Breaking Point
Have you brushed up against that moment when you knew that everything was at risk? When you knew that to take a step of obedience would forever alter your connection to God? That moment when you knew that what was most precious to you had to be left behind if your were to seek Him first? There is an emptiness here. It is not fear. Fear belongs to the man or woman who believes God exists but does not care intimately about personal life. No, this emptiness is the gnawing certainty that your evaluation of life’s priorities is about to be shattered. It is the uneasiness that there is a new dimension of spiritual connection waiting on the other side of total surrender but you just can’t see it. Right now you are alone in the dark.
Abraham stood over that altar, his son bound, ready to be slaughtered. Everything he believed about life and purpose, everything he held of value was about to be sacrificed. He faced only one solution – total dependence on God. All that was left to Abraham was the choice of obedience.
Jesus’ agony in the Garden reached the same breaking point, that place where there is nothing left but obedience. No second agenda. No promises. No calculated reciprocity. Before him was the certainty of death accompanying the certain call of the Father.
Sovereign grace. Without those two words the only logical solution to life is suicide. With those two words the only logical solution to life is sacrifice. Either alternative brings death. Only one has hope.
Unless I believe that God is sovereign, I face a world of random tyranny where the sheer probability of disaster overwhelms everything but denial. But even with a sovereign God, I am tormented unless I have grace. I know in the very depths of my soul that I do not deserve joy. That is why I stand in front of the altar shaking. I have only one hope left. It is God’s covenant of grace. If God loves me, He brings me to this place in order that His love may be perfectly manifest to me. I am able to obey only if I am utterly convinced that He loves me. It is His love that tells me there is something on the other side of the dark.
We retreat from this moment of devastating dependence. It is so hard to see life as we wished it to be slip away from us. We clutch the fabric of what we have made from living threads as if the cloth were capable of shielding us from the impossible emptiness of Being. We cannot comprehend being nothing by choice.
God presses another way. It is the way of surrender. Abraham’s agonizing release of the son of promise to the Lord of life. Jesus’ agonizing release of perfect merit to the separation of sin. What I try to keep, kills me. What I give away no longer binds me. But it is gone, nevertheless. Freedom means opening my hand to the wind.
Tonight I stand before my Lord knowing that He asks me to let go of all that I believed I needed to survive, of all that I believed made me who I am, of all I know He put in my life. It was never mine. That reality must sink into the depths of my heart if I am to obey Him in the dark. It is my death, the death of what I thought I would be, that blinds my eyes. I have only His word as my anchor. But a blind man must trust the seeing man’s voice.
I ask myself, “Are my choices really motivated by God’s call to emptying or am I still trying to grasp my life?” “Have I considered my existence a thing to be clutched to myself or have I relinquished my very being to the Father’s will?” “Am I caught in the web of holding on to the life I have been given or am I standing at the altar, blade raised, ready to sacrifice my hopes and dreams simply because He asks me to?”
It is dark here. I am near the grave. But I hear His voice. “Follow me.” I am not sure if I am able. But I desperately want to bring the blade down and be free.
