"Surrender"
Sermon Transcript for April 14, 2002
Scripture Reading: Matthew 11:28-30
By Steve Wakefield, Minister of Youth
I’d like to thank you, the congregation, for allowing us to share with you this morning part of our youth ministry. As Dan said, it’s not your traditional 9:30 a.m. service; but it’s a privilege to be up here this morning with a group of great young people. People that I love each and every one of them. And have them show you what they are experiencing in their lives and in their spiritual growth. And so I thank you for that.
Actually, it’s pretty tough to get up here at this point. When Ben Hosinski got up here this morning and gave his great witness; it’s a tough act to follow. And I really appreciate Ben stepping out of his comfort zone and stepping up in front of the congregation and sharing a very profound experience in his life and showing the kind of profound experiences that we can all have in our lives if we surrender to the Lord. Which, coincidentally, we didn’t plan it that way. But the message is titled this morning also "Surrender". So God’s at work here.
I appreciate especially Reverend Dan and Reverend Mike allowing me to come before you this morning the opportunity to bring the message to you. I appreciate it because I know it is important for each one of us to prepare to tell what we know, like Ben did this morning, because if you don’t prepare to tell it you never will. That goes with preparing to tell your witness also. And do you have a witness? I told mind recently but I’ll get in to that in a little bit.
The scripture this morning I’m using is just three sentences. "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened; I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from it for I am gentle and humble at heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." One of the things that we have been working with the youth on is taking our time to read the scriptures. I picked this particular scripture because it is very short; it’s very simple. It’s both easy and difficult. I think sometimes we don’t spend enough time with the scriptures looking at the scriptures in depth and taking our time with the scriptures; that we read the scriptures too lightly. And so I’m going to spend a little time this morning working through how I came to know these scriptures and how powerful and how important they are to me. This scripture is simple on the surface, but yet has very great depth for me.
Let’s look at the first sentence. "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened; I will give you rest." What an invitation – Christ’s invitation! It’s an invitation that many of us have taken advantage of especially during times of brokenness when we are really hurting. We all carry burdens. We are human beings; we will always carry burdens. Life throws them at us. We all get weary from carrying those burdens. Our burdens may include sin and knowledge of our continuing sin. When I was growing up I was fed the Ten Commandments in a German Lutheran church in northern Iowa. Grandson of a German immigrant who was a Lutheran, real stoic, who took religion very seriously. The Ten Commandments he took very seriously. And one of the burdens I carried was that I never could feel like I could live up to the Ten Commandments. Brokenness in our relationships are burdens. We have broken friendships; we have boyfriends and girlfriends that no longer stay with us. Marriages sometimes dissolve. Daily pressures – they are burdens - the constant search for enough money to live, school, homework, job pressures. Add on to that all the material things we have – TV’s, DVD’s, high speed Internet access, PC’s and on and on and on with the race that the material things in the world throws at us. It is a world that can come very confusing and burdensome. Christ says, "Come to me with your burdens; and I will give you rest." For most of my life I came to Christ and asked for help when I was in trouble and He did provide a measure of rest for me. But soon I was back to my turbulent life style—emotional, jumbled up inside. My burdens and weariness didn’t diminish; I kept adding to them! My relationship with God was like a yo-yo. I was asking Christ over and over for a simple fix.
What I needed to focus on was the second sentence of the scripture, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from it for I am gentle and humble at heart and you will find rest for your souls." When I first read this I thought, "Well, what is a yoke?" And I turned to the back of the Bible and one of the great things of the Bible if you don’t understand one of the words often they are found in the dictionary concordance in the back. And from a verb standpoint a yoke is "to join together". The second definition is a noun and it’s "a wooden bar that goes over the backs of two animals usually oxen." In fact, you’ve probably seen pictures of usually third world countries where the oxen are out plowing and the two oxen are tied together by a yoke, a wooden bar. Now the key here for me that I never really comprehended was that I needed to trade my yoke, the one I placed up on myself--the yoke of the world, for Christ. Christ wants us to do His work; Christ wants to use us. My first response when I did comprehend was that already I had a yoke and guess what? I had me at the reins.
One of the interesting things or one of the great things I should say about Grace Church and our leadership is that Reverend Mike’s Dad, Glen Beck, also a pastor. He and I have a relationship and I get a double dose of spiritual leadership from both of them. And I value that relationship with Glen. And I did give a similar message to this at a Wednesday evening service and Glen came up to me afterwards and he said, "Well, you know Steve, that’s one of my favorite scriptures also." I said, "Well, great!" And he said, "You know the thing that really I find neat about that scripture is that there are two spots on that yoke – the first spot is for me and the second spot is for Christ." The light came on! Light bulb, pull strings – Steve goes, "I wish I’d have heard that comment before my message. My message would have been that much better." The great thing is that Christ will be right beside you in His work. Christ isn’t at the reins. He is guiding from right beside you and providing strength for you.
But what if I didn’t like Christ next to me and guiding me? How is this going to make me different? What about free will? Good old rebellious Steve – free will. I now realize that this is the hard part, the deep part, of Christ’s invitation. "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me." It is the part that promises a great reward – rest for my soul! I know that I must surrender control to Christ and learn from Him. It’s all about surrender as Ben said earlier and trust.
Does the word surrender bother you? It bothered me my whole life until recently. Last summer at World Changers in Birmingham I realized several important things about my relationship with Christ and the importance of surrender. When you go to World Changers it’s a turbulent week. It’s a week where you start off and generally travel some distance. You get there and at least from a leaders standpoint you are pretty tired. And the youth have a lot of fun in the 15-passenger van so they’re not quite as tired and they’re ready for more action than we are. But one of the first things you do when you get there is they divide your youth group up into crews--work crews. There are about 300 to 350 kids at each one of these sites around the country. There are about 15,000 kids that participate in this each summer. So when you get there, two of you, a maximum of two, get assigned to a crew. So the first year I went to World Changers it was like, "Oh gosh, now I have all this unknown. Now my youth group gets fragmented and what’s all of that about?" But it actually turns out to be a great experience. And last year Jackie Shatto and myself ended up on one crew without any of our youth, which was a new experience. And our youth were paired up and got to meet all kind of youth from different churches and experience their faith.
So one of the things you do when you get out to your job site, you get into project whether it’s roofing or painting or building handicap ramps or whatever. And it is very hard work and you get very dirty and you get very tired. But at lunchtime we always take time for devotions and we always take time to share our witnesses. And I felt called and was asked, I don’t know if I was asked I might have just felt called to this time, to share my witness. And I went back to the school that night; Ben said we went to the high school. We got to sleep on the floors of the high school. And I’m laying there on my sleeping bag and all this towel flipping is going on around me and I’m exhausted. It’s midweek and I’m thinking…All of a sudden I realized I don’t have a witness. And I’m thinking, "Well, what kind of a youth leader am I when I can’t, when I don’t even have a witness." And it goes back to what I was talking about earlier in the message was that if you don’t prepare a witness, if you don’t prepare to tell what you are, what you know, you never will. So I found this a very wonderful opportunity, my third World Changers experience, to tell my witness. And I’m lying there and I’m thinking, "What is my witness? Gosh, this is unbelievable."
And then it came to me. Of course it’s a youth event, and I told this message once before about from the back to the front and I won’t go into a lot of detail on it but years ago when my kids were much smaller and my wife, Brenda, was working weekends so we wouldn’t have to do the day care thing. And so I had the kids on the weekends, three young girls, and I used to bring them to church on Sunday. And I’d come to church and people would say, "Well, don’t you comb their hair?" and I’d wonder if the clothes were inside out. And Brenda would get these reports back and she’d, you know, look at me like I was a bad parent. But I did bring them to church and I tried my best. But anyway, they got use to a little service we had on Thursday evening in the front of the church. It was a children’s service—midweek service. So they came up to the front of the church all the time and were use to that. I was kind of the back guy; I was in the back of the church that was where I… I kind of inched forward from the back from my Lutheran days kind of to the Methodist middle, you know. And I’m hanging out there; I’m feeling really good. I know there are a few people behind me who can see the back of my head but I can look at all those people in front of me. So anyway I was a middle kind of a guy. And my kids came in one Sunday morning and marched up to the front and plopped down. And the whole congregation is watching this and of course, you know, I’m a middle kind of a guy, come on back here. And they are like, "No, no, no we’re going to sit here." And they are toddlers at this point. And this went on a couple of times. And I’m thinking…finally it just hit me that one of my, you know, I have a lot of inhibitions built in to me. And here I am, why am I going to give my kids my inhibitions. God’s calling them to the front of the church; it’s a special place for them. How can I possibly drag them back to the middle? Maybe from the middle they’ll cascade on back to the back and how will that be? What a tragedy. So I plunked down in the front of the church there and I try to sit there, have sat there ever since. And it’s a symbol of me giving over control of my life to God. Not surrender, but control – there’s a difference for me and it’s the difference I came to realize.
So I told this witness to the group of young people and Jackie and our other crew leader and I felt, "Well, gosh, I felt pretty good about that." But then when I went to the worship service that night, similar to what Ben experienced at the worship service, I still felt hollow; I still felt like I hadn’t quite made the connection. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t Steve have that Holy Spirit burn in him as Ben described? Why couldn’t he have that pilot light burst into flames in him? And I was sitting in the worship service and I just…the music was upbeat, praise songs, great messages. One of the things you do every evening during World Changers is you worship. You work all day long, get up at the crack of dawn, you worship and then you worship in the evening and then you have group devotions after that. It’s a long day. And they are great worship services. And I was sitting there and I thought, "What is it God? What is it?" And I had this vision. It’s kind of step two where all of a sudden I saw myself out in the parking lot in the dark all by myself, with head bowed, and God looking down at me. And I realized that it was all about me personally surrendering to God. Not just giving up what I thought was control, but surrendering saying "God, I just can’t do it. Now you are the one." At that point my life changed. It’s changed a lot over the years here at Grace Church, but it really, really changed at World Changers. Christ needs to be in control of my life. When I take the reins I know the result is worry and weariness.
Now for the last sentence of the scripture, three simple sentences, the last sentence, "For my yoke is easy and the burden is light." Christ is reassuring us that He won’t ask for anything we can’t handle in that scripture passage. In addition, He will be with us teaching and guiding us from beside us. The depth of this passage really cuts to the soul. The beauty of the passage is that Christ is gentle and humble at heart and He cares deeply for us if we put on His yoke and stand beside Him. As for free will, I believe that it’s the pinnacle of free will to surrender control to Christ. Christ doesn’t demand it; He asks; but it is up to us. In that surrender we are truly free. Free from burdens and weariness because we know that we have the most important thing – eternal life! Why do I continue, as I said before, to sit in the front of the sanctuary each week? -- Because it’s my repeating commitment to Christ that I’m surrendering control to Him.
What if when we wake up each day, instead of immediately starting to worry about our schedules, our burdens, we place God first through prayer. What if we prayed like the chorus song we sang this morning, "Take my life, take my heart and form it, take my mind transform it, take my will conform it to yours, to yours, oh Lord"? For me it is all about surrendering control to Christ by putting on His yoke. In that action I am free from worry. I encourage you to do the same.
E-mail Comments to: Reverend Dan Sinkhorn