Abandon Outcomes to God

It is hard to resist the culture of success at all costs. But our life with God depends on it. 

We have been told a story that can subtly erode our discipleship. The story is that we are walking up a hill, straining towards a pinnacle where God will reward us for our faithful, plodding steps. To get there, we have to trust God and put one foot in front of the other. The climb is arduous, but the reward is worth the effort. 

And as we climb, we gain energy from knowing whether or not we are succeeding. We look up from our labor to see if that city on a hill is coming any closer. We want to know if our present investments will yield future dividends or if we’re gambling ourselves into ruin. In all of this, we reveal that we want certainty, control, and guarantees. We believe that with the right inputs, God will give the proper outputs. But none of these signposts are offered in the way of Christ. 

The spiritual path that Jesus offers and is begins with a different premise. Our starting ground is not poverty, but fullness. When we receive Christ, we are given access to the fullness of God that already dwells in Jesus. United with him, the entire paradigm is flipped upside-down. Instead of climbing a ladder or treading a hill up towards God, we are handed a master key. We are given access to an endless mansion with many rooms. All of the riches have already been placed with us and within us. 

With these riches, why does it feel like we still live in poverty? Our inner narrative and external formation suggests that we need to achieve and strive, proving our worth and trustworthiness before God will give us everything. But God already has. 

So what do we do with this alternate premise, this actual reality? What if the spiritual life consisted not in obtaining more, but letting go of everything in order to have open hands for everything God has already given? What if there is nothing to achieve, but everything to yield so that we could hold the vast riches God has already placed in your heart and hands? 

But what this surrender also wasn’t enough? What if we turned our desire to surrender into just another mechanism to prove our worth? What if the only reason we surrendered was because we still hoped for the right reward?

We resist this false story by not only yielding ourselves to God’s hidden grace, but also surrendering our need to know the outcomes. With God, we gently explore the ways that our striving towards God are, in fact, the very things inhibiting us from loving union. We examine the ways we have made our relationship mechanistic, turning God into an object we move towards, rather than a being who has already moved towards us. 

In love, we surrender to God’s grace to heal us, transform us, and bring us into the beauty and goodness our hearts have always longed for. We cannot move closer to the God who has already moved close to us. But we can detach from the insecurity that obstructs our union with God. Here are three key ways. 

We detach from measurement

Jesus teaches that in this life, the good will grow with the bad. And in our eagerness to root out the bad, we might accidentally uproot the good. Without mistaking one for the other, Jesus teaches us that we are in danger of discounting all of the good because bad grows up with it. Instead of counting the heads of wheat and the dandelion blossoms, Jesus invites us to detach from measuring if we are producing enough good. Do not worry about what is growing, because God sees and knows the good and the bad. And God is gentle and tender enough to uproot the weeds at the right time, while preserving the full harvest. We detach from measuring how much we have, and whether or not what we have is good enough.

We trust God with the outcome.

We detach from comparison 

One of the ways we’ve been malformed is our need to feel better about ourselves by thinking ourselves better than others. If we are further along than others, and if we’re not the one in last place, then perhaps we’re doing okay. But of course, Christ turns this on its head by saying that those who straggle last into the kingdom will be exalted as the winners. This comparison can be obvious, but it also can be tricky; we might be doing this without even knowing it. It’s possible to think we are peering into the inner life of others to help them when, in fact, we are simply comparing. Instead, we can assure ourselves that God is doing a hidden work in my neighbor in the same way God is doing a hidden work in me. With the same measure that I trust God will quietly and patiently set me free, I trust that God can do the same for others with no need to know or control that story. We can celebrate that God’s work goes forth and we can detach from our need to know what God is doing, and whether God is efficient.

We trust God with the outcome.

We detach from meaning-making 

When we feel insecure in ourselves or in our life with God, we naturally look for meaning. We assign moral value to what feels like failure, or we try to look for what good God will bring from what we endure. But instead of looking for the good God will make, what if we turned our eyes towards the God who can make good? What if our security did not consist in the compelling story, but the one who was writing it? By detaching from the need to know the meaning, we can live faithfully and fully as fully present protagonists. We are precisely in the middle of a story, invited to live these lives fully with quiet trust that they are meaningful. They are meaningful not because we see and know everything, but because everything God does is good. Every creative act of God is full of meaning, brimming with beauties we do not yet know. 

We trust God with the outcome.