devotion22 - What Are You Afraid Of?

When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son (Genesis 22:9-10)

Late last year, my father and I sat in a hotel room following a men's conference in Toronto. Though he had given his life to Christ months earlier, he was still struggling with what it means to put Jesus first in his life and to surrender himself completely to Christ. "Let me ask you this," I said. "Would you trust Jesus enough to let him take Mom from you, if that was required of you in order to follow him?" He pondered their thirty-eight years of marriage and all that she means to him, then finally replied, "I don't know."

I empathize with my father as surely as I empathize with Abraham, whose test of faith has become the example for us all. The question for most of us, including my father, is academic since few people ever have to make such a dramatic choice. However, it's a useful test of the depth of our trust in Christ to ask, "What would I give up to follow Him?"

If we will be honest, there is something which each of us fears losing so much that it strains the limits of our faith to contemplate trusting it to God. Our life is perhaps the least of these, for surely there are worse fates than dying. Perhaps it is losing our wife, husband or child. Perhaps it is losing our freedom, our health or our mind.

As I began to take this inventory for myself in my twenties, I came across one thing which I could never permit God to take from me and which I could not offer in sacrifice. It was my mind. I justified this by saying that if I lost my sanity or my ability to perceive the world around me, how could I serve Christ? How would I even know who He was? If that were the case, would I be lost forever? Does my salvation rest upon my ability to understand it? I concluded that I could stand any manner of pain and torture so long as I had clarity of mind, but I told God in no uncertain terms that my conscious mind was off limits.

Years later, I came to the conclusion which must have preceded Abraham's reluctant decision to sacrifice His son, and which every Christian must reach before they can sacrifice the last remaining sacred treasure they have been withholding. I thought, "God, if you take this from me, it's part of your amazing plan and I can trust you." It was part of the realization that if God is going to take something from me, He will remain faithful to me and see me through it. He will give me whatever strength, faith and endurance I require to make it through the loss. This is the promise Jesus gives to all who place their faith in Him.

I don't know how God would sustain me if I had brain injury and lost my ability to reason. I don't know how my father would make it through the pain if he lost his wife. The point is that we don't have to worry about any of that once we surrender to God. We simply trust in the Lord with everything we have and He will see us through. God never said it would be easy, but He did say He would sustain us through the hard times and welcome us with open arms into His kingdom when our time comes.

Search deep within yourself now and contemplate the one thing that you have not been able to surrender to God. Find that one thing about which you have silently, subconsciously said, "God, take anything you require but please don't take this." I know that it feels like you would be destroyed if God took that from you, but you have to trust him. If God takes this from you, He will sustain you. Whatever He takes from you will be given back to you tenfold in Heaven. Most importantly, if God takes it from you, it is part of His amazing plan. Trust God with it now and let your surrender to Jesus Christ be complete.

The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me." (Genesis 22:15-18)