On surrender and love

“[The Father] has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son”

— Colossians 1:12 ESV

My simplest answer to the question What do you do? is this: I help people adapt to heaven culture. When people accept Jesus' invitation to follow him, they leave one culture and enter another, very different, culture. This defection requires full surrender. But surrender to whom?

Christians are often encouraged to 'lay down their rights'—to surrender. And I think we confuse this with love. We're called to love and to serve other Christians, our neighbors, even our enemies. But we don't surrender to their expectations. We surrender to God. Jesus didn't surrender to Pilate's expectations, he surrendered to the Father's will. (John 19:10-11, Matthew 26:39)

Once we've surrendered to God, self-denying others-oriented love becomes an act of spiritual warfare. And it should be waged aggressively and indiscriminately.

Testing to failure

I was trained as a chemical engineer and early in my career I actually did engineering work. One of my first assignments was to operate a pilot plant filled with an explosive gas at high temperatures and pressures. If anything failed, everyone in town would know it!

So it was important that all the tanks were pressure tested before they were installed. Some tanks were tested to failure. Every tank was tested at high pressure so it could be used at some lower pressure.

Here's the thing: when tanks are pressure tested, they're tested with water, not a gas. When a tank full of water fails, some water rushes out. When a tank full of gas fails, shrapnel flies everywhere. Safety first.

At our church we use three indicators of spiritual maturity: stability, gratitude, and generosity. So how do we discover our limits—or whether we've grown? We have to be pressure tested. Of course, real life pressure tests us every day—sometimes to the point of failure. But real life conditions aren't the safest. Failure can be explosive and damaging.

A better way to know ourselves is to engage in Gospel-centered community—with safe people—that will test our maturity. Everyone in the group should anticipate failures. And everyone in the group should be quick to extend grace.

A personal trainer

In my last blog post I offered that it's best to know the people we disciple so we can introduce them to the right information and experiences at the right time and at the right pace. To do this, we generally sort people into categories.

But then we notice: within each category, we have a new set of categories. And within this new set, still more categories. Inevitably we get to individuals—every one unique. And that's overwhelming because we are limited in our capacity—we are finite.

Here's the game-changer: God is infinite. If a person's discipleship depends on us, we will be exhausted and the person will be short-changed. But if it depends on God, every person will receive exactly the training they need, when they need it.

The greatest training we can give people is to train them to be trained by Him. Train them to pray, to fast, to read and memorize Scripture, to observe God's work in others, to journal, to serve, to give, to step into places where they will certainly need God's help.

Don't train them to do these things 'because they should'. Train them to do these things because, in doing them, they will be trained by God. And it will be the most customized, most personalized training.