Are You Ready to Give Up?

This world we live in can dish up some pretty hard days for us. We experience loss of loved ones, belongings, and relationships. We endure harsh words spoken about us, unfair judgments, and false accusations. Bad things happen, people let us down and life can sometimes seem completely unfair. When we are caught up in despair, we believe it would be easier to just give up; be done; runaway and hide.

We lose our way, things don’t go as planned and we find ourselves experiencing disappointment. We struggle to achieve what comes so easy for others. We have hopes and dreams that seem will never come to fruition. We pray and wait and pray and wait and wonder if anyone is listening. We want to be women of great faith, but we find it easier to just give up.

If that is you, if you find yourself in any of the above phrases and you are ready to give up – don’t. Hold on! But… be careful, oh so careful!

We give up on God and hold onto our pain, plans and pleasures.

We have it backwards. We must switch what we give up and what we are holding onto.

Let’s give up our pain, plans and pleasures and hold on to God with all our might!

How? How in the world are we to let go and let God? It sounds great and we want to do it, but it seems too hard. We can say it, but how are we to live it?

God’s ways are not our ways. This does not come naturally for anyone. It is not easy breezy. It requires supernatural help, learning to truly trust God, and denying ourselves. It requires surrender.

The definition of surrender is to cease resistance and submit. Cease resistance… do we resist God, resist His ways, and resist being obedient? We want to shout, “No!”. Let’s stop and reflect for a few seconds. When we place our thoughts, our feelings and our opinions before the truth of God’s word – then we are resisting God. We are being prideful and valuing our own ways above His.

We must give up our way and hold onto His way.

Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. James 4:7

Are you ready to give up? Let’s don’t give up on God – let’s hold tightly to Him! Let’s do give up our pain, our plans and our pleasures. Let’s abandon our selfish pride. Let’s give up our way. Let’s cease resistance to God and instead submit completely to Him. Surrender. Then as we submit to Him, we will be able to, in His strength, resist the devil. We will resist being selfish and seeking our pleasures, our worldly desires and our own way. We will resist talking about others; boasting about ourselves and our plans; hoarding our time, money and possessions; being impatient and grumbling; and we will resist doubt and fear. (James 4)

Instead, as we hold onto God, we learn how to make room for Him in our lives. We find time to study His word. We spend more and more time in prayer. We develop intimacy with Him because as we draw near to Him we find that He is in fact drawing near to us.