Struggling to surrender and trust God? Maybe you are like Abraham.

Hi. I see a lot of videos that talk about surrendering to God. Surrendering takes great faith. When I think about someone in the Bible with great faith, the first person I think of is Abraham. He is referred to from Christians as the Father of Faith, and you can find him in what we like to call the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews chapter 11. But what if I told you that Abraham was human? That he struggled just like you and me? Today, I want to share his story with you, maybe from a perspective you've never heard before. Before we jump in, I want to let you know that if you are struggling with your faith, I have a free reference that I'd like to share with you. God has given me a love for his children, and I want to walk with you through your trials. So the link to that is on my website. It's totally free for you. The link to that is in the description. So what is surrender? I looked up the definition, and it means to stop resisting and submit to someone else's authority. Can you think about a time when you have completely trusted God? Sometimes we submit out of fear, but sometimes we submit out of trust. I would love to hear if there's a time that you submitted to God in the comments. Let me know. I'd love to hear about that. I know, personally, I used to struggle a lot, especially when I was a new believer. I can remember a time when things seemed to be falling apart. My family was in the middle of an adoption that just had delay after delay after delay, and we didn't know if we'd be bringing our children home. My kids were struggling in school, a couple of them. We were in the process of trying to move, but the adoption had delayed our move. You know, I was stressed, so then I was eating, and then I was gaining weight. You know how it is. I'm trying to stay strong for my whole family, but I was frustrated every day. And one day, I just broke down, and I was weeping, and that is not me. If you know me at all, I am a Martha, okay? I have a book on Are You a Mary or a Martha, and I am definitely a Martha. Now, if you read my book, you'll discover that God loves both of them. But in the meantime, this was so unlike me to just be crying and crying, and I knew that I needed to give it to God, but it's so hard to do because I wanted to figure things out. But I one day just said, God, I can't do this anymore, and I need you to take over. And I just prayed and wept, and I'm telling you, I woke up the next day feeling completely different. Sometimes surrender can mean laying on the floor weeping, but if you're a Martha like me, it doesn't always mean that. There are other ways that I surrender to God, okay? But basically, what it means is trust God. Trust that His plan is bigger and better than ours and say,

I'm giving you my problem, God. I'm giving you my struggles. Ultimately, surrender cannot come without faith. We think that we can do everything ourselves. At least I do. If you're like me, I'd love to know if you're a Mary or Martha, if you're like me. But deep down, I wonder if sometimes the reason we don't surrender to God is because we actually think that our way is better or that our timing is better. It's kind of a lack of belief. It's almost like saying, I know that you're good and wonderful and powerful and that you love us and that you have a plan and that you're going to fulfill that plan. At least that's what you said, but I need to be a part of this. I have to be in this mix. I have to be a part of figuring out how I'm going to get through this. This might be a tough pill to swallow, but I think our inability to surrender is truly lack of faith. Now, this is where we get to Abraham. I want to encourage you. This is an encouraging video, okay? Abraham was faithful, like so faithful, but it took time and a process and it was a journey to get there. He needed to surrender his life to God's plan, but he struggled with that. Now, his story can be in Genesis chapters 11 through 25. Obviously, I'm not going to read that entire thing to you today, but if you get nothing else out of this video, I encourage you to read this story, okay? Read it over the next few days and see how God speaks to you. A little bit of background. Abraham lived in Ur of the Chaldeans, which is modern day Iraq, okay? He lived about 2,000 years after Adam and Eve and about 2,000 years before Christ. His name when this story begins was Abram, okay? It was later changed to Abraham, which is what we tend to call him. When he was first mentioned, he was 75 years old. He was married to a woman named Sarai, who was 66 years old and barren, meaning she could not have children. God came to Abram and gave him seven great promises that he would bless him, that he would make his name great, that he would make him... a great nation through his offspring. Okay, but he's 75, his wife is 66, they have no children. All right, so God told him to leave his land, leave his people, leave his father's household, and go where he tells him to go. Well, he did leave, but he took his nephew Lot with him, and he took his father, Terah. He trusted God enough to leave, but he could not trust God fully and completely to surrender. Okay, so that's the first time that he failed to completely trust the Lord. Well, God spoke to him again, and God reminded him of his promise, but here's what happened. A famine came, okay, and Abram got scared, and he went into Egypt to find food, but he took his wife, and his wife was very beautiful, and he was sure that

Pharaoh was going to want to take his wife home to be her own. So he said to his wife, just lie and say that you're my sister, which was actually only a half lie because she was his half-sister. Okay, but again, this is a time when he couldn't completely trust God. Thankfully, the Pharaoh of Egypt figured out who Sarai was and gave her back to Abram after trying to take her home to be his wife. So God goes to Abraham and once again reminds him of his promises. Well, the promises weren't coming quickly enough for Abraham. Okay, do you know what this feels like? Abraham started complaining. He basically told God, I don't believe that you're going to give me a child. Okay, have you ever doubted God's timing? I tell you what, I doubt it all the time, and it's wrong, but I understand where Abram is coming from, right, and so God came down and spoke to Abram again. He actually physically sealed a covenant with him. This wasn't for God to remind him of his covenant. This was for Abram to give him a physical sign of his promise. Despite that, Abram still didn't think it was happening fast enough, and him and Sarai came up with a plan, and the plan was to have a child through another woman. Okay, and this is where Ishmael was born, but I don't know about you. There's no chance that I'm sharing my husband with another woman, and Sarai thought that she could do this, but once it happened, it was just an emotional mess. Okay, so God comes again, and he says, Abram, I have a plan and a purpose, and it's good. Trust me, but now Abram and Sarai are 90 and 99 years old, and Abram said, I just can't believe this. Okay, this is my version. This is Katie's version. I'm obviously not reading this word for word. Look up word for word what he said, but God said, I'm going to change your name, and he changed his name to Abraham, which means father of a multitude, and Sarah became Sarai's name, which means mother of nations. Can you imagine? You have no children. You're almost 100 years old, and God changes your names to basically mean tons of children. Well, names today don't mean that much, but back then, every name meant something special, and everyone knew what it meant, and every time that they had to introduce themselves, they had to say their new names, and it might have been embarrassing, but they were speaking power over their situation. They were telling the world what God's blessing was going to give them. They were speaking something out as though it were. God wants us to be that faithful. He wants us to speak our blessings out loud before they come to be. He is trying to get them to surrender and accept the plan, but they're struggling because they weren't seeing the evidence of God's power. How often do we think we need to see the evidence of God's power before we can believe,

but God says, believe first, and then you will see. But Abram, Abraham, and Sarah still aren't sure, so God and two angels now come down to talk to him again, and they hear the plan, and Sarah, his wife, starts laughing. She's literally laughing at God. She says she's too old. Well, I don't know if you make excuses, but God doesn't need our excuses. God doesn't care if you're too old, too poor, too inexperienced, have made too many bad choices. God chose you. He knew what He was doing, and He doesn't need your excuses. He needs your trust. So God now gives them a date of when His promises will come to pass. At this point, God has spoken to them nine times personally, out loud spoken to them. You'd think by now they have to fully surrender, right? They have to be completely faithful, but instead, they move, and again, there's a famine, and there's a king, and the king sees Sarah, and she thinks she's beautiful, and she says to Abraham, who is this woman, and what do you think Abraham said? He said, my sister. So again, he thinks that he needs to figure this out for himself and lie to the king, okay? But God was faithful even when Abraham couldn't be, and when the date came that God promised... Abraham a son. Abraham and Sarah had their son. Okay, at some point over the next 5 to 12 years, we don't know the exact number of years, at some point during this time, Abraham figured it out. Okay, Abraham surrendered his life fully to the Lord, and we see that because of the next story that we read, the story that's the most famous story. When Abraham is sent to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his one and only son Isaac, the son that he had waited so many years for, the son that God promised him, the son that he had such a hard time believing for, God said, go and sacrifice him. And Abraham said, yes. Okay, he knew that God had been faithful. He knew that God had been good, and he had repeatedly showed him that. And he said, okay, I'm not going to question or doubt you anymore. I know you gave me this son, but I trust that you have a plan. And do you know what God said? That's all that I needed. God gave him a replacement sacrifice. God didn't need Abraham to sacrifice his son. God wanted Abraham to surrender to his plan, and he did it, and he figured it out. But you see, it was not quick, and it was not easy. I don't know if you know that Abraham failed this many times, okay, but I want you to see through this story that if you are struggling to surrender, you are not alone. Okay, God is calling you to trust him, and he showed us that. He has a wonderful plan for you, just like he had for Abraham and Sarah. And I also want you to see that God is good and faithful. He will wait for you to finally get to the point of release. He will come back as many times as it takes. But Abraham went through many, many years of trauma

because it took him so long to figure this out. Okay, so I'm telling you today, today, say, God, I surrender to you. Maybe you've gone through trauma in the past, but you don't need any more coming. So today, say, God, I will surrender it all to you. Okay, if you fail, he's going to keep coming back, and he's going to keep reminding you, but it's going to be tough. It's like a GPS that's trying to get you where you need to go, okay, and you may take a wrong path, and God's going to keep directing you like that GPS, keep directing you to get back on path. He's going to keep coming back. He's not going to give up, but if you don't surrender, now the road may get bumpy, and it may take you a lot longer to get where you need to get, okay. But I want you to say with me, God, I am going to rest in the knowledge that you love me and that you know what's best for me, that you are protecting me, and that you have a plan. And I believe that one day, one day, your name just might be found in heaven's new hall of fame, okay. You just one day might be called the most faithful. I believe that when you get to heaven, that God's going to look at you and say, my child, you were so faithful. You were so faithful because what you did in your past doesn't matter. How you previously responded doesn't matter. It didn't matter for Abraham, and it doesn't matter for you. It starts right now. How awesome is that? I pray that God spoke to you boldly through this message today. If he did, let me know in the comments. Let me know if you learned something new. Tell me if you're going to go read this entire story. Again, it's Genesis chapter 11 through 25. It is such a great story. And if nothing else, I want to inspire you to read this Bible and see how God speaks to you through Abraham's story. But all we hear is how faithful he was, and I'm telling you it was a journey. And you may have failed in the past, but you have an opportunity now because the Bible tells us that God remembers our sins no more. He chose not to think about Abraham's failures, and he chose to focus on his faith, and he wants to do the same for you. So I pray this touched you today, and that you go out there and let your light shine. God bless.