Striving. Oh, my. As I look back over my life, I see striving, striving, and more striving. Striving was pretty much how I operated until I learned the secret of surrender. 

It was a poignant moment. I was getting ready in the morning and having a lovely conversation with Jesus. It was lovely until He said, “If you really want to do what I have put you on this planet to do, you’re going to have to lean in to music.”  

WHAT?!!  

“The deeper the surrender, the greater the impact.” 

That’s the shortened version of the conversation (full disclosure: I’ve conveniently omitted out my argumentation back to God with all the reasons why I should never have to ever be involved in music outside of my personal bathroom or office), a conversation that kickstarted a journey of learning to surrender deeply and seeing that surrender—not striving is where we truly accomplish GOD’S work in our lives, not OUR work. 

Think about it, Jesus says in John 15:5, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” Remaining—or abiding—isn’t exactly a posture of striving, it’s a posture of rest, a posture more akin to surrender than hard labor. We see this principle at work in Jesus’s life, the One whose life and ministry demonstrated the greatest level of productivity (aka fruit) and global impact EVER. We see Jesus pulling away from the crowds to be alone with His Father over and over and over again. We see Jesus telling us that He only does what He sees the Father doing, again, a posture of surrender, not striving (see John 5:19-20).  

When we surrender, we are exchanging our vision for His, our desires for His plan, our ways for His. When we surrender we align with His heart and therefore His authority, and THAT is how we operate at a higher degree of power and effectiveness. See, if WE choose the plan, the method, and the goal, it’s OUR work, not God’s. If we choose OUR work, we are choosing to live by our own sweat, we are choosing gains limited to our own capabilities, and we are choosing impact limited to our purview. Can we choose our work our way? Absolutely! We have free will! BUT what if… 

We chose to do God’s work, a work FAR bigger than anything we could ever dream of on our own, a work far greater than we could ever pull off with our own means and even our own teams. What if we chose to do God’s work God’s way and landed in spaces and places we could never even begin to imagine through the same heavenly wisdom and understanding that created this amazing planet we live on and the universe that still stretches beyond what our best instrumentation can capture and measure? What if we chose God’s work God’s way and used HIS strength, power, and authority and not our own? We would never be the same. The world would never be the same.  

So how about we dream together with God? How about we learn the secret to surrendering more deeply than we ever thought possible? How about we learn how to do God’s work God’s way and see a God-sized impact in this world?