(You can read my message notes from that passage in this post entitled The God Who Has Proven Worthy of Full, Total, All-In Commitment.)
I think we would be better off if we shifted from seeing full commitment to God as being highly active to being fully yielded.
By yielded I mean open. Accessible. Available. Transparent. Willing. Listening.
We often tell people that Christianity isn’t about having the right religion but rather about having a relationship with God. How many of your relationships are defined by a list of activities you’ve committed to complete? Checking all the boxes won’t necessarily make your relationship stronger. Relationships are matters of the heart.
Do fully committed followers of Jesus go to church a lot, give a lot of money, volunteer, pray a lot, etc? Often, yes, but the activity itself isn’t the relationship. The activity is merely the conduit, opening the capacity for God to show himself to us and lead us closer to his heart.
Fully committed disciples discover, more and more each day, what it is to be spiritually free. To walk in the unforced rhythms of grace and loosen their attachments to anything that prevents them from a richer experience of God’s presence.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to do less of any particular spiritual discipline unless the discipline has come to be seen as an end in itself rather than the means through which we experience a greater depth of God’s grace and love.
In other words, rather than saying that the way to get closer to God is to pray, go to church, etc., we should instead say that the way to be closer to God is to be more fully open to him, which often happens when we’re praying, attending church, etc.
There is much more to unpack and nothing I’m saying hasn’t been written about in a thousand volumes by trustworthy teachers, but sometimes I need the reminder that God is HERE for an ever-deepening relationship with each and every one of us.
If you want to read further about being fully committed, I’d highly recommend these books:
- Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God
- Skey Jethani’s With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God
- Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
This article on being fully committed to God originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
