Why is it so hard to let go?

To surrender all that we are to the craftsman who made us.
To the one who provides the very air we breathe.
To the one who gave us life.

Why do we fight this inner battle? Elizabeth Elliot put it so beautifully,

“There is no ongoing spiritual life without this process of letting go. At the precise point where we refuse to, growth stops. If we hold tightly to anything given to us, unwilling to let it go when the time comes to let it go or unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used, we stunt the growth of the soul. It is easy to make a mistake here, “If God gave it to me,” we say, “its mine. I can do what I want with it.” No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish,
ours to lose, ours to let go of – if we want to find our true selves, if we want real life,
if our hearts are set on glory, then we must give it ALL to Him.”

— Elizabeth Elliot

As humans, I think we have an innate desire bred into our beings to control, define and write our own destinies.

Isn’t that what the great world teaches us? We are the masters of our own ships, aren’t we? Free to sail and live life as we please.

True as it is, it is nothing without God.

We are selfish by nature. We clinch our fists at anything that defies the blueprints we’ve drawn up for ourselves. {<======CLICK TO TWEET}

So it’s no wonder we struggle when life doesn’t go our way.  When death, sickness, and pain, come knocking on our door. When plans don’t pan out, or when we didn’t get the memo that a major life change was on the horizon.

Learning to let go, has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of wanting to give our lives over to God, but doing it our way.

Everything in human nature collides to hang on. We battle to solve the difficulties, fight to figure out life, and cultivate comfort in all we do.

It’s so against our constitution to surrender, to yield and give up all that we are to walk blindly into the fog–not knowing the path ahead.

Yet, He promised to never abandon us. We must remember that He is not made of the same frail human condition we are.

He loves us.
Utterly and completely, without fail.
And that changes everything. {<====== CLICK TO TWEET}

“No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us. And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

—Romans 8:37-39 {NIV}

I pray my heart will always beat to the rhythm of His song.
My soul always sing his praises.
And in all things, may my life ever point back to Him.

“The cross is laid on every Christian. It begins with the call to abandon the attachments of this world…When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world.

But it is the same death every time… death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at His call. That is why the rich young man was so loath to follow Jesus, for the cost of his following was the death of his will. In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts. But we do not want to die, and therefore Jesus Christ and His call are necessarily our death and our life.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Shared by: Lisa Larson

Photo Credit: Randy Heinitz