Surrendering the Wrong Thing

In the beginning of our journey on the faith in Jesus road, we talked a good bit about surrendering our life to the One who called us to come after Him.  But, even as we did the talk, we also had a sense of what we might need to surrender.  In those days it was usually some very visible thing like a bad habit, or Sunday leisure during worship hours, or maybe language that was too rough for Sunday School.  Whatever we might have called them as we remember those days, they were most likely the external things.   

As we moved along the road and began to compare notes with others and listen more intently to what Jesus was say, we began to understand the real things Jesus was calling us to turn lose were the internal, unseen by others, mostly invisible things of the heart.  We should have recognized from the very beginning that this was going to happen, but we managed to get started without remembering how Jesus spoke in the Sermon on the Mount about going a step beyond what was obvious.  As He viewed the world and those who wanted to come along with Him, doing was never the most important thing.    

It is interesting how we regarded salvation by works as such a heresy and then over the course of time began to live out our life in such a way.  Many of us worked ourselves into a frenzy for the sake of Jesus.  Maybe, some of us still do.  We worked hard doing the things we had come to understand believers were supposed to do and since we excelled in the doing, we were lulled into the sleep of having gotten it right.  Only after we were worn out, exhausted, and weary did we begin to realize Jesus was not as interested in the pious looking things we had set out do as much as He was interested in the things which lurked in our heart and were actually the real things He wanted us to surrender.