The following is a devotion from my message series 10 Steps to Freedom. I hope these devotionals help you experience lasting freedom in Jesus!

STEP TWO: day 2

Surrender and unleash the Spirit’s power within you

There is one phrase, one teaching repeated by Jesus more times in the Gospels than anything else. Six different times, Jesus is recorded as teaching this timeless truth:

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” Matthew 16:25

If this was important enough for Jesus to teach repeatedly, it should be important enough for us to live out today. What Jesus is teaching here is the principle of surrender. Our natural desire as humans is to live for ourselves, to be the masters of our own fate, to direct our own path and to be responsible only to ourselves. As natural as that is to us, it will only lead to death. Freedom comes through surrender, when we stop doing life our way, when we stop being in charge, when we stop trying to save ourselves and when we surrender everything to God. 

That’s when the power comes through the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:8). We’re called to be continually filled with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18), and when the Holy Spirit fills us, we have the power we need to see our lives forever changed. But the Holy Spirit is not going to fill us if we’re already full of ourselves. To experience the life-changing power of the Holy Spirit unleashed within us, we need to empty ourselves, we need to give up control of our lives, we need to surrender. If you want to experience true freedom, you have to do it God’s way. You have to put both hands up and surrender yourself completely to God.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. It doesn’t make much sense on the surface to find your life by losing it, but Jesus taught that freedom comes through surrender. How hard has it been for you to fully surrender to God in the past?

2. If you were honest, what is the one thing today you’re holding onto the tightest, the one thing you have trouble giving over and surrendering to God?

You can read other devotional entries for 10 Steps to Freedom here.