What makes you successful at work makes you struggle at home.
What wins you awards in your career will lose you intimacy with God.
Those statements may be hard for you to read, but I’ve learned those truths from personal experience, including failure.
As a first-born, driven individual, I became very skilled at performing, achieving, and winning. Whether it was in the classroom, on the field, or in the office, I knew how to win. In school, I was the valedictorian. On the field, I was all-state. At work, I was the one the boss knew she could count on during a crisis.
It was those same skills which won me awards that I brought with me into friendships and even marriage. However, my friends didn’t want me to win; they just wanted me to be with them. My wife didn’t want me to solve the crisis; she wanted me to listen to and connect with her in the middle of the crisis.
The same things were true with God. I could win awards for expressing my faith, but winning awards for my knowledge of the Bible ended up being far different than knowing the God of the Bible. Intimacy isn’t about what you know. Intimacy is about being known.
It was these experiences that led me to resonate with the first verse of CAIN’s “Honest Offering/I Surrender All.”
“Tried to clean it up nice
Tried to hold it all together…
And I been waiting to give
Till I can give you something better”
For many of us, we got the idea at a young age that if we performed well, we could earn the love and acceptance from others for which our souls deeply longed. However, as we get older, we discovered that love through performance is never secure nor is it true love. We got tired of performing. Who wants to live in a world where we’re only as worthy as our last at-bat, last quarterly report, or last show?
WATCH NOW: CAIN's "Honest Offering" Official Live Video
RELATED CONTENT: CAIN Presents Their All To Jesus In "Honest Offering / I Surrender All"
We get weary of the same thing when it comes to God. What happens if we forget to read our Bible one morning? What happens if some spiritual authority figure says we didn’t serve enough or contribute enough? How long do we need to pray every day to feel like we can check that box off our list?
This kind of mindset leads to burnout in life and it leads to anxiety, apathy, and even atheism when it comes to faith.
But, there is another way. Again, this new song from CAIN points us to the Gospel and a different way which Jesus described in Matthew 11. “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest…you will find rest for your souls.”
Jesus invites us to abandon the hamster-wheel we’ve been running on for years and decades, thinking we would one day get His approval and others’ love. We don’t have to live that way anymore. In fact, that’s never the life He called us to embrace.
The kind of life He invites us to step into is one marked by honesty and surrender.
CAIN sings about it this way:
“Jesus, You can have it all
‘Cause you love every broken piece
Of an honest offering
Jesus, you can have it all.”
A little over 10 years ago, I hit a wall. I burned out. Reading the Bible felt like reading the instruction manual for my car. Prayer felt like shouting into a black, dark void. I had zero clarity and vision for the future of my leadership within my church. All of my performing and achieving had come to its natural end - I was exhausted.
During those days, I discovered (or maybe re-discovered) God’s deep, unconditional love for me - a love that was not based upon what I did, but rather was based on who I am. I am God’s beloved son. I don’t have to earn or achieve that identity. With God, I had nothing to prove and I had an identity I could not lose.
Meditating on and marinating in the truths of those sentences, which I discovered in places like Romans 8, Ephesians 1-2, Mark 1:9-11, and Matthew 11:28-30, my life and my relationship with God was transformed. Instead of seeking to be a success for God, I started surrendering to God. My life began to resemble an old hymn I’d heard 1,000 times as a child. It’s a hymn that CAIN uses to close out their song, "Honest Offering."
“All to Jesus, I surrender
All to You, I freely give
I will ever and trust you
In your presence
I daily live”
It’s hard to surrender yourself to someone you don’t trust really loves you. When you’re trying to achieve and succeed your way into security, you keep waiting for the performance that puts you over the top where you can rest. I eventually realized that what my soul needed would never come down that path.
Instead, once I realized that I was already fully known, fully accepted, and fully loved by a God who offered me that kind of security, I found someone and something I could trust. I began to surrender and give myself to God and I found rest for my soul.
Just today, I gave Him what I had. After a deep breath, this was prayer. “Here’s what I have today. I surrender it to you. Thank You for Your unconditional love. All I have is Yours.”
It’s impossible to fully represent a 20 year journey in a few hundred words and it wasn’t nearly as neat and quick as this devotional has represented. Nevertheless, I pray that you find the freedom I’ve found and that you experience the Jesus CAIN sings about in this song.
When you do, your life will change forever.
Scott Savage is a pastor and a writer with the best last name in the world. Scott’s writing helps you laugh, challenges you to think, and invites you to grow. He leads Cornerstone Church in Prescott, Arizona. Scott is married to Dani, an award-winning attorney, and they are the parents of three growing savages. You can read more of Scott’s writing at scottsavagelive.com.
