The dog just came up to me with a toy bone in her mouth and stood up to play. The bone she had was not for me, though it was for me to take and then to throw for her to retrieve. How like us with God is this He asks us to give Him our all and then we have a fight with Him before we surrender.
Father asks us to step away from the entanglements of daily life and take up the life that He offers. For us to do this we need to surrender the things that complicate our lives and draw us away from Father. The twist with many of these issues is that we have been taught to think they are important by God’s opposition and also by the society in which we live.
This is where the parallel with the dog comes into play. Father is gentle with us. He knows that we will be better off when we do surrender those things that impede us. He doesn’t however force us into a decision against our will, He waits for us to decide to let go.
The dog did not present me with the toy so that I would take it from her, as soon as I took the end of the bone it became a tug of war between us, until she decided to let go. Having let go she expected me to throw it away so that she could run off find the toy and the game would start all over again.
How often do we do this to God I wonder? “Forgive me Father for I have sinned” we pray and He does but we do not forgive ourselves, or worse, turn around and do what we have just prayed about again. We say Father I believe and then start to doubt what we have said so we have to come back and repeat our earlier confession.
Still He says to us “take my load on your shoulders for it is light”, He knows our limits and is careful to ensure that we do not become overloaded by His standard. He cannot control our natural inclination to accumulate to ourselves that which we are not supposed to take on. This is the “stuff” we need to remove from our lives so that we are only supporting the load that Father has planned for us.
There is another reason for deciding to surrender these parts of our lives. Jesus told the people He ministered to that whoever gave up their life would save it. That to be faithful we need to daily take our labours and follow Him. Against this background is it worth holding on to stuff that might just be an aggravation or distraction that keeps us from the fullness of life that is promised by our Master?
It seems to me that the peace and joy that we are granted by Jesus along with the promise that “Greater is He who is in me” and that I can “do all things through Christ Jesus who enables me” is of far more worth than the vicarious thrill of being able to do something that I know the Master would rather I didn’t.
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