On self - Mountain Movers

Our pastor has been preaching a series recently on “What’s in your refrigerator?” or “I Don’t Want Anything in Me The Devil Likes.” His illustration for the series is that if he (we) went to someone’s house and they didn’t have any food he (we) liked, then he (we) wouldn’t stay very long. Similarly, the enemy of our souls likes to hang around with the “junk” in our souls, but not with us when we are Spirit-infused and free from that junk. The vintage refrigerator on the church platform serves as a visual reminder that if we keep our hearts/minds/Spirits cleaned out of the junk of this world, our enemy will not want to hang out with us. As the Apostle Paul said, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5 NIV)

So far our pastor has talked about the “junk” of bitterness, unforgiveness, and our self-will. An online dictionary defines “self will” as “the quality of obstinately doing what one wants in spite of the wishes or orders of others.” Ouch. In John 6:38 (NIV) Jesus told us that, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.” If we are supposed to be “little Christs” and follow Jesus’s example, our wills should be surrendered to God’s will. In fact, in Luke 9:23 (NIV) Jesus told us that, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” But daily denying ourselves and fully taking on Christ means completely surrendering ourselves to God – a process that I (and maybe you) have not found necessarily easy.

To put it in the amazing words of Rich Mullins:

Surrender don’t come natural to me
I’d rather fight You for something I don’t really want
Than to take what You give that I need
And I’ve beat my head against so many walls
Now I’m falling down, I’m falling on my knees*

I subscribe to a daily C.S. Lewis quote and the last three days have been, in various ways, about self-will. Could be a hint, huh?? I’m not even sure I completely understand what this means for my life. But Jesus said that, “I will do what the Father requires of me, so that the world will know that I love the Father.” (John 14:31 NLT) So, somehow, the surrender of our self will is an outward representation of how we love God. But it’s also a path to peace.

We each need to “clean out the refrigerator” every so often. God uses that cleaning process to clean away bitterness, unforgiveness, self-will, and other things so that our bad habits, depression, anxiety, and other struggles have nothing to feed on. What happens when we have none of this junk in our souls? We have peace. And that is worth the surrender to God’s cleaning process.

God Almighty,

Thank you for your call on our lives to surrender our selves and live in relationship with you. Thank you that when we allow you to clean out the bitterness, unforgiveness, and other junk from our souls, you give us peace. Help us to crucify our natural self so that we can have everlasting life and resurrection – to live in love and obedience to you, our God. in Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.

“A rejection, or in Scripture’s strong language, a crucifixion of the natural self is the passport to everlasting life. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.” – C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“They [Adam and Eve] wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.” – C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“The human spirit will not even begin to try and surrender self-will as long as all seem to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt…And pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” – C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain