TABLE READ-The #1 Reason Why Surrender Is Too Hard (Ch. 5)

Most of us know that surrender is a necessary component to our Christian journey, but when life gets really hard and painful, surrender seems the most impossible option. How do I let go and let God? 

This episode is based on the bridge in my book on surrender from what it is and why it's important to how we actually can do it. The key isn't going to surprise you: it's a common theme on this podcast. But today we're going to talk about the key component to "exercising" our spiritual muscles. 

Without understanding this tool, we will continue white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel of our lives and controlling our lives right into another painful mess. 

Let's stop the cycle here and make this tool a part of your daily rhythm.

Pull up a chair 🪑 

SHOW NOTES

Binge the first episodes in this series: TABLE READ

TABLE READ: Prologue & Introduction From My Book on Surrender

TABLE READ: Naming Control Blindspots (Ch. 1)

TABLE READ: What We're Getting Wrong About Surrender (Ch. 2)

TABLE READ: What If God Doesn't Explain WHY We're Suffering? (Ch. 3)

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

Transcript

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One of the questions I get asked the most is not about biblical theology or doctrine. It's simply I know that I'm supposed to surrender my whole life to God, but I don't know how. How do I actually let go when things are really hard and circumstances are making it really difficult and I just need something to hold on to? How am I supposed to be able to surrender in the midst of that? Great question. Pull up a chair. Let's talk about it. Welcome back to the mentors table. My name is Joy, and I am the mentor here at this table. My goal in this podcast is to provide a place for women who are searching for a mentor in their life, but are having trouble finding one locally to be able to come and gather with other like-minded women and listen to my table talks as we discuss and go deep in emotional and spiritual health topics that really challenge you to grow deeper in your walk with God. Okay, today we're gonna jump in. If this is your first time here at the table, the pattern that these episodes follow is that we begin with a moment of silence. We want to put into practice the spiritual disciplines that God has led us to in order to prepare our hearts and to prepare our minds to receive his word as we talk more. But before we get started, we always take this minute for silence and solitude. So if you could join with me and take a deep breath in through your nose, release it slowly. Place your hands open, palms up in a posture of surrender. And anything that is weighing on your heart, any to-do list racing through your minds, any emotions that feel to be all-consuming, just invite you right now to release all of those to keep God. On John Eldridge's pause app, he often begins moments of silence and solitude with the simple phrase, I release everything and everyone to you, God. Why don't you say that now? Let's say that one more time. I really believe it is super powerful. I release everything and everyone to you, God. Go ahead and take one more deep breath in. Release it slowly. You can put your palms down on your lap and open your eyes, and let's begin. As I've been working on my book, I recognize that chapters one through four that we have already discussed earlier on the pod are all about why surrender is necessary as well as defining surrender. Surrender is not defined by our circumstances, surrender is not defined by our abilities. Surrender is a choice of obedience that we make. It is something that requires great strength, if we're being honest, to let go of life's steering wheel and allow God to completely drive. So many times when I talk to people about surrender, they often come back with a response along the lines of, yeah, that sounds great. Yes, I really do need to surrender. Yeah, I see it. God is always asking us to surrender. But how? I don't have the strength to just completely let it all go. There's too much, it's too scary, it's too undefined. Doesn't God want me to hold on to some of this? And it's interesting that they can argue that while the fruits in their lives are clearly not fruits of the spirit, fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. Instead, it's anxiety and fear and depression and control. And they are not living their best life that God designed for them. But I can see the hunger in their eyes. I can see the desires in their heart to truly surrender, but I also see the helplessness and the question of if it's even actually possible. I want to pause here and talk a little bit about the Song of Solomon. I know it's a weird segue, but throughout the story, I've recently been studying it with my Havarim, my close friends who are doing a book club together. And we were talking and discussing about how from the beginning of Solomon Solomon to the end, it is not a distinct up and to the right line of the Shulamite woman giving her love to her quarter or who would be Jesus in our lives and trusting him completely and he transforms her life. And then everything is roses and unicorns. Much like in the book of Hosea and the story of Hosea feeling led to marry Gomer, and Gomer, who is a known prostitute, continually questions his motives and rejects his love, and there's a back and forth, back and forth that goes throughout the book. The same thing happens in the Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs, where there's this back and forth. The Shulamite woman gets caught up in her lover's attention and love, but then she begins to question it. And then she gives herself over to him, but then she starts to doubt that she really is worthy. And he's just constantly wooing her back and calling her lovely and doing all of these things that say, I'm waiting. It's okay, I'm patient. You can question, you can doubt, you can struggle, and I'll still be here with arms open wide, inviting you back into this relationship. I believe our process of learning how to surrender fully to God follows that example more than just a simple up and to the right. I figured it all out and now I surrender. There's a back and forth. There's things that go well, and then there's times that you start to doubt again. There's times that you completely trust Him for something big, and then there's little things that trip you up and you start to doubt and you start to trust in your own strength again. All of that to say the God that we serve, unlike any other God in any other religion that you can find, is a God of love. He's a God of patience, he's a God of grace. And he stands with his arms open wide, consistently, constantly inviting you to surrender. And I think it's more of if we're looking at it like the picture of holding our hands on the steering wheel of life, there's a little bit of like, okay, I can let this one hand go, but then our hand creeps back up and we're holding on with both hands again. And then there's times that we let go with both hands, but then we grab on with just one finger again. And then we end up with the whole hand again. There's a back and forth. And so as we're talking about surrender, the goal has never been to somehow master surrender so that you never have to think about it again. There's going to be a process. It's and it's probably going to be the rest of our life that we're developing this process. But in chapter five of my book, what I switch over to from the definition of surrender and why it's important and what it's dependent on and what it's not dependent on, and I switch over to how we surrender. I spend the rest of my book giving very clear connections to ways to make surrender easier. I'm not guaranteeing that it's always going to be easy, but easier to let go of the steering wheel of life and open your hands, palms up, and surrender to God. There is a way. God did not just throw us on this earth and say, figure it out. I hope you can do it. God does not look and see the different personalities and the different strengths and weaknesses of each of us and say, Okay, well, that person is more wired to be able to surrender. So I expect they'll be able to surrender most of the time. But that person, there's no way that person's ever going to be able to let go of whatever they need to surrender to God. God doesn't look at it like that. God looks at all of us equally, and he says, Hey, I have tools for all of you. And all of you have a way to be able to, as we've talked about many times on this podcast, exercise and develop spiritual muscle memory to be able to let go. It's accessible for all of us. Also, I think it's important to make a distinction that while I'm about to start to talk to you about the tools that develop the muscle memory for surrender, I am not trying to add to your to-do list and add to your anxiety or your busyness and overwhelm in your life. If that's what you take away from this talk, then throw the talk away because that is not at all God's heart, and that is not at all the goal in these conversations. Instead, the goal or the tool ultimately that is going to make surrender easier is an intimate relationship with God. So the things that I am inviting you to practice, while they may initially look like more things to add to your to-do list, instead, I want you to, instead of looking in those things as things to check off, instead it's a matter of prioritizing. And prioritizing your intimacy and your relationship with God means that some of those other things take a lesser seat in your life, and you make space for that which is most important, which is the things that develop that intimacy in your relationship with God. You know, similar to the Song of Songs, a Shulamite woman goes through a back and forth, a back and forth, um, whether she trusts her lover or not, but she also near the end has built up different levels of trust and intimacy that is directly proportional to the intimacy that she is allowing into her life. Meaning those things do get easier and are we are wired to desire that relationship. We are wired to thrive when we're in that relationship, and so as we make that relationship a priority, the things that are required to continue to stir up that intimacy become more of a priority naturally, and it's easier to order our days. Similar to when we start dating and you know we're in that initial stage of butterflies and flowers and uh hearts over our eyes. Isn't it interesting the way that we spend our time and how it shifts? Whereas before we met the one, we were super busy and felt guilty saying no to certain people and unable to go to a lot of functions and just consumed with all the things that were going on in life. And then when we meet the one and we're feeling the electricity and we're feeling the butterflies, and we just love being with that person, suddenly our priorities change, suddenly our time opens up, suddenly the things that are not so important begin to fall away and take their proper place in our life lower down on the priority list. The same as possible in our relationship with God as we prioritize and as we fall deeply in love and we search and seek intimacy with God, the other things are going to lower into their proper place on our own priority list. Okay, long enough teaser. The number one way that we can build spiritual muscle memory to be able to let go and actually surrender is through practicing the spiritual disciplines. I'm sounding like a broken record at this point. I know we've talked about this before, but I want to go back and highlight some of those and continue to flesh out the connection between if you're practicing the spiritual discipline, this is why it makes it easier to surrender. This is why it's building muscle memory to let go. The first spiritual discipline that I want to talk about is one that I've talked about before on the podcast, but you will not find on many, if any, traditional lists of spiritual disciplines. Generally, on those lists, you're going to find scripture reading, prayer, worship, silence and solitude, fasting, sabbath, and all of those are really important and really key spiritual disciplines. So why am I trying to make a new spiritual discipline instead of focusing on what's already on the list? Well, first of all, I think that there is a component of this discipline, remembering, that is inherent in almost all of the spiritual disciplines. So instead of looking at it as necessarily a new spiritual discipline or a different one, I want to point out, I want to pull out remembering the remembering component of all the other spiritual disciplines, highlight, examine, and try to explain a little bit more of why that spiritual discipline is so important. As I was preparing for this, my first thought was of Project Hail Mary. I don't know if you've read the book or seen the movie. Ryland Grace, who is the main character played by Ryan Gosling in the movie, is a science teacher who actually had an extensive background in science, but ends up instead of pursuing some sort of research, he is teaching high school or middle school science in the movie. One of his papers leads him to the top person in charge of Project Hail Mary that is trying to figure out how to literally save the world. My point in all of this is that there are multiple scenes when Ryland is brought on the scene to study this component that they do not understand, that they have recently discovered that they title astrophage. It's the astrophage that is eating away at the sun and potentially going to end mankind. So when Ryland is brought on, he's given a very small amount of astrophage and he's told to figure out as much as he can as possible about the astrophage. And so they go through this whole series of tests. He has every tool accessible and the state-of-the-art lab to be able to do whatever he wants. He looks at it under a microscope, he pokes it with a needle, he looks at it in the dark, he um separates it, he figures out a way to make it reproduce. There's all these different things about it that he discovers while he is carefully studying it. That's the picture of what we're doing with this concept of remembering. We're gonna poke at it, we're gonna look at it under a microscope, and we're going to see all the different reasons why it is so vital of a component of all of the spiritual disciplines and why it brings us to a place where we can more easily surrender to God. I'm not gonna get into all of the different things that I cover in this chapter, but we'll talk about the first mention of remember in the Bible. It's found in Genesis 8:1. We're back to Noah, who we just talked about in great depth on the last episode. And it says this is after the flood has happened, and so there's 40 days and 40 nights of rain coming down and coming up out of the ground, and everybody and everything has been eliminated except those living on the ark. And in my uh complete Jewish Bible, it says in the last verse of chapter seven, the water held power over the earth for a hundred and fifty days. Wow, I love that wording. Anyways, but then we go to chapter eight, verse one, and it says, God remembered Noah, every living thing, and all the livestock with him in the ark. And so God caused a wind to pass over the earth and the water began to go down. Now, in my footnote in my Bible, I want to read this to you because it really helps us understand what remembering means. Remember that first mention is an important study technique when you're studying the Bible to get a clear definition of how God expects you to define the word as you see it reappear in different parts of scripture later on. And it says in this footnote, God remembered Noah. To remember in this context does not mean a collection of fond memories by God. Rather, it implies focusing on the object of the memory, in this case it would be Noah, which then results in positive action. Focusing that results in positive action. That's the definition of remembering or remember in the first mention of remember in the Bible. I'm going back to the footnote and reading again. This idea of remembering is similarly found in Exodus 6.5, when God heard the groaning of the people of Israel and remembered his covenant with them by bringing them out of Egypt. It directs his attention and focus back to the groaning, the pain that they are feeling, and it precipitates an action, a positive action. That's the kind of remembering that we are talking about. There wasn't some cosmic poke that came to God and he was like, Oh yeah, Noah and the Ark. I totally forgot. I should have been working on that. Oh, what are we gonna do? It was not that at all. It was a focusing, and I want you to keep that in mind when you think of the different components of remembering in all of the spiritual disciplines, it's a focusing, it's turning our attention. The enemy right now is fighting really hard to. Steal your attention away from God and put it on yourself or really anything else. He just wants that attention to be focused on anything except God. And then we're back to the original sin in Genesis 3, where Satan comes to Eve and says, You can be like the gods, and takes her attention off of the one God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and puts it on herself. Oh, I could be God. My attention can go in that way instead. This is what remembering is all about. It's about getting your focus back on God, the creator and the source and the provider of all life. And when we remember, it not only focuses our attention, but then it inspires positive action. This is why remembering is so important. I may have covered this before, but there is a Jewish tradition that really brings this home. It's called briqa. And brikkas are blessings that the practicing Jews speak out all throughout the day. And they're blessings that are directed toward God, and they are acknowledging him as the source of everything that they're experiencing in life. It begins with Blessed are you, Lord our God, who returned my soul back to me for another day as soon as they get up. Blessed are you, Lord our God, who brings forth bread from the earth, who brings fruit from the vine. They all are blessings, directing their attention to God as their source, as the only source. The power of remembering on a daily basis and not just once a day, but multiple times throughout the day is all about our attention. It's about our focus. What are we focusing on? In my book, I talk about how the posture of surrender is hands open, heart open, eyes fixed on God. That attention component is necessary for being able to surrender. And when we remember, we're redirecting our attention back to God over and over and over. Now we're talking about epigenetics and neuroplasticity and developing neural pathways that are deeply ingrained in our brain that no matter what we look at or what we experience throughout the day, our attention shifts back to God as our source and our provider. That is the value of remembering. And remembering is important not just because of it redirects our attention, but also it fills our hope tank. We can't walk out in faith if we don't have any hope. The Bible says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, which means we have to hope first. We have to have hope that our faith creates substance for. If we don't have hope, then we will not be able to walk in faith. And when we remember and we fix our eyes on God and we remind ourselves over and over again that He is the source and He will provide, but also we add on to that, looking back in our past, the ways that He has been faithful, the ways that He has provided before, whether it's something that feels small but really is a big deal, He gave you breath again so that you can breathe, your health, your life, your ability to walk, your ability to have children, your ability to teach, to speak, to feel things. There's so many little, quote unquote little, but really big, but then also big ways in the sense of you know huge financial provision or a miraculous healing, or you fill in the blank. There are little and big or just a huge variety of ways that God has been faithful in the past. And when we remember those and we fix our attention on those, our hope tank automatically fills because we know, oh yeah, this is a God we can trust. He's been faithful to do it before and he will do it again. I want to end with a verse in Psalms. In Psalm 77, verses 11 and 12, it says, This is David speaking, I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. There's remembering the things that happened in the past. I will ponder, which means to think on, to meditate, to repeat it over and over, to chew on it. I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds. David understood the importance of remembering, and I think that it's important for us to grab a hold of that and recognize for our own lives the power of remembering, because then that fuels our hope and it makes it easier for us to surrender because our eyes are fixed on God and we already know He's the source and He is faithful, and so we can let go and let Him have His best way in our lives. There's so much more that I want to share, but it's in my book, and I am working now to get that published so that I can offer it to all of you. If you are interested in being one of the first people to know when my book is published and where you can get it, go ahead to joyabod.com right now. At the bottom, you can sign up for my monthly newsletter. That is the best way to stay on top of what's going on here. I would love to hear from you and be able to tell you and celebrate with you as soon as this book is written. But for now, you're just gonna have to hold on to these words from the episode until I can get that book out to you. But man, I am so excited for that. As a personal update, we have had a very busy season. I appreciate your patience as I took a couple extra weeks to get this podcast out. We spent almost a full week camping with two other families. This is an annual tradition that we absolutely love. We camp in my favorite place on earth, and it is beautiful. It fills up my happy tank to the tippy top. So we had that happening before that. My cousin and her two sons came to visit us, and this was their first time visiting us in the Tetons, and man, it was such a special time to be able to share that with her. Additionally, my daughter's still getting ready for college. People are working and have jobs, and I'm working on this book, and I've already started querying agents, and it's so exciting to be in this next stage of the book. So those are the main things that are happening right now. August is looking a little bit less busy than July, and then October will be our beginning of our next season as we really settle in to our regular rhythm of weekly podcasts and coming to you and having these table chats and having the opportunity to mentor you. I'd love to hear from you. Go to joyabod.com. That's J-O-Y-A-B as a boy a d as and dog.com. Sign up for my newsletter and send me a hello. I would love to hear from you. I'll see you in August.