Daniel Seabaugh

In his book, How to Pray, Pete Greig makes a fascinating statement about God. He says, “one of the main differences between you and God is that God doesn’t think he’s you!”

Most of us don’t verbalize our replacement of God for self, but it happens all the time. We want what we want when we want it. We define reality based on our will, not God’s. We become outraged when someone gets in the way of our dreams. We fracture relationships when they veer from the path of our choosing. We accumulate stuff like the good life is determined by the abundance of our things.

Let’s be honest, we make crummy gods. The true God is sovereign and can create galaxies with a word. The best we can do is fight and claw our way to some fleeting outcome. The true God is the creator and sustainer of everything. We really can’t create anything that lasts beyond the grave. He is the Creator God. We are created beings.

Greig goes on to say, “moments of stillness… are moments of surrender, in which we stop competing with God, relinquish are messiah complexes, and resign from trying to save the planet. We stop expecting everyone and everything else to orbit our preferences; we recenter our priorities on the Lord and acknowledge, with a sigh of relief, that he is in control and we are not.”

Have you had moments of stillness lately? Have you paused long enough to relinquish your control of life? I struggle in this area. I don’t pause enough to recenter my life around the truth that he is in control. My soul needs it. My guess is, yours does too.

There is freedom in losing control. Control is deceptive at best and destructive at worst. None of us get out of this life alive. Even if our wildest dreams come true, apart from Christ, when our spirit departs this world, on that very day our plans come to nothing (Psalm 146:4).

Can you sense the absurdity of living for our own agendas?

God is eternal. We are not. God is omnipotent. We are very weak. God is omniscient and omnipresent. We have limited knowledge and can only be one place at a time. God never gets his identity confused. We routinely find ourselves in an identity crisis. God knows he is in fact God and lives out his existence perfectly. We often think we’re God and live out our existence full of trouble and frustration.

It’s time to realign our existence, purpose, and plans around the majesty of God. We must stop seeking our own will and pursue the will of the one who holds everything together. To him be the honor, the glory, and the praise. Forever and ever.