It has been way too long since my last post and for those of you who follow me semi regularly I am sorry. I have been busy doing a whole lot of nothing since I have been home for Christmas break. I have had plenty of good ideas for posts but in the moment haven’t felt as strongly as I do about this one coming up. Like always I will give you a little bit of background to where this post is actually coming from. I just got back from hanging out with my friend at work. He works the night shift at a hotel so we watch tv shows and movies for most of the night until its time for me to go home to bed. Tonight when I got home I lie down in my bed and prayed. Right now in my life I have lots going on mainly inside my head so the average person would not even know it. Pretty much decisions. Many, many decisions I need to make and as I prayed tonight I asked God to take care of them for me. As I was praying a song popped into my head. “take my life and let it be, all for You and for Your glory. Take my life and let it be Yours.” The song actually became my prayer. As I literally sang to God my prayer in bed I began thinking about the song. Have we ever really thought about the words to this song? I know you are probably sitting there thinking, “well duhhh, its pretty self explanatory!” Oh is it? Many of the times I have sang this song has been at a camp towards the end of the worship section of the service and the song has been carefully placed to get the most affect. We have all sang the song at the top of our lungs, eyes closed, arms held high, possibly even tearing up a bit because of the magnitude of the words we are singing. As I think about all of the times I have sang those words I thought, “why have I always had to come back and make this my prayer over and over again?” Making this a daily prayer can never be a bad thing, if we truly mean it. This post is my break down of this simple yet powerful chorus.
Lets start with the first word, take. Do we actually know what take means? If not, I Googled it for you. Many definitions came up for the word take. The first definition is to carry out, as in take action. Since the pronoun in the chorus is capitalized, we can assume God will be doing the taking. Another definition is lead. God will be doing the leading. “To get into ones hands” is the next definition. God will be putting us in His hands. In the sense the word “take” is used here is the same as to “take a cookie.” If you take a cookie you are taking the cookie from where it was to wherever you are now. Incase this doesn’t make sense yet please stay with me.
The next words in the chorus are “my life.” Unlike “take” this can only mean one thing. Your life is your life. Not your parents, neighbor, friends, relatives, teacher, etc. you are the one who is in control of your life. No one else controls it (not saying that you shouldn’t respect/obey your parents, elders and so on). Lets put “take” and “my life” together. Take my life = carry out my life, lead my life, pick up my life. Just in this first part of the chorus you are already telling God to do something very, very big. To TAKE YOUR LIFE. Taking of lives can mean many different things and for most people it usually just means to kill/end a life. If you think about it like I do, it actually makes more sense than any other way I could explain it. “God take my life, end the life I have now” is what you are saying so far. Hope you are still with me because it will become clearer very soon.
“And let it be” is the next part of this chorus. I don’t want to insult your intelligence but just to be clear we are going to go over what each of these words mean. “let” means to allow something to happen. “it” is referring to YOUR life. “be” is one of those words you know what it meand but you probably couild not give a straight definition for if you had to so I googled it as well. “Be”, by definition, means: to have the quality of being, to be identical to. Can I say WOW!?! Lets put all of this together. “and let it be”- allow my life to have the quality of being…/allow my life to be identical to.... . if we put everything we have learned together we get. God put my life in your hand, allow it to be…/God carry out my life so it can be identical to… . Still following?
Next we come to “all for You and for Your glory.” Do we all know what “all” means? Google says “all” means: completely given to or absorbed by. So completely given to or absorbed by what? That brings us around to the “for You and for Your glory” part. Completely given to or absorbed by God, for His glory; not our glory but His. What does glory mean? My trusty google says glory means: a state of high honor. So: completely given to God for Him and for His high honor. Lets put it all together yet again. God allow MY life to be for YOU. Let My life bring YOU glory. Take my life and let it be Yours.
For many of you scholars out there this has probably been the most redundant thing you have ever read. You are thinking, “ yes, yes I knew exactly what that meant, I didn’t need to waste my time reading this!” Well I am not quite done. In order for God to take our lives we have to surrender it to Him. In other words, in order for him to pick us up like a cookie and take us somewhere else we have to let him end the one we are living in right now. This is a chorus of salvation that we as Christians or non Christians can sing to Him anytime we feel we are not in the right place. To live our lives we have got to lose the one we are living in now. We can sing this chorus everyday for the rest of our lives but until we truly mean it we won’t get anywhere. We have to lose/end our life-it has to be taken from us (by God), we have to allow God to have His way with our lives so that we can actually live for His glory and to bring great honor to His name. So many times we have stood in a crowded worship room, hands held high, tears running down our faces, screaming at the top of our lungs for God to come take our lives and let them be His.
For so long I sang this song. I always wanted Him to take control of my life and to make my life about Him and less about me. Until tonight I didn’t put 2 and 2 together; that I had to actually tell Him to take it but I also had to ALLOW Him to take it. He can do it alone, but He is not going to. We have to put forth the effort to change our lives and to make Him first before he will give us a hand with it. Think of it like this. Your teacher at school isn’t just going to give you the answer to that hard math problem before you try to figure it out. The only difference is that we have God to help us. And if we try hard enough he is going to help us through to where He wants us to be in our lives. We have to remember one thing: as we sing this prayer it will mean that He can and will take our life, it will no longer be our life but His, and it will be about His glory and not our own. Once we understand this we can finally allow Him to have our lives and actually surrender to His will for our lives. It is such a deep thing when you think about it that when we mean it we are actually telling God that we have full confidence in Him to take our lives and to mold them into what He wants and that whatever we want does not matter.
Like always I hope I didn’t lose anyone along the way and if I did drop me a line on here or facebook or wherever and we can discuss this further. I also hope I was not too redundant because a certain someone told me I repeat myself a lot in these, so if I did I apologize. Until next time, God bless you
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