting. And they're making fun of you or me. And they are actively constantly berating you for choosing to go a different way. That wears on you. That is difficult. That is really, really hard to stand up under. Noah didn't just have a few people in his life. You know, we have people, maybe there's somebody who has that person at work that just constantly berates them. Maybe it's a so-called friend. Maybe it's a neighbor, whoever it is that comes to mind, who just will not let up on giving you a hard time and trying to convince you that your belief system is wrong. Think about the fact that you can take a break. You can Go to church on the weekend or on a weekday, and you can surround yourself with people who love God and who are seeking after Him. You can listen to a message. It could be at church, it could be on a podcast, it could be on TV, but you can hear from somebody else who is actively seeking after God, who can speak words of life and encouragement into your heart and into your soul so that you have the motivation to continue moving forward. You can go to a trusted friend or family member and seek wise counsel from them. You have options to get out from under the oppression and get encouragement and go and obey and surrender to God. Noah had none of that. He was literally the only one. There was no way to get out and take a break. Yet the Bible says he continually chose God. He obeyed and he walked with God. In chapter 6, verse 9, it says Noah was a man righteous and wholehearted. Noah walked with God. I just don't think that we have a full grasp of what it was like for Noah to be completely alone and then have an invitation to surrender and continually choose God when literally no one else does. I really want you to sit in that. I really want you to sit in that, not to feel sorry for Noah, not to feel shame because you have given in to temptation around you, but to understand the stakes of what Noah was living in when God appears to him and tells him to build the ark. Now keep in mind, I am of the belief that at the time there was no such thing as rain. I believe that water was coming up from under the ground through the springs and fountains and perhaps providing some sort of a mist from within the ground, as well as there was a covering over the atmosphere that was keeping things in this ideal environment for growth. So for God to come to Noah and say, I'm gonna flood the earth, you need to build a boat, there are more than just how in the world am I gonna build a boat at stake? There's the question, what's a boat? There's the idea, what's a flood? I don't even understand that concept. Rain. And the Bible says that when the when the flood began, not only was rain coming down from the heavens, but the earth opened up and it was coming from down below as well. Noah had never ever experienced that, and neither had anybody else. And he had to create this arc that was well beyond the measure of what one human is capable of constructing. And he had to then trust that God was going to bring in all the animals that he was going to preserve, and somewhere there had to be all the food gathered for the animals and the humans that were going to go into this boat. There's so much more at stake here. Noah already, literally the only person following after God, literally already the only quote unquote outcast in the entire world, already getting berated, already choosing to go upstream in a really strong downstream world that he was living in. And now God is asking him to do something that he has no concept or understanding of. That even when we feel so lonely, when we feel that the whole rest of the culture is swimming a different way, when God invites us to do something, we can choose to be like Noah and obey. Or we can choose another more difficult way. Like I said at the beginning, I believe that surrender is what triggers and opens the door for miracles to happen. To my knowledge, is not any greater miracle than preserving humans from a cataclysmic flood that wiped all living creatures off the face of the planet. That's a miracle. The fact that they were sustained in all that time, that they had enough food, that he chose the right animals or the right animals came to the ark, however, that worked itself out. That is a huge miracle. And it was not dependent on Noah's understanding of the situation, of Noah's understanding of any of the words. He didn't have any definitions for rain and flood. He only had instructions from God, and he chose to immediately obey. And that is what preserved the human line that Jesus descended from. Our Savior's seed that had to be born of a woman came through Noah's family as the only humans that survived the flood and was able to pass down from Adam eventually to Noah and on to Mary and Joseph. That's a miracle. That's incredible. That had nothing to do with Noah's understanding or how lonely and unsupported he was. That was all about obedience. That's our invitation. Our invitation is to surrender and obey even when we feel like we are all alone. No matter how isolated you feel right now, no matter how lonely, no matter how few people you have in your corner supporting you or giving you answers and encouragement and telling you, yeah, that's from God, go and do it. What matters is your relationship with God and when He instructs you to do something, regardless of how much you understand it, regardless of if anyone else is going to help you, you obey. That's the standard that God has put forth for us. That's the standard that I want to challenge you with today. I want to read you a small excerpt from my book talking about the surrender of Noah. Noah literally would not have survived if he had not surrendered immediately. I wonder how many of us are playing with similar big stakes. I'm pretty confident that the answer is all of us. Perhaps the stakes aren't our literal lives, but I guarantee they're bigger than you want to risk. On the flip side, consider the provision and protection Noah's surrender catalyzed. When Noah surrendered, he made a way for God to provide supernatural protection for him and his family. His surrender also meant that his family carried on the bloodline that Jesus would eventually come from. His surrender opened the door for supernatural protection and provision from a cataclysmic event. I'd say that was well worth the discomfort of saying yes to God, even when God's instructions still didn't make sense. I also wonder, this is joy talking again. I'm not reading from my book anymore, but I also wonder if we understand sometimes how big the stakes are. I think there's a lot of times that we are invited to obey and we don't understand how big the stakes are. And God giving us free will and loving us and not wanting to create puppets, but rather people who have individual free wills who choose to be in relationship with him. I wonder how often he invites us to obey without telling us how big the stakes are. And it's our choice. It's our choice to obey or not obey. And then there's times that I wonder if when we choose to not obey, there's consequences that we look around and we go, God, going back to chapter three, why is this happening? I love you, I serve you, I am following you. And I'm looking around and I am seeing really tough, hard, hurtful, painful situations happening that I am experiencing, and I don't understand where this came from. Don't you love me? How many of us have shaken our fists at God? I wonder if we would be humble enough in those moments of hurt and pain to quiet our hearts and our minds enough to listen. And perhaps God would open the eyes of our understanding to see that these consequences are a result of disobedience. They are not God's best, they are not God's will, they are not what God had planned for you. But that's why He invited you previously to obey regardless of knowing the answers to why. And then He knew the stakes, He knew what both obedience would open up for you, and He knew what disobedience would bring co uh consequences to your life. And he left the decision up to you in those moments. If we can quiet our hearts and our minds enough to listen, and God reveals to us that this is a result of your disobedience in this specific situation. But you guys, that is not the end of the story. That is when we have another invitation, an invitation to repent, an invitation to fall back on our knees, open our hands and surrender. And we also have an invitation to invite God who lives outside of space and time and is not limited by the choices that we made in the past, as that's finished, there's nothing we can do about it. He can go back in the past, he can go back and he can redeem that time in the past, and he can bring about better fruit, and he can release you from the consequences of that disobedience and open the door to new things as you choose obedience. He's that powerful, so comforting to know. But before we get too caught up and shaking our fist at God and demanding a why and looking around at our circumstances and using that to determine, I don't deserve this. God, why are you doing this? Why are you hurting me? Before that, let's take a moment and take responsibility for our own actions and invite God to show us is this a result of my disobedience? What can I make right now? What do you want me to do? I'm ready. Here I am. Send me, I will obey. For a quick personal update on my life, we talked a lot about graduation last week, and it's been a couple of weeks now, and I've had a chance to kind of rest and recalibrate and quote unquote start our summer. I am finding myself coming out of a season that is very familiar to me, and perhaps the season sounds familiar to you as well. I think that this is primarily attributed to being a type A doer, recovering perfectionist, recovering control freak. But for me, the transition from a school schedule and rhythm to a summer schedule and rhythm is a rough one. Historically, it has been rough. I am working on surrendering more and anticipating more and inviting God into the transition so that it doesn't hurt as much as it usually does. But I am coming off of these last couple of weeks, just feeling the physical discomfort in my body from going from a very scheduled and predictable routine to a very unscheduled, unpredictable routine. I love summer because it affords the bandwidth to be able to sleep in later. And honestly, it's a time that I can be more present with our daughters. And that transition from going from my to-do list from one thing to the next or my hourly schedule on my calendar to open spaces of time where the invitation is to connect with my daughters and the invitation is to uh be more present in the moment and to rest and recuperate. The invitation is to go out and have adventures and have fun. I find that these first couple of weeks of summer are really difficult and uncomfortable for me because it just doesn't feel productive enough. Does anyone understand that feeling? It's a rough one for me. It's an invitation to surrender. I know because I have been able to name this season that instead of spiraling in anxiety, which, if true confession, in the last few years, a few years ago, I would spiral. I would get real anxious. I'd be, I would literally be fidgety, like my body would be fidgety. I would be troubled in my mind, and I would be complaining to my husband, like, oh, I just don't like this season. It doesn't feel right. Something is wrong. I'm missing out on something. I'm not doing it right. I also recognize that in general, I get to the end of June and I freak out because half of my summer is gone and I don't know where it went. I have not gone camping yet. I've barely gone hiking. I've done very few adventures. I've done a lot of work. Actually, it looked a whole lot like during the school year, but now the kids are at home, but they're not getting anything done because they're sleeping in and they're going out with friends and they're doing barely anything. And what just happened to summer and all these idyllic scenes that I had created in my mind. Now I understand that this is a normal feeling, and that when I get into July and August, I actually feel like life is moving a little bit slower. I have that to look forward to. In fact, it's not even half or over, it's less than half over, and there are slower moments that are in my future, and I can take comfort in knowing that those times are still yet to come. I haven't missed them. So these last couple of weeks have been good moments and bad moments of remembering what season I am, giving into anxiety, and then other times choosing to surrender and really starting to settle into the rhythm of summer. A couple of notes. Number one, this morning, our alarm is always set for 6 a.m. And this morning I felt totally fine with snoozing my alarm. Generally, I do not feel if I do choose to snooze it, I feel some guilt or anxiety that I'm gonna be behind. But I know I'm getting into the summer mode when I don't feel guilt and I do feel peace about snoozing my alarm. So there's hope, guys. I've got a sign that I am starting to settle into it. Thanks again for pulling up a chair here at the mentor's table. Just a couple of quick reminders. If you have any responses or thoughts or questions about what we talked about today in this episode, go to the show notes and click send us fan mail. It's at the very top of the show notes and leave a voicemail. I would love to hear from you. Once again, if you have not already sign up for our newsletter, it only comes to your inbox once a month. And if you are listening to this in July of 2026 and you missed out on the June newsletter to get that book recommendation, if you will subscribe now in July, I will send you June's newsletter so you can get that. And then finally, remember that we are a little off schedule, but there will be a second mentor's table episode in July. It just won't come in two weeks. It'll probably be three, maybe four weeks. We will show back up in your feed before the month ends. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. Have a happy summer. Enjoy these July days. I'll see you later.