Letting go, letting God

Yesterday a woman told me that her greatest challenge was yielding to God. In her mind, what God was asking of her seemed a huge sacrifice. In mine it didn’t seem so hard, but this morning God turns and talks to me about yielding, and suddenly my fingers are hurting.

He uses the story of Abraham, a man who had been promised a son and that he would be blessed and a great blessing to all the world. Abraham was filled with joy and hope, and worship was the most natural thing.

Isn’t it like that when life goes well? I have all I need; my prayers are answered; God is blessing me. Worship is easy, even spontaneous.

Abraham easily submitted to God, but what would happen if God asked him to yield that which he treasured the most? Would he still submit to God if his joy and hope were threatened?

They were. In Genesis 22, God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, the very gift that God had given to him and who had caused him so much joy. If he surrendered Isaac, Abraham would be acknowledging that he was totally yielded to God and that Isaac also belonged to God, not him.

I began thinking of this in terms of what God has given me. Certainly the list includes my family, but also possessions, abilities, health, a whole host of good things. At this moment, I know exactly where I’m hanging on and on which of my blessings God is asking me to release my grip.

Reading on, the Bible says:

“And Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son as a sacrifice. At that moment the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Yes,” Abraham replied. “Here I am!”
“Don’t lay a hand on the boy!” the angel said. “Do not hurt him in any way, for now I know that you truly fear God. You have not withheld from me even your son, your only son.”

My devotional book says, “Of course the act never came about—except in Abraham’s heart as he raised the knife to slay his son, and in this sense the sacrifice was made. . . . When this real victim had been slain, there was no reason to harm the boy.”

The real victim refers to Abraham’s will, desires, affections, all those things that stand between us and total commitment to God. Sometimes we don’t know what they are until they are threatened in some way and our grip tightens. Then we realized that God is asking us to give them up.

Corrie Ten Boom, Dutch author of The Hiding Place, used to say that she’d learned not to hold on to anything too tightly for it hurt when God pried her fingers loose. My friend is not enjoying sore fingers, but I also am feeling the hand of God on my clenched fist.

As for Abraham, the next thing that happened after God stopped Abraham was that he “looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering in place of his son.” God provided a substitute, a symbolic representation of Abraham’s submission, and he learned two things: a pleasing sacrifice begins with offering up your own self, and “in the central act of sacrifice, the LORD God makes the worshiper like Himself, for in the divine plan God would provide His own Son to be the sacrifice for us” (Recalling the Hope of Glory, p. 141).

“Abraham named the place Yahweh-Yireh (which means “the Lord will provide”). To this day, people still use that name as a proverb: ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.’ Then the angel of the Lord called again to Abraham from heaven. ‘This is what the Lord says: Because you have obeyed me and have not withheld even your son, your only son, I swear by my own name that I will certainly bless you. I will multiply your descendants beyond number, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will conquer the cities of their enemies. And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me.’”

Later on Jesus taught that to gain my life I must be willing to lose it. This is what sacrificial worship is about; giving up everything to do with me and embracing everything there is about Him. God will see to it that my needs are met, yet that does not mean that He will automatically restore everything that I have yielded to Him. What it does mean is that He will provide what is needed, and in that provision I will be blessed.

The struggle in all this is not being able to see beyond the altar of sacrifice. Abraham had no idea that God would stop him from slaying his son. He only knew that this is what he’d been asked to do. In the same way, I’ve no idea what God will do with that which He asks from me, only that He is prying my fingers loose—and that my fingers are no match for His mighty hand. Will He provide? Reasoning cannot see how, but faith keeps whispering yes.