The secret of life

Good morning. This uh this morning's scripture reading comes from Matthew chapter 16 verses 21-28. If you have your Bibles with us, we're going to be looking at Matthew 16 21- 28. From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying,"Far be it from you, Lord. This shall never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." Then Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever shall save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his father, and then he will repay each according to what he has done. Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God coming. See the son of man coming in his kingdom. This is God's word. What is the secret of life? Wouldn't we all like to know? And yet in this passage really Jesus has illustrated to us a secret of life and it's paradoxical in its form. Ultimately he says for what uh for in verse 25 whoever would save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. So there's something about surrendering and losing our life that we actually find life. We gain life. And this is a conundrum and a mystery to all of us and especially to the disciples at this point in time. As we looked at last week, Jesus had just been declared the Messiah. He had accepted and received, "Yes, I am the Messiah." He is the one that has long been prophesied to come to be the salvation of Israel, to deliver the people, to usher in God's kingdom. And yet now he begins to turn to the disciples and say, "But I'm going to go to Jerusalem and I'm going to suffer at the hands of religious people, religious leaders, and I'm going to die. And on the third day, I'm going to rise again." Now, they don't hear that third day. They don't hear rise again. They hear suffering and die. And this just does not equate. This this doesn't seem to make sense in their own minds. And I think that's true for all of us. Paradoxes are hard to process. They're hard to make sense of. And what do we do in these moments? We're told, even in our own culture, that it's not about surrender that produces the life you want and that you really long for. It's success. It's achievement. It's setting your mind and all of your heart and focus on those things. And the culture tells us you can do anything you want if you just set your mind to it. But you know, I watched Drew Brees one time who is a believer, probably a great guy, but I watched him after the Super Bowl one time win the Super Bowl and kneel down to his kids and say, "You can do anything you set your mind to." And he wanted to use this as an example for that. And I thought in that moment, well, did Dan Marino, who really wanted to go to the Super Bowl, not set his heart and mind on it enough? Did he not try enough? You know what about Matt Ryan who made it to the Super Bowl, got so close, was up by three touchdowns, and yet maybe he didn't try hard enough at the end there when Tom Brady came back and beat him. And maybe any other number of people who set their heart and their mind and their intentions and all of these sacrifices to gain it and yet they didn't. And sometimes we find, as Jesus has said here, that the salvation that we long for, the really deep things that we need in life are not obtained by running out there and grabbing them, but by surrendering. And not just surrendering in general, but surrendering to a particular one. And so today, we're going to find that the secret of life is in that surrender, not in the achievement. And as we look at this today, we're going to see what is the problem, how is it remedied, and why does it matter. I think as we look at our text today, we see these three things. What is the problem? How is it remedied? Why does it matter? So, first thing, what is the problem to this? Jesus has said, I'm going to go and lay down my life. I'm going to suffer and I'm going to be killed. And they're thinking this doesn't usher in God's kingdom. This is not how you actually achieve these things. It's not through the like anyone would tell you if you want to have corporate success then you achieve, you gain, you strive, you go harder. Jesus has all this momentum. He's healing. He's stealing the waves of the sea. He's doing all of these miraculous signs illustrating his power. That is the way Jesus. and you just want to put all that stuff aside and bow and be willing to suffer. And somehow in this Jesus is actually showing us not just that he's here to save, but what it means for each of us to follow in the footsteps to find that salvation for our own lives. So what is the problem? Well, Peter in this moment thinks he knows best. Verses 21 to 23. From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and the chief priests and scribes and be killed on the third day and raised. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "Far be it from you, Lord. This shall never happen to you." Peter thinks that he knows better than Jesus. And this is really a remarkable thing. It's brash. Uh for a a a Jew Jewish disciple to essentially turn to his rabbi, pull him aside and begin to rebuke him was was unheard of. You just didn't do something like that. It was completely disrespectful and risky to do that. And yet you we also know Peter's character and this is pretty much his type of personality which he does. Anyway, pulls Jesus aside and he's in essence saying like you don't you don't understand Jesus. You're what are you talking about? This will never happen to you. It'll never happen. And he's trying to talk Jesus out of this. In essence, as Jesus says to him, he says Jesus in 23 says he turned to Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan." Now, that can be a title for Satan. But that also in the Hebrew just means an adversary. That's the word Satan in Hebrew is an adversary. And right here, Peter has positioned himself. Hearing what Jesus is going to say, says, "It's not going to happen." In essence, we might have to wonder if Peter's like, "I'm not going to let it happen." And we've seen Peter's actions later in this book that prove he's really fighting against this ever happening. He stands against Jesus suffering and Jesus's death and this path that he wants. And he joins a long list of people in the Bible who didn't like the way that God was running the world or God's plan for bringing about his purposes. And so that they thought they would help God or get in the way or just flat out reject what God was doing. God had promised to bring the children of Israel into the land of Canaan, the promised land. And yet they spies go into the land and they see giants and they grow afraid and they come back and give a bad report. and all of Israel decides this is a bad plan. We logistically cannot defeat them in any military way and so let's just abandon ship. Maybe we should go back to Egypt. And they forgot the fact that God had just delivered them from the mightiest nation on earth of that day, the Egyptian army, the Egyptian people, the empire of that time, and God had ripped them out and given them deliverance. Couldn't he handle this kind of situation? You know, Moses circumvented all this when he was uh a younger man. He thought, you know what? I'm going to bring about the deliverance of my people. I'm going to help God out. I'll kill an Egyptian and start a revolt. That wasn't God's plan. And pretty soon, he's running for his life. And he spends 40 years in the wilderness tending sheep before God begins to work him back into his plan. When you stand against the purposes of God, you become an adversary to God. It does no good to get in the way or to think that you God needs your help in some way that goes against him or to lecture him as if you know better. We don't resist God's plan. The invitation in life for Peter and for all of us is to trust that God actually knows best. See, we think that only good is all that we need. But because we're broken people, just giving us all that we need in terms of good and everything we want and everything we desire isn't what we really need. What you want isn't always what you really need. And what we find often times in life is that through the suffering, we find correction. Through the trial, we grow closer to God. Through sometimes the evil, even though God doesn't will it, we see him work good. And it teaches us to trust and to surrender to the God of the Bible, to his plan, to his purposes. And and and for some of you, I get it. I understand that you can look things maybe maybe you've looked out in life and and we all have at some point and not understood God's purposes, his plan or his way. Why did that girl who wanted to go to the mission field finally get there and die in her first year? Why? Why did that child get cancer? Why did God allow those kinds of things to happen? Why did God let my father die? I prayed for him. I pleaded with him. had faith where was God and we can struggle to understand the plan of God but time and time again and the invitation here is to trust his purposes because we don't always understand his ways. The Bible tells us that God's ways are higher than our ways. He h he's he has the full picture. He understands everything that's going on and we don't always understand that. We can't always see or know that. Years ago when I was a teenager, um I had a dog and I I let her out one night to go to the bathroom and something was outside. So she took off running uh after it and she ran kind of into a an area that was sort of overgrown with forest and she came back limping and she had actually had a stick that had jabbed through her front leg all the way through clean through and uh and you know obviously she's bleeding, she's limping, she can't do anything. And so I I get one of my siblings to hold her down because I know I got to get this thing out and it's late at night and uh and so I you know I break off part of the stick and I'm able to to to dislodge it and to get it out and then uh and then I take some peroxide. We got to disinfect this thing. I mean I'm a teenager, right? I'm like 18 years old. I I'm just trying to figure out how to like fix this thing. So, I throw some peroxide on her, you know, and then I I actually get Neospor and I'm like, "Let's just cover this thing and I bandage it up and everything like that just to try to kind of do some sort of home remedy late at night." Now, my dog in that moment did not think I was helping. And it took all my siblings might to hold that dog down because in that mind of that dog, I was an evil person. I was causing more harm than good in that moment. But I really did know what I was doing. And I did know that that peroxide would disinfect and that that, you know, that ointment would actually kill and removing the stick even though it hurt was the actual best thing we could do. Not leaving it in was not going to help things. And so it is with God. He understands things on a bigger and a higher level than we can. And sometimes when we're in the midst of this world and this life, as broken as it is, it's hard to make sense of it. But we have to trust that he knows and that he is good and that his promises are true and that sometimes even when we cannot make sense of it that God understands. Otherwise, what you wind up doing is being opposed to God. And maybe if you've struggled in your own life with questions of God, that's okay. We all have. It's okay to wrestle with God and to be honest with God, but at some point in your life, you're either going to have to look to yourself as God and think you've got it all figured out and you know best, or you're going to have to trust the one who knows all, who loves you and who is ultimately in the midst of a very broken world working a plan and we have to trust. Second thing we see here is that uh Jesus says to him not only that he is satan he says you are a hindrance to me you're a stumbling block in my way. Peter exhorts Jesus wrongly in this. He says may this never be. And then he says it's weird. It's worded really weird in the Greek. It it's hard to translate in English but it just basically says mercy to you. Or we might say have mercy or God have mercy on you or something to that effect. But it's just Peter is trying to talk Jesus out of this. He's preaching some other truth to Jesus like this is not the way. God have mercy on you. God wants to be merciful. He wants good for you. He doesn't want you to have to die and to suffer. You're the savior of the world. This is not a good plan and it cannot be your father's plan. And he's preaching a different narrative to Jesus than what the will of his father is. And we can do that same sort of thing in our own life. We can use these cultural truths that we preach as if they're biblical in our own life and buy into them. You do you. Follow your heart. Do whatever makes you happy. And I think all of us know and I hope you do that sometimes following your heart and doing whatever you want to do has led to a lot of regrets and mistakes in our lives. And we have to be careful about these cultural truths, these isms that we can preach to ourself and that we can preach to other people around us because you can lead yourself and lead other people astray in life. You become a stumbling block by buying into the lie of your day and preaching it as if it is truth. You can ultimately struggle with who God is, not like it, start to buy into these isms and these trueisms of life, and then what you will ultimately do is is because God offends you, but you believe that there is some God, we can take that God and begin to make him conform to the trueisms of our day. so that he's a god that likes the things we like and hates the things that we hate. We reshape our theology, not bowing ourselves in our theology to who God is and how he's revealed himself in the word, not to his way or to his plan, not to his commands, but to what we like and what we prefer. And you can change your whole theology and following of God into something that really isn't a real God. It's a mini god. It's a fake god. It's your own god. And ultimately really what you're doing is you're bowing down to yourself. If you've ever seen um Thomas Jefferson's Bible before or you're familiar with it, you Thomas Jefferson, you know, was a was a deist. He believed in a god who wound up the universe and essentially let the universe go its way at that point. And Thomas Jefferson did not like a lot of the Bible. And so he was honest, super honest. He just cut out sections. There are whole sections of Thomas Jefferson's Bible where she just removed things that he didn't actually like in the Bible. You see what he's done? He's become his own God, dictating what truth is. Instead of bowing and surrendering to the truth, he actually just makes up his own truth and serves that. What kind of God is that? It's you. But can you save yourself? Do you really know what's best?

And so we are invited to trust. Finally, Jesus says to to Peter, he says, "For you were not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." And we can have humanly wisdom and human thinking and think of God wrong. We can put our own interest just like Thomas Jefferson conforming our own theology and our own ways and changing and rejecting ultimately the truth of God, his call, his command and we could follow our own heart instead of instead of bowing to God and trying to surrender to his plan and trust it even when we cannot see it. We can reshape everything, think of God wrongly, and wind up serving a wrong God. When we do that, maybe you don't know the God of the Bible. Maybe you aren't bowing or serving the God of the Bible.

God's ways are beyond us. And at some point we can either trust ourselves, which makes us our own God, or we can trust God. And I think for all of us at some point in life, you've probably seen, you don't know what's best. And sometimes we feel like we want to steer the ship of life. Gets us into a mess. And how are we going to get out of it? and try to steer ourselves into something else. Well, how is it remedied? What is the remedy? We find here in verse 24. Jesus says, "Then Jesus told his disciples, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." And here's the real secret that he's explaining. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. losing our life for Christ's sake. And how does this work? What does this look like? What is the path that Jesus has called his disciples and his followers to walk? First thing he says here, he says, is if anyone would come after me, which is really the word wish or desire or want, like if anyone begins to look and to see, he's talking to his disciples. If you really believe I am who I am, if you really want to follow me and you want to be one who surrenders and says, "I want to be like you. I want to grow in you. I want to follow you. I want to trust you as the savior and the messiah of the world." That's the first piece he says. If anyone desires to come after, we have to recognize. And here's the thing. Just in this wanting, desiring, and wishing for Jesus, we have to recognize that Jesus is who he says he is and that he's worth following. See, what Jesus has done here is unlike um if you've studied Eastern religions or Eastern mysticism, what we often find is they they they do something similar to what Jesus has said here. They talk about the way. the way and there is this way that you follow in order to obtain nirvana or heaven or eternal bliss or whatever it is and you just have to do all of these sort of things in order to follow the way on that path to get to that location and what Jesus has done that's unlike all others is he said it's not about following a way it's about following a person It's about following me. He has presented himself as the savior and the salvation as the way, the truth, and the life. Not just some path that you walk, but a person that you walk along with that you follow in the footsteps that you surrender when they say left or right or wherever to go that you do those things and you trust. So if anyone wants to come and believe and follow, it's not just doing a bunch of tricks. It's not about earning salvation. It's about trusting me, coming to me. And then he says in verse uh in that verse there, he says that we deny himself that we're called to lose ourselves to let go of trying to be our own God. We don't like giving up control. Peter and the disciples think Jesus was on a good path. Momentum is building. He's on his way to bringing in his kingdom. And now he wants to suffer and to die. And I I just cannot make sense of that. And so many of the other disciples besides the original 12 have a hard time following and making sense of what Jesus is saying because he's calling them to trust him to deny themselves to follow him even if it means to a cross even if it means to suffering. We do not like losing control especially when we cannot make sense of where the path is going. when it doesn't look like it's going to lead to good or to lead to path and we want to insert ourselves when it doesn't look like it's a safe bet. Uh one of the things that when uh we're driving, if you've ever driven on ice, you can relate to this. You know, if if you are sliding towards a cliff or to a curb or whatever and you steer against it on the ice, what's going to happen? Nothing. You're going to keep skidding. It's only when you're willing to trust that if I turn into this thing, I'm going to regain some control and be able to turn out of it. And so it is in in a way when we release and submit to Christ, we're essentially letting him take the steering wheel of life, trusting him that he knows how to drive better than we do, that his purposes and plan are better than our own. I was um we don't drive that good. We don't drive that well in life. We don't always know the right plan and the right way. And often times we think I need these things. I need that career. I need that wife. I need this success. I need this money. I need this kind of pleasure in life. And we try to fill our lives with all of these different things that will get me what I really want. That's really the path to salvation. that's really ultimately going to fill my life with what I really long for. But we found in life, just I said, buy into those truisms, buy into all those different things of life, and they leave you empty and unhappy and confused and working against God's purpose and God's plan, even for your own life. The secret is submitting and denying yourself to God's plan to giving yourself to him and trusting that he knows best. And most of us in life have probably at some point lived in such a way that you took the wheel of life. You drove it and you drove it to career and success. You drove it to this other this pleasure or the things that you really needed and then you got there and it didn't really satisfy. It didn't really give you the meaning or the satisfaction or the life that you wanted. And history is filled with individuals who obtained all kinds of success in their life. And then they got there and they really s thought is this all there is? Is there anything more than this? And they were dissatisfied. And it's because we don't really know where we need to go in life. We don't really know how to find or achieve salvation by our own means because we can't and we serve and bow down to the wrong things and we drive our car in the wrong direction so often in life and we wind up causing more harm as we wreck into things and cause damage because we don't really understand. We don't have the great picture. We're not our own God. And so the call and the secret of life is to bow to one who is God, who does know what is best, to trust his plan and his purposes in life. Jesus invites us to let go of trying to be our own God. To let go of the control, to let go of our own plan that goes against God's plan. Even for the disciples, he's giving them a principle here that's bigger than this moment. He's teaching them if you're going to follow me, it's not going to be on your terms. And we think of that so often times that we can that that that salvation is only about mental ascent. I can believe in God and believe in in Jesus, but I can live the way I want and I'm just going to keep my hands on my own life and do what I think is best. And I'll, you know, I'll try to be a good person. I'll try to serve him. But you're still being your own god. You're still trying to save yourself at the end of the day. And Jesus is saying, "That's not going to work because you're still not submitting to my plan. You don't even know where you need to be steering to. I'm calling you to let go, to surrender, to let me lead, to let me steer, to follow me along the way in this process, to deny your own thinking and your own logic and your own purposes and your own agendas." Yeah. We are reminded in uh Galatians 2, Paul says to us, "I have been crucified with Christ." It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life I now live, I live in the I live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. I've been crucified with Christ. We give our lives to him. We take up our cross and follow him. And that's finally the last thing Jesus says about this remedy. It is to embrace the cross to be dead to sin. Because there is this this amazingly beautiful thing that happens when we take up our cross when we surrender to Christ. Certainly we get from him grace and salvation that comes in that. But we also it's not just something that's way out there in the distant. We begin to experience the power and the healing and the wholeness that is available for this life today when we surrender to him. When we let go, Paul says it in Colossians like this. He says, "For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." Then Christ when Christ who is your life appears, then you will also appear with him in glory. It seems like a paradox to let go of life and to surrender our life to Christ that it actually gains life, that it actually heals. Letting go feels scary and it does not feel like it's going to produce good because it involves trust and faith. Um St. Augustine who lived in the 4th century who became a a great um scholar uh and bishop in North Africa. Uh he before he came to Christianity he lived a um a free life. He was pursuing career. He had achieved really high ranks. He he was a he was a public speaker probably on his way to a political path and uh and he was very he's he later wrote a book called confessions in which he talked about his former life and he was really um addicted to lust and to sexual life. He had a mistress. He had somebody else that an ays he was supposed to eventually be married to when she became of age. He he kind of lived a a lentious sort of life. And Augustine was convinced as he had searched. He knew that he felt so empty in life. And so he was looking for for the formula. He was looking for the way. And he he studied all of these different religions in life. And he would try out this religion and see if it worked and it fit into his logic and way of thinking. And if it kind of does it work for me, I'm going to try it on. And he'd be dissatisfied with that. And he moved to something else. And he even tried Christianity for a point in time. and he found it, nah, it's it's it's I don't really like it. And he threw it and discarded it. But then he got to Milan and he heard a sermon one day by a really academic pastor and uh and it moved him and it began to kind of stir. Maybe I need to revisit the truths of Christianity again. And he began to investigate that. But he became convinced that Christianity was true logically. He was a very logical person. But he had this way of life and he didn't want to let it go. And he knew that something about that was going to hold him back because he knew that the call of Christianity is to surrender your life. To turn from these things that were not lifegiving, that were not producing life, that were making a mess of things that are not satisfying in themselves, and to let go of them. They're not going to give you. And he and he just kept thinking, I if I can hold on to those and have this, but he knew it wouldn't work. It doesn't logically make sense. He either had to surrender or he had to reject that and turn back to his old life. And he grew miserable, miserable with his state of life. And then one day he was reading in Romans 13 and he read a verse that helped him make sense of it all. And he realized that if I turn to Christ, I don't have to battle this old life. He's going to through resurrection power heal me, change me, make me new, and I will be able to have the power and the strength to say no to that old life, to die to that way that was destructive and making me miserable and it wasn't lifegiving. And that's exactly what Augustine did on that day is he took up his cross and he followed Christ and he found it wasn't just a heavy burdensome cross of death. It actually produced resurrection power in his life. That's actually the great mystery of the cross is it's not just that we're called to suffer, but we're also called to follow Christ. And then we experience the joy, the life, the resurrection power that comes when we make him lord of our life to become dead to that sin. We all surrender to something. We're all following something.

Are we chasing after an idol? Are we trusting in our own selves? And is that working? or will we trust that God knows and that ultimately life comes in him? Now, why does this matter? Finally, why does this matter? And ultimately, it matters because this life and all that it offers is fading away. I mean, at the end of the day, we know that death comes to all of us. And no amount of fame, no amount of pleasure, no amount of all these other things that we can attain in life is going to go with us at the end of the day. Jesus says it here. He says in verse uh 26, for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? You can gain all of these different things in life. And yet, what does it really get you? You're going to be unsatisfied and you cannot take it with you. Even if you found something that was good for today. It's not going to be something that forever lasts. At the end of the day, you'll be forgotten and your money will pass on to others. And the joy that you once felt will no longer be felt anymore. What can we give in exchange for our soul? We can't do enough good works because that would make God a debtor to us. At the end of the day, you could come and say, "I did all of these good things." It's not about surrender. It's just about me attaining my way. You can do anything you set your mind to. I'm going to set my mind on getting to God in heaven. I'm going to get into his kingdom through my own sheer will. I'll be a good person. You won't. You'll fail. And God wouldn't have it that way because that would make him owe you something. Ultimately, we believe that there's eternal consequences for the way that we live. and who you submit your life to. CS Lewis reminds us it's like this. At the end of the day, you can either say to God throughout your life, thine will be done. Or you can say to God, "My will be done." And at the end of the day, for those who turn to God all their lives and say, "My will be done. I'm going to keep my hands on. I'm going to maintain control. I'm not going to bow. I'm going to try to somehow work out a thing, make a deal with God, try to save myself, trust in other things. My will be done. Then God turns and says, "Thine will be done." And that's ultimately really what hell is. It's not just this place of punishment. It's a place where people want that because in God's kingdom, God is king. And it means that our lives must be bowed to him, the ruler of the universe. And for those that do not like that, that have spent their lives saying, "My will be done," that doesn't sound like a good place. That sounds like a restrictive place. They have not found the resurrection power of life. And so they hold on for the control. My will be done. And so God lets them have their way. But it becomes ultimately destructive because we know and as we've seen in this life, having our own way and our own will, our own purpose, our own plan doesn't really give us life. And that's why we're always searching for the secret. and we're looking to see other things that we can try on and make them become our salvation instead of ultimately looking to Christ and surrendering to him not to achievement to other things but to bow to him. The secret comes when we give our life to Christ. In our death, the old and broken way of life, we experience the new power and life that comes in Christ. We experience it even now.

And I think if you've if you've come to Christ, remember what brought you there. Remember what God rescued you from. Don't forget those things. Remember the beauty of the truth when he bestowed upon you his grace and his forgiveness and his love. And it's something we experience even now today. But we will also experience in the life to come. Jesus reminds us uh for the son of man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his father and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.

Ultimately, is Jesus your Lord? Do you surrender your life to him? You know, you see the real challenge in that too isn't just it's a oneand done. It's a daily thing. Paul said, "I take up my cross and I follow him daily." The call of the Christian life is each day to surrender our own autonomy and to trust his plan and his purpose. To understand that he is good, that he loves you, that his plan is good. And if it is, then won't you trust him? Won't you surrender and let him be the Lord of your life?

The lies can fill our mind. They can turn us away. We can be filled with all sorts of wrong thinking and cultural truisms. Or we can push those things aside, those stumbling blocks, those lies, those satons, and turn to Christ. We need to be honest about areas where we're not letting go. And I think that's the discovery of life often times is that even though we have if you've committed your life to Christ and he is your Lord, there's still little places in the crevices of our heart where we're our own God. And there's times where we don't want to surrender to him to forgive that person because of what they did to us. I can't do it. And so we reject what God is calling us to. You can't be Lord there. You don't understand what I walked through. or the anxiety we feel. And we can slowly begin to want to control the outcome of life or be anxious about what lies on the horizon instead of God reminding us and submitting to him saying, "I got it. Even if hard things come, I told you I'll walk with you. I'll never leave you. I'll never forsake you." to trust that he can be that kind of Lord to us and that in the end that even when if we suffer or we experience hard things just like Jesus said he rose on the third day so we rise to the newness of life in him and so we're called to surrender the unforgiveness the anxiety the hurt the disappointment to trust to take up our cross to follow him and to experience all the power of life that's found in him. The one who loses these things for Christ's sake will embrace the fullness of new life in him. As we pray, I just want us for a moment just to take a second because we confess daily to the Lord. We're called daily to examine our own hearts and see where is there still a little throne for me that isn't trusting the Lord and still hasn't submitted something to him and just let the Holy Spirit in that moment speak to you through that and if you haven't trusted Christ today is a good day to do that but in all of it we'd surrender it whether it's the first time or whether it's for the thousandth time we're called to bow to him, to let him be our God and our savior because it is good. Let's pray.