Prodigal Magazine

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One nugget of Christian rhetoric I have always had the toughest time understanding is “giving everything to God.”  What was so frustrating about this is that “giving everything to God” sounds like the right thing to do, and here I don’t even know the implications of the statement!  My visceral response is to pack up all my belongings and give them to the church.  Or perhaps to quit my job and say I had given it to God.  The Peace Corps seems to fit the bill for that too, I should enlist (or whatever it is they call it).

No.  That isn’t all there is to it.  Luckily, Jesus shed some light on what it is to “give everything to God.”  In the gospel of Luke, Jesus shared his perspective on giving God complete ownership of one’s self:

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come,

Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation,

nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is

within you” (Luke 17:20-21).

In Greek, the word Jesus used for ‘kingdom’ was ‘basilea,’ which is better directly translated into ‘kingship.’  I am not one for selecting diction across the bibles deriving spectrum of languages, but I think that there is something to be said about God’s ‘kingship.’  When we hold the phrase “giving everything to God” up to the light of what Jesus said we find that Jesus defined the above virtue as “giving God leadership of our kingdom.”  Since Jesus established that no physical place on earth would ever truly be under God’s kingship, He must be saying that God has different real estate in mind, and it’s within us.

Jesus was saying God should have reign over our spiritual identities; that we should give God the very fibers of our inner-person.  Our “everything” is just that, the very core of us to which all things that are exclusive to us burst forth.  God wants to be located at the epicenter of that which is our “kingdom.”

Tragically enough, how many of us have completely disregarded the wellbeing of our kingdom (our core selves) in the name of unselfishness?  Some people live their lives almost on-call to others in such a way that they omit the possibility of needing to be served at that point in life.  Some people stay involved in unhealthy relationships (romantic and otherwise) out of some sense of “extending grace” when all their doing is hyper-extending their compassion.  Ultimately, they lose more then they could’ve given in the first place.  While the process of learning to say “yes” and “more” takes considerable practice, the gift of “no” requires more temperance and spiritual-awareness.  A fear of saying “no” seems to communicate our own lack of trust that God’s work is independent of our own.  It’s as if we fear that if we don’t shoulder a certain workload, God won’t shoulder His.  However, God’s best work is done in the spirits of His followers even though His followers regularly disregard their spiritual identity.

The problem here isn’t the fear of most believers to give God their spiritual identity; the problem is that most believers are giving God a faulty one.  To fully articulate this I must shoot the fear of sounding cynical to the wind and say that if I stripped the most spiritual people I know of their lofty ideas and disciplines (the things that make them look spiritual), they would have no idea who they are and how they would go about finding that out.  They have no problem giving God their kingdom; they actually prefer it because doing so leaves no responsibility for them to even set foot within it’s walls.  Essentially, if they left God in control of their inner person, they never have to do the ‘work’ necessary to understand it.

This is a cop-out, and this isn’t what God wants.

Naturally, God isn’t interested in the polar opposite as well, where we take full ownership of our spiritual development and wait for it to be complete before we allow God to move in.  That simply will never happen.  As almost everything in life points to balance, so does the grotesquely misunderstood act of “giving everything to God.”

Say we did have this balance where we allow God to be the pivot in the spiritual understanding of our Self, while at the same time never shying away from seeking to understand who we are.  This may seem like a very simple middle ground and that this article is stating the blatantly obvious.  However, if we all truly understood this balance then why do we assume responsibility for other people’s relationships?  As men, we think we ‘know’ when relationships are ‘broken’ and mandate repair to which only we can provide.  If we understand this balance, why do we always catch ourselves saying ‘yes’ to too much?  Better too busy than too lazy right?  Wrong.  We don’t want to stop moving.  We hate to be still, and know that He is God.  We want to ‘fix’ things in our world so we don’t have to deal with them being broken.  We are scared children running around trying to make things fit into our single-dimensioned understanding of ‘right.’  We would rather be the caulk that holds the world together than accept things as they are and trust that God’s work will be completed in time.

If we don’t respond to structural flaws of the kingdoms we give to God, these issues will never be dealt with.  And how can we hear what God is trying to tell us when we won’t shut up?  “Quiet time” is what most Christians call it, but I call it “Ben time.”  Basically, I would sit down and calm their mind for a period of time. By setting aside this time to spend in my own skin, God always shows me something involving my spirit.  I bring my journal, and work through things with God that way. Sometimes I do something I love, but do it alone.  Naturally, this isn’t a formula for spiritual success; it’s just more of a suggestion.  Ultimately, one must pursue a deeper understanding of the spirit God works in, and everyone will do this differently.  The ultimate pursuit is the ability to take scenic walks through the kingdoms God gave to us, which we give Him the reins to.