Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Letting Go (Genesis 22 and Philippians 2:1-11)
Date: October 13, 2024
Some of the most incredible military victories over the course of human history have been won because one side simply refused to surrender and fought with courage and valor until their opposition was finally overcome. Even battles that have been lost have been turned into rallying cries for future soldiers to inspire them on to incredible feats of bravery. Consider the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo!” When the citizens of Texas were fighting Mexico for independence which ultimately resulted in their becoming a part of these United States, they were inspired by that cry to keep on pressing to defeat their foes until their threat was eliminated once and for all. But the fact is that Texas lost the battle for the Alamo that created that cry. It was their very refusal to surrender, though, that transformed them from being merely the losing side to immortalized heroes in the minds of their fellow soldiers and citizens.
Surrender is generally considered a bad thing. When you surrender, that is a sign that you are accepting the fact that you have lost. The battle did not go your way. You are giving up your fight and submitting yourself to whatever awful designs your enemy has in mind for you. Surrender, simply put, is not a good thing…except when it is.
When you take a water safety course, when they get to the part about what to do when you are drowning, what is the one most important thing they tell you to remember when a lifeguard comes to rescue you? Don’t try to rescue yourself when that happens. Don’t struggle against the lifeguard. Don’t even try to “help” the lifeguard. That lifeguard is trained to pull you safely back to shore without any help from you at all. In fact, your help will not only not be helpful, but could actually be harmful to you and the lifeguard both. You have to surrender to the rescue. Or how about when you are following directions to get somewhere that you’ve never been before. If you try to help with that process and take some turns on your own, you are far more likely to wind up lost than to arrive at your destination. The same goes with learning how to ride a bike. When my dad taught me to ride a bike, he held onto the back of my seat as I pedaled my way from our house to my elementary school about a half-mile or so away. Had I tried to ride away from him or balance on my own, I would have fallen and gotten hurt. While I certainly had to do what I could in terms of working the pedals, I had to otherwise surrender entirely to his help to be successful. In situations like these and others, surrender is not only a good thing, but the right thing to do in order to experience the good things waiting on the other side of our giving up.
This morning we are in the second week of our series, Together: Investing in God’s Kingdom. All this month we are setting our faces directly toward the work God is doing and preparing to do in the expansion and renovation of our old sanctuary building. More than that, we are talking about ways that we can invest our lives more fully in the expansion of God’s kingdom. We are talking about ways we can play a more active role in God’s work in our lives and through our lives into the world around us. He has been moving us in the direction of taking a big step of faith together to better equip us to reach more families no matter their shape or size with the Gospel than ever before. Our willingness to boldly and faithfully follow Him is what is going to make the difference in just how profound of an impact we are able to have with His abiding help.
Our collection of things to help supply the North Carolina Baptist on Mission disaster relief volunteers on the ground in the western part of the state is a perfect example of this. While, yes, we are talking about some things God is doing here among us this month, investing in God’s kingdom is not something that happens only here. In fact, it is when we are most committed to investing in God’s kingdom elsewhere that He will be able to do the most and best work here. Thank you to those of you who have already given so generously toward these efforts. I know you had to say no to some other things in order to say yes to investing in God’s kingdom in this way.
That is actually perfectly in line with where we started our conversation last week. If we are going to experience and take part in God’s work to advance His kingdom in our midst, it is going to take a willingness on our part to live a sacrificial lifestyle. This doesn’t mean we simply go without everything because God somehow can’t get by without our stuff. Rather, it means putting God’s priorities ahead of our own. And in order to really do that, we are going to have to say no to some things we might otherwise want or even feel like we need so that we can say yes to Him and His priorities. Or, as we put it then, growing God’s kingdom requires us to walk a path of sacrifice.
As vital as a sacrificial lifestyle is to our experiencing the wonder of God’s plans, sacrifice has a cousin who is just as important to bring along for this journey if we want to see just how grand God’s purposes for us really are. Sometimes these cousins are hard to distinguish from one another because they look so much alike. They are not, however, the same thing. This morning I want to talk with you about the role that surrender plays in our ability to receive what God wants to give us.
Now, at first glance, the ideas of sacrifice and surrender seem to have quite a lot of overlap. Yet while they are indeed opposite sides of the same coin, they are still opposite sides. Sacrifice is about actively giving something up for the sake of someone else. In our particular context, it is about giving up something we think we need to have the life we have decided we want for the sake of enabling and receiving the good of God’s plans for us. Surrender, on the other hand, is ultimately about getting out of God’s way and letting Him do the work that only He can do. In order for us to get our minds wrapped a bit more fully around what this looks like, I want to look with you this morning at two stories of surrender in the Scriptures.
If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, the first of these stories plays out in Genesis 22. Like our story last week of David’s errant census and its aftermath giving way to his expression of the biblical notion of sacrifice, the story here in Genesis 22 is hard. It provides ample ammunition for folks who aren’t really interested in properly understanding the text to make all sorts of uninformed accusations about God’s character and the character of His followers. Accusations resulting from ignorance, willful or otherwise, however, doesn’t mean the story isn’t still hard to grapple with.
What makes this story so hard becomes clear as soon as we start reading it. Follow along with me in the text right at the beginning of the chapter. “After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ he answered. ‘Take your son,’ [God] said, ‘your only son Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.’” Got that? Take your kid—you know, the kid you waited on for 25 years (plus another 50 years or so before then)—and put him to death as a sacrifice to me. I’ve got to be honest: If I heard a voice telling me to do something like that, I’d respond by telling the voice what I thought about the idea in rather direct terms. For his part, while we don’t know what Abraham’s initial responses might have been, what we do know is that Abraham set out to do what God said.
We can explore another time all of the ins and outs of why Abraham might have responded like He did to God’s command. I did explore all of that in more detail in a sermon I preached here several years ago. If you are really interested in it, I can connect you with a copy of it. For now, we’ll say this: Abraham had grown to know and trust God so much over the many years of his journey with Him, that even when God told him something that didn’t initially make any sense, he had confidence that God knew what He was doing better than Abraham did, and so he obeyed faithfully.
What Abraham did here was to walk a particular path of sacrifice. It’s not one we easily understand, and it’s not one we have any evidence from the Scriptures God has ever asked anyone to walk again with a single exception which we’ll talk about in just a bit. But today we are not talking more about sacrificial living. We are talking about surrender. So then, why are we talking about this story? Because there’s a really good example of surrender here that I want us to see together.
Keep reading in the story with me at v. 3. “So Abraham got up early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took with him two of his young men and his son Isaac. He split wood for a burnt offering and set out to go to the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go over there to worship; then we’ll come back to you.’ Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac. In his hand he took the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked on together. Then Isaac spoke to his father Abraham and said, ‘My father.’ And he replied, ‘Here I am, my son.’ Isaac said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham answered, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’ Then the two of them walked on together.”
What’s going on here? A whole lot of trust from son to father. We don’t know what Abraham said to Sarah about all of this. We know she was pretty protective of her son. It’s hard to imagine she was an easy sell on the idea or even if Abraham clued her in on it ahead of time. Imagine how that camping trip report went later! But Isaac was along for the ride. He saw his dad loading up everything, and knew they were going to make a sacrifice to the Lord. But usually when they did something like this, they brought along a typical sacrificial animal like a goat or a sheep. But not this time. This time they loaded up all of the supplies and set off without that most crucial element in a sacrificial offering…the sacrifice.
And so, being a little boy who was naturally predisposed to being inquisitive…about everything…trust me, I know this very well…Isaac asked his dad what the plan was. This may not have happened at first or right away, but after a while, the thought dawned on him, and not knowing any better, he voiced it. “Hey Dad, we have most of the ingredients we need for a sacrifice, but we’re missing the lamb.”
Can you imagine the strain in Abraham’s voice when he responds to his son? The son he loves as Moses took pains to point out to us back at the very beginning of the chapter. We shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that Abraham was somehow looking forward to what lay ahead of them as far as he understood things. How was he going to explain this to Sarah anyway? “Yep, Son, you’re right. God’s going to take care of that one for us,” was all he could manage to get out.
And look how Isaac responds. Did you miss it? It’s pretty subtle. All Moses tells us is that “the two of them walked on together.” Nothing else needed to be said. Isaac asked his question. Abraham gave his answer. Isaac trusted that his dad had told him everything he needed to know. He was going to leave the rest in Abraham’s hands. Isaac simply surrendered to his father’s will, trusting that things were going to work out as they should.
If this level of trust seems impressive to you at all, though, what comes next pushes things to the next level. They arrived at the place where the sacrifice was going to take place, and Abraham’s intentions for the sacrifice became clear. “When they arrived at the place that God had told him about, Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood. He bound his son Isaac and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.”
Let’s just call this what it is. This would have been a horrifying moment. It would have been horrifying for Abraham to feel like this was what God wanted him to follow through on doing. It would have been terrifying for Isaac. The moment they heard the voice of the angel of the Lord for Abraham to stop what he was doing had to bring unbelievable relief to them. Abraham was prepared to live out his unwavering trust in God in a way that baffles us and has never been requested of another person since. For his part, though, Isaac’s trust in his father was so totally complete that he was willing to say yes to whatever his plans were even if he couldn’t see how they were going to come about in a way that played out to his or anybody else’s best interest. That is, he was willing to walk a path of total surrender. For his part, God honored Abraham’s willingness to pursue a path of sacrificial living by reaffirming His promise to use His descendants to bless the world. One act of sacrifice combined with one act of surrender set the course for human history. Our willingness to surrender to God’s will like this can be a truly powerful thing.
Come with me to the second story of surrender I want you to see this morning, and we’ll see just how powerful it really is. When the apostle Paul was writing to the Philippian church, he was in prison in Rome. His circumstances were about as humble as they could be. For their part, the Philippian believers’ straits were not all that much better. They had experienced great persecution, but had persisted in faithfulness all the same. He wanted to give them the encouragement that they were on the right track, but rather than pointing to himself, he pointed them to Jesus. Specifically, he pointed them to Jesus’s willingness to surrender Himself completely to the Father’s plans.
Flip way over to Philippians 2 with me, and let’s take a look at this. “If, then, there is any encouragement in Christ, if any consolation of love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, make my joy complete by thinking the same way, having the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.” Are you with him here? He is encouraging us to take up the attitude of Jesus. And in case that isn’t clear, the next verse makes it explicit: “Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus.”
Okay, but what is this attitude and what does it look like in practice? Stay with me in the text: “Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even to death on a cross.”
Jesus surrendered to His Father’s plans. Just like Isaac had before Him, Jesus trusted so completely in His Father’s willingness and ability to work things out for the good of everyone involved that He was willing to say yes even when the outcome was not obvious. He was willing to lay down His very life so that His Father’s plans could come to pass. That is the biblical understanding of surrender. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how.
And don’t miss the fact that God actually did what He asked Abraham to be willing to do, but stopped him short of actually doing it. He asked Abraham to put his son’s life on the line as a demonstration of his total trust in God’s ability and willingness to fulfill His promises, and yet when Abraham proved his faith, God interceded, and pulled him up short. When it came to His own Son’s life, though, He didn’t pull Him back from the brink. He was willing to make the sacrifice that He didn’t ask us to make so that we can be in a right relationship with Him; so that we can be a part of advancing His kingdom on earth. Jesus surrendered completely to His Father’s plans. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how.
The truth we have to embrace together if we want to see God’s kingdom expand in our midst and beyond, is that investing in God’s kingdom requires us not only to take up a sacrificial lifestyle, but also a lifestyle of surrender. Simply saying no to things we feel like we need in order to invest more of ourselves in God’s kingdom isn’t enough. We have to actively get out of His way, choosing to go along with His plans rather than to resist them. When He has made clear what kind of a sacrifice He is asking us to make, we have to surrender to His will and follow His lead. We won’t always be able to see how His plans are going to play out, or what our impact on them will be, but we don’t have to because we trust in Him and His word more than in what we can see for ourselves. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how.
When we surrender to God’s call on our lives, when we stop fighting Him to do things our way instead of His, trusting in only what we can see, He is able to accomplish great, kingdom-advancing things through us. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how. So, what is it that God has asked you to do? Don’t just brush that question off. What is it that God has asked you to do to advance His kingdom? Don’t hide from the answer. Embrace it. And once you’ve done that, ask this question next: What is keeping you from surrendering to His will and following through? Fear? A lack of trust? Selfishness? A false picture of reality you have nonetheless convinced yourself is real? God’s record is as clear as could be. When His people surrender to His plans, all of those hang ups are proven to be nothing but a vapor. He is trustworthy. And He won’t ask us to do anything He hasn’t already committed to Himself. His plans will always come to pass. Like Esther, the only real question is whether or not we are going to accept His invitation to be a part of them. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how.
Last week, we talked about living a sacrificial lifestyle. This morning, I want to invite you into a posture of surrender. Actually, I want to invite you into a posture of prayer, because prayer always precedes genuine surrender. When we seek God out that way, He will call us forward into His plans, giving us the opportunity to give up our own in favor of His. He doesn’t always show us much past the first step, but He won’t fail us as we stick to the path He lays out for us. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how.
God has plans for this church. And when I say, “this church,” I mean us; you and me together, investing in God’s kingdom. If we are going to experience together the wonder of those plans, it is going to take all of us committing to a path of sacrificial living, and then surrendering fully to God’s call on each of our lives. Committing ourselves to that kind of a path is a scary thing to think about. Our minds go quickly to all the ways things could fall through and leave us high and dry. Yet when we put our trust in Him, and then follow Him faithfully, surrendering to His leading, He won’t let us down. He won’t leave us or forsake us. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how.
I’d like for you to join me in doing just that. As you leave today, you are going to be given a card. It’s a pledge card. Hear me well: I do not want you to do anything with this card today except to take it home and commit to praying for the next week. Pray over just how God is calling your family to pursue a path of sacrificial living in light of the building project He is calling us into together. Pray for the courage to take up a posture of surrender in light of that call as we invest in God’s kingdom together. Then, when we come together next week to worship and celebrate a time of homecoming, I want you to bring it with you, ready to make a bold commitment to investing in God’s kingdom together.
I don’t know what this looks like for you. That’s between you and God. But I do know that as you follow Him with courage and faithfulness, He will lead you with even great faithfulness into a glorious future that sees His kingdom grow from this community outward, becoming a blessing to all those who fall within its sphere of influence. As we invest in God’s kingdom together, the blessings of His kingdom will only expand, giving us a greater experience of the life that is truly life, enriching this community, impacting our region, and on out to the uttermost parts of the world. All this comes when we surrender. Surrender means saying yes even when we can’t see how. Would you join me in prayerfully considering how you will say yes in the days ahead of us?