Maybe It’s Time to Give Up

By Rick Warren — 09/10/2021

“The battle is not yours, but God’s.”

2 Chronicles 20:15 (NLT)

Imagine you’re sitting on a plane that’s about to take off. As the plane goes down the runway, you start flapping your arms. As the speed picks up and the nose lifts in the air, you flap your arms faster and faster. Once in the air, the flight attendant approaches you and says, “What are you doing?”

And you say, “Oh, I’m helping us get off the ground.”

That’s ridiculous, right? But that’s basically what you do when you try to do things only God is equipped to do. Just like you don’t need to hold up a plane, you don’t need to hold up God.

Do you want to know why you’re tired all the time? Why you’re frustrated? Why you’re worn out by life? The reason you’re so tired is you’re trying to fight battles that belong to God, and you are not God.

“The battle is not yours, but God’s” (2 Chronicles 20:15 NLT).

People tend toward independence, and so when you see a problem, you think, “I’ve got to figure this out. It’s up to me!” You assume God’s role, and it wears you out, because you were never meant to carry it in the first place.

You’ve been running in circles trying to solve problems in your marriage, your body, the economy, your school, the world. You’re trying to solve them on your own power. You’re trying to fight the battle on your own, and you’re getting tired.

When you finally just give up and come back to God and tell him you’ve made a mess of it, you may think you’ve let him down.

But you haven’t let God down, because you were never holding him up. You don’t have God in your hands; he’s got you in his hands. If you’ve got God in your hands, it’s not God. It’s an idol. If you’re trusting in something that you think you can control, then that thing is not God.

God is not disappointed in you, because he’s not expecting you to do what only he can do. You don’t hold God up. He holds you up.

Let go and surrender to God. Because then he says, “Great! Now we can get something done.”

PLAY today’s audio teaching from Pastor Rick >>

Talk It Over

• What is the thing you’ve been trying to hold up in your life on your own for too long?
• Why does God want you to surrender before he will act? What does he want you to understand about him and yourself?
• How does it affect you when you know God is not disappointed in you when you can’t handle an impossible task?