September 11, 2016
Dear Friend
I am led to share one of my own testimonies. Today I share with you what took place in my life many years ago. I call it the day of ‘My perfect storm’. This was the day I surrendered my all.
‘The Perfect Storm’ was a movie I had seen. It was a story about a huge ship in the middle of the ocean that was about to be hit by two tornadoes coming from two different directions. The captain of the ship panicked and realized that in order to avoid the tornadoes he had to change the direction of the ship. The whole turning action was so absolutely agonizingly tremendous that the ship toppled over.
I realized that I was that ship that had to change direction. The Father wanted me to live life and do business from a total different angle than before, different to that of the world. No more goals for personal gain, no more unreasonable expectations of other people, no more own opinions. These thoughts rushed through my mind and I was terrified, crying out to the Father that I could not do it, not because I did not want to, but I did not know how to . Today I realized that it was not so much pride but rather fear, that previously kept me from surrendering, until the day He forced me, by letting all of my own plans fall flat. The Father asked me, “How can you trust Me if you don’t know Me? “That day I realized that many people find it difficult to surrender to the Father, because of fear. Why ? It’s because they don’t really know Who He is.
Many years ago I had a particular perception of what I thought ‘success’ meant, until the Father came and changed my perception. During the years of being in the business world, I was surrounded by competitiveness, drive and ambition. I was influenced by all of this and I found myself having the same attitude as that of the world. I thought I would achieve success if I could fulfill a senior position within a company. I use to plan my life years ahead, wanted to know every step ahead, and always wanted to have an answer ready for the unpredicted and unexpected question. I found it very difficult to sit still and relax because I felt driven to always be productive. I never felt content until I could tick off on my daily to-do-list. Everything had to be perfect – your table manners had to be impeccable, your vocabulary had to be of a high standard, and you should be productive all the time. How utterly ridiculous was I not to have such expectations !
The Father used the failure of a business partnership to draw my attention to this totally unreasonable and ungodly attitude of mine. He revealed to me the reason why I was results and performance orientated was not so much because I wanted to be accepted by others, but that I wanted to feel better about myself. I set extremely high standards for myself as well as for others. I often felt frustrated when people didn’t meet my standards, until the day that every one of my own plans fell flat. I felt so totally out of control. How prideful I actually was, but I realized afterwards that it was a false pride, because deep inside of me I was actually so totally insecure. I badly wanted to achieve success. However the more I tried to succeed according to my own standards, and the more I ran around trying to keep the pieces of the puzzle together, the more the whole puzzle fell apart. I was desperate. I asked the Father for direction.
He told me that He wanted me to change direction in terms of my way of thinking. I was in a state of panic, because I did not know how to change. I cried out to Him that I knew no other methods than that what I had experience of. I set goals in my life, which in itself is not wrong, but too many of them were my own ideas. I had too much control in my own hands. It was time for me to surrender to the plans and perfect will of the Father. We often think we need to give the Father a hand, instead of putting our small hand into His and asking Him to lead us. I reached a point of desperateness and fell flat in front of the ‘Door of surrender’. I surrendered there and then. I gave Him all my concerns, all my own ideas, my heart, my fears, everything I had. I surrendered my whole – I gave Him, ‘me, myself and I.’ I had reached a point of no return.
The outcome of surrender – The birthing of something new
The moment I surrendered the Holy Spirit touched me in a way that I found myself in an arched position groaning for a period of two weeks. Most of the time I was forced flat on my stomach. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, and I wondered when it was that I had previously experienced something similar to this. The Father reminded me of the birth of my first child. I knew then that I was in spiritual labor and the Father was going to birth something new in me. He told me that He would change my worldly way of thinking to His way of thinking, and that He would transform and restore me from the inside out to a new being in Him. I started to follow Proverbs 3 v 5, “in all our ways, recognize and acknowledge Him and He will direct and make straight and plain our paths.”
Dear friend, how often do you think we need to surrender in our lives? Just once and that’s it ? I don’t believe so. Each day is a new day, bringing new challenges testing our heart attitudes in each circumstance. Pride creeps in so easily without us even taking notice and before we know it we follow our own ideas instead of His. Let us not say, “God I have a plan, You come with me” but rather, “God what can I do for Thee ?” Let us choose to stay humble to be able to surrender so that we can be pure holy vessels of God’s nature. So when things start to fall flat in your personal of career life, you now know what to do !
Love in Him
Rishon
