"I'm Free At LAst"

I’m Free At Last

Matthew 16:24-25 (NIV)

When it was time to take our first child home from the hospital, we put her in the car seat in the back of the car, and then I got in the front seat to drive. She was so small even the baby seat was way too big. We had to prop her up with towels and blankets, and she looked so fragile to me that, no kidding, I drove home going 10 miles per hour below the speed limit. People were behind me honking and cussing.

That first day, when your kid is in the car with you, is a scary day. Does anybody want to know what the next really scary day is with your kid in the car? It’s when they turn 16, and now you’re handing over the keys. Now they’re moving from the passenger seat, from the ride-along seat, into the driver’s seat. That’s a scary moment.

I remember when the kids were pre-teens, I told my son that he was going to drive home from a convenience store about six blocks from where our house used to be. It was through a residential neighborhood. He didn’t want to do it because it was new to him, placed him outside his comfort zone. I said, “You’ll be fine.” He pulled out of the parking lot of this convenience store going five miles an hour because he was so scared.

He turned the wheel as hard to the right as he could, but then he kind of got paralyzed, froze up, and wouldn’t straighten the wheel out. So, he almost ran into the curb going five miles an hour with this look of horror on his face until I, his father, took control of the wheel.

Whoever is driving, is the one in control.

It is a big moment in your life when you hand someone else the keys. Up until now, I’ve been driving. I choose the destination. I choose the route. I choose the speed. You’re in the drive-along seat. But if we are to change seats, if you’re going to drive, I have to trust you. It’s all about control. Whoever is in this seat is the person in control.

In my neighborhood the streets are all circuitous. And no matter where I’m going, even if it’s three blocks away, sometimes Lady Renee will critique the route I take. Just the other day as we were out and about, I hear, “Why are you going this way? This is the long way. We shouldn’t take the highway; we ought to take the street way.” I have to tell her, “This car is my car. These keys are my keys. This way is my way.” Sometimes, she wants to sit in the driver’s seat while actually being in the ride-along seat.

Think about this. Remember Palm Sunday. This is the day Jesus came riding into Jerusalem. He came into town on—does anybody remember what his mode of transportation was? It was a donkey. Not an impressive way to come. It was like coming into town in a Pinto.

Everybody was cheering for him, but they all had an agenda for him. Hosanna! Jesus, come and take care of me. Come and heal me. Come and deliver me. Come on in and overthrow the Romans. Come on in and take back the temple. Come on in and get rid of the foreigners. Come on in and rearrange the circumstances of my life the way I want them to be. We’ll all shout “hosanna!” if you do what we want you to do. We’re glad to have you in the car, Jesus; just remember, it’s our car. These keys are our keys. The way is our way, but you’re welcome to be in the car.

A lot of people find Jesus handy to have in the car as long as he’s in the ride-along seat, because something may come up where they require his services. Jesus, I have a health problem, and I need some help. There’s something going on at work, and I’d like it to be different. I’m feeling some anxiety, and I would like your peace of mind. I’m feeling a little sad; I would like some of your hope. I’m facing death one day; I want to make sure I’m getting into heaven. I want you in the car, but I’m not so sure I want you driving.

If Jesus is driving, I’m not in charge of my life anymore. If he’s driving, I’m not in charge of my wallet anymore. If I put him in control, then it’s no longer a matter of giving some money now and then when I’m feeling generous or when more of it is coming into my life. Now, it’s his wallet. It’s scary.

If Jesus is driving, I’m not in charge of my ego anymore. I no longer have the right to satisfy every self-centered ambition. No, it’s his agenda. It’s his life. Now, I’m not in charge of my mouth anymore. I don’t get to gossip, flatter, persuade, deceive, rage, intimidate, manipulate, exaggerate. I get out of the driver’s seat and hand the keys over to him. Now, I’m fully engaged. In fact, I’m more alive than I’ve ever been before, but it’s not my life anymore. It’s his life.

Who’s driving your life?

So here’s the question I have for you as you look back over your life and the way it is moving now: Who’s driving your life? Have you ever surrendered it? Is Jesus just in the car? Be honest now. Is he just doing a ride-along or is he driving? Have you ever said to him, “All right, Lord, I am now giving you the keys of my life”? Jesus is clear about this. There is no way for a human being to come to God that does not involve surrender.

We find scripture in Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 10:39. It says, “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” (NIV)

Or Jesus puts it this way another time in John 12:24 by saying, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (NIV)

Or he puts it another way in Matthew 16:24 when he says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (NIV)

Surrender is not the same thing as being passive. Part of God’s will for your life is that you be active, make good choices, that you take initiative and be responsible. It is not at all the same thing as passivity. It does not mean being a doormat. It doesn’t mean that you allow other people to walk all over you. It doesn’t mean that you accept circumstances fatalistically. In fact, if you fully surrender your life, if you become a holy, devoted follower of Jesus, often it will require courage in fighting the status quo.

It does not mean that you cease to use your mind, ask questions, or think critically. It is not a crutch for weak people who cannot handle life. Surrender is the glad and voluntary acknowledgement that there is a God, and it is not me. His purposes are wiser than my purposes, and his desires are better than my desires. Jesus does not come to rearrange the outside of my life the way I want it to be. He comes to rearrange the inside of my life the way God wants it to be. In surrender, I let go of my life.
It’s a kind of awareness or awakening of the soul, where I am no longer at the center of the universe. I say to him, “I yield. I let go. I will do what you say, whatever it is. I will obey your Word. I am not driving my life anymore.” That’s what we’re talking about today, and I know, this is a hard word.

Surrendering to Christ is not easy, but it leads to freedom and life.

In our culture, when spirituality gets discussed, certain messages from the Bible can get named in any venue and everybody likes hearing them. For example… No matter how much you mess up, God still loves you. Everybody likes that message. They will download that one. I like doing that message. Or, you get busy and exhausted, you work so hard, you run so fast; God wants you to be rested. God wants you to be refreshed. Everybody likes that message, right? Can I get an amen!
Now when you hear… You need to surrender. You are sinful and stubborn and stiff-necked. It’s not the whole truth about you, but it is the truth about you. You are self-centered and self-promoting, often in secret ways. Your desires will often be self-serving, and even your ability to perceive your brokenness, your sin, will be blinded by self-deception. You need to bend the knee. You need to submit your heart. You need to confess your sin. You need to surrender your life to God. Is everybody excited about that message? Not really!

I’ll tell you one person who didn’t want to hear that. Me. I’ll give you a personal example. I grew up with this need to think of myself as a leader. That was the word for me. To think of myself as stronger and more popular and more confident than I was. In high school, I ran and won class president, because when you hear grown-up leaders talk, they say stuff like, “Even back when I was in high school I was class president.” The truth was, I was more introverted and bookish and insecure than I ever wanted anybody to think or wanted to let myself think.

As I grew up, it was like trying to be somebody I wasn’t, trying to grab something I couldn’t, and it would make me unhappy and driven and inauthentic in ways I didn’t even know. To make matters worse, I ended up at a church in Indianapolis with the most remarkable leadership culture I had ever seen.

They put on leadership summits that literally scores of hundreds of people around the city would get exposed to.

So I was surrounded by this. About 20 years ago, I went through 5 years of internal emptiness and pain and depression like I had not experienced before. That was when my mother died. It culminated in a moment that I will never forget. I sat on the edge of my bed. I was talking to God, and it was a sad time. Then I said to him, “All right, God, I will give up my need to be a leader.” Then, out of nowhere came this volcano of emotion like I had never experienced. Not just a tear or two, but wrenching sobs. I felt so sad it felt like I was going to die. I could not wait to get to church to fall at the altar.

All I knew was, I had been holding on to something, and it was messing up my life. There was no life in it. There was no joy in it. I said, “God, I will let go of this need to be this person. It has been my dream for so long. I don’t know what’s left. I don’t know who I will be, but I will trust you. I will try to do the best I can at whatever it is you give me to do. I will let it go. God, in this area of my life, this is so hard. I feel like it is killing me, but all right, you drive.” At that time, I surrendered to the calling of ministry that I had been fighting.

It is strange to look back on that, because that was 20 years ago. To see what I was dying to was nothing. It was a false self. It was this illusion of misplaced pride and ego and junk. Of course, I still have a lot of surrendering to do, but one of the things I am learning is on the other side of death is freedom and life.

One of many ironies is that I’m now in a position where leadership is a fair amount of what I do, and I’m finding myself energized by it and growing more through it, praying and depending on God and learning in ways that I never did before. But there is not this weight attached to it. There is not this need attached to it. I’m not on the line with it. There’s this kind of freedom in it.

We cannot will ourselves to victory; we must surrender our will.

This gets deeply to the issue of surrender. I cannot surrender to God unless I trust he has my best interest at his heart. I can’t do it otherwise. Jesus has a lot to say about death to self, but it is always the death of a lesser self, of a false self, so that a better and nobler self can come to life. It’s always death to desires and behaviors that would end up killing me anyhow, so that I can come alive and thrive as the person God wants me to be.

Life works better when Jesus is driving. Here’s why: You receive power through surrender that you cannot obtain any other way. You receive freedom through submission that you will otherwise never know.

Example, I ran across the 12 steps of AA in something I was reading this week. The 12 steps lay out a way of life that is the greatest single vehicle to freedom for addicts, for people enslaved in habit and desire, that the world has ever known. AA is for people who find it impossible to stop drinking. This is what’s so interesting to me. In any of the 12 steps does it say, “Now try really hard not to drink”? None of them even say, “Now decide that you’re not going to drink anymore.” The most powerful tool against the most powerful addiction in the world never asks people to decide to stop doing what they have to stop doing. They do not try to mobilize their will. They’ve tried that before. They surrender their will.

Step one, we realize we were powerless. Our lives were unmanageable. When I’m driving, I’m going to mess it up. Step two, I came to believe a power greater than myself could restore me. Then this is step three, this is our step today. This is a killer. We made a decision to turn our will and life over to the care of God.

Have you done that? It’s a strange thing. Try to overcome your problem, your junk, your whatever it is by your own will, and it will beat you. Surrender your will, as scary as that is, and then another kind of life becomes possible. Surrender. We think of that word as defeat; that’s loss. It turns out to be the only way to win, the only way to victory, the only way to life. Not just with alcohol, but with addictions, habits, and brokenness—sin in general.

We must surrender daily

That’s the way temptation always works. It is a form of temporary insanity. The only way to be free is to hand over the keys. I don’t want to do it. Neither do you. Of course, the good news about surrender is, if you do it one time, you never have to worry about it ever again. Right? Or maybe not. Jesus put it like this: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.” What’s the key word in that little sentence? Daily.

This day, we’re in church. I love God. I want to follow God. But then, tomorrow’s Monday. Then Tuesday. Then Wednesday. Paul puts it like this: “Offer your body as a living sacrifice.” The idea is this continuous offering.

Usually surrendering to God will have behavior that comes with a cost, like a sacrifice. All the time in our lives there’s this question: Who is driving?

Conclusion

Here are your three options. You can, if you want to, live with a rebellious heart toward God. “God, my car, my life, my keys, my way. I want nothing to do with you. I will live the way I want to live. You stay out of my life. I’m not going to talk to you. I’m not going to believe in you.” You can live with a rebellious heart if you want to.

Probably a more live option for folks here today is to live with a divided heart. Jesus is in the car, but you’re driving. “I’ll keep this area, this pattern, this relationship under my control. I will hold onto this grudge. I will enjoy the pleasure I get from this habit. I will retain this secrecy. I know, God, you want full surrender, but I don’t trust you.” We keep that unclear even in our minds, and God is seeking for us to make it sharp and clear. Who’s driving?

You should know this: if you live with a divided heart, it will be a miserable way to live. Sometimes you can keep a lack of a surrendered heart vague and fuzzy, but sometimes it will be vivid. It will block you from that sense of ease and life and freedom that is given to a surrendered heart. If you keep Jesus out of the driver’s seat, it will gnaw at you. Only one thing gives real peace and real life, and that is (oddly enough) a surrendered heart. “I’ll turn my life and my will, God, over to you. I know there’s a cost. I will do that.”

So here is the question: who’s in the driver’s seat? Have you fully surrendered your life to Jesus? Jesus will be relentless about this; he was in his day. (woman adultery)

Maybe it’s in your relationships. Has anybody here ever tried to control another person, like a spouse. Surrender. “I give up control of that other person. I give up control over my future. I give up having to have my way.”

A lot of times it’s around money. A rich, young ruler comes to Jesus, and Jesus knows this is a place where he needs to surrender. So he tells him, “I want you to surrender your wallet to me.” He won’t do it. Zacchaeus volunteers, “Half of everything I own, I’m going to give to the poor, and I’m going to pay back everybody I cheated four times over.”

Maybe it’s a grudge, maybe it’s an attitude, maybe it’s a habit, or maybe it’s a job. If you struggle with this, Jesus will help you, because he understands your struggle. The reason we are hear today comes down to this one man. Jesus knelt down in a garden and said, “God, I don’t want this. I don’t want the cross. I don’t want the weight. I don’t want the burden. I don’t want the shame. I don’t want the pain. I don’t want the death. I don’t want it. But not my will. Yours be done. Father, you drive. I’ll pay the cost.”

In the words of Martin Luther King, “free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.”