Letting Go and Letting God

Letting go seems somewhat of a cliche coming from me since I have always been urging and motivating people to let go of the burdens that hold them back from experiencing the totality of a full and meaningful life.

I even wrote an article about it three years ago and if you search the archive, you would still find it there.

But what I failed to emphasize in that post was the part about surrendering whatever heaviness or burdensome thought or struggle that worries you to God.

You may have heard this phrase before already, I certainly have it ringing in my ears every time worry or anxiety starts to creep in but many of us crumble under pressure, as I certainly have before, and we lose focus on God and we start concentrating on how to solve our problems and worse, we torture ourselves for being incapable to address them and solve them completely.

In the end, as a last resort, we cry out to God in prayer and desperately ask Him to help us and bring us out of the pit hole that we got ourselves into. After getting out of the mess, we start again to be complacent and neglect the fact that we need God and we need to constantly depend on Him and we stray from the right path yet again.

It goes on and on like an unbroken cycle of stumbling and failing and bailing out by God until such point that you become restless about it and ask yourself why this keeps happening in my life. It does not have to be this way and know that God has much better plans for us but it requires much humility from us.

From the beginning when the problem is still quite small, ask God already to help you and do not make the mistake of thinking that you have the power to do this on your own because at the moment that you let pride sink in your mind, that is when everything will start to fall apart and you will get entangled by oodles of problems that you feel like you are trapped in quicksand.

There is nothing wrong in believing that nothing is impossible but you have to know whom to believe in and whom you can put your trust on.

That is where the Bible comes in and speaks truth to us and reveals to us that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, can be trusted and that by believing in Him and submitting to Him all our cares and worries that all things will be possible no matter how seemingly immovable our mountains may be.

So what does the Bible tell us regarding our letting go of our worries and letting God fight our battles for us?

1 Peter 5:7 tells us that we should:

"Cast all your cares upon the Lord because He cares for you."

What a relieving statement! To know that the Creator of the heavens and the earth and everything that dwells in it cares for us, who are really nothing but specks of dust in the vastness of this universe, isn't that a wonderful thing to take hold of?

God, who in His abounding and unconditional love for us, tells us to lift up to Him all our anxieties, everything that makes us feel restless and fearful, and He will take care of it because He has genuine compassion even in the most simple battles that we face in life, those things that we think God would not have a part of but He actually cares and He does want to fight all our battles for us.

Proverbs 3:5-6 encourages us to:

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight."

Another revitalizing passage of Scripture and it speaks the truth. Being a student, we always squirm and feel that nervous anxiety in our stomachs like butterflies when taking exams, most especially those subjects which we clearly have no aptitude for.

I can apply these verses to those situations because we may think from the very beginning that we have no chance of acing any test but that way of thinking already belittles the potential that God can unleash in our lives and how much He can help us win in every battle whether it be spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, or social.

Of course, I would not expect to get a high score on an exam in which I did not study for but if you prepared well enough and did all you can do to try and perfect that exam then the rest you can lift up to God and ask Him to give you guidance, strength and endurance, peace of mind, and wisdom and understanding.

As you take the test, always stay humble even if the questions may seem easy for you. There have been many times in my life when I knew the answers but because I was too puffed up, my mind suddenly went blank and I ended up making mistakes on those that I knew fully well.

2 Chronicles 20:15 relays to us a really important message as well:

"He said: 'Listen, King Jehoshaphat and all who live in Judah and Jerusalem! This is what the Lord says to you: 'Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God's.''"

"The battle is mine," says the Lord. What a comforting reminder and words of encouragement coming from God. Romans 8:31 tells us further that if God is on our side, then we have no one and nothing to fear for the One who is greater than all fights for us.

Jesus, who has overcome the world, has told us to take heart and to not let the troubles of this world weaken our faith or force us to compromise because He too went through those persecutions and temptations.

But He never succumbed to them and He overcame them by the power of the Holy Spirit and because of His devotion to God the Father and doing the Father's will above His own.

Moreover, 1 John 4:18 reminds us that there is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear. So, we have nothing to be afraid of because when we have God on our side, nothing can hurt us or snatch us away from His hand.

So you may be wondering what worries or problems you can entrust God with? Well, the Bible makes it pretty clear that you can cast all your cares. You can always pray to God and ask Him for help in everything whether big or small, He will be willing to help you with anything.

The answers that you might get from God may not always be what you expect but that is where trust and faith comes along because you just have to know that what God knows your needs and He can satisfy those needs.

He knows what is the best course of action that you must take and simply obey Him wholeheartedly and without any objection or grumbling. Do not try to reason with God because He simply knows more than we do, in fact, He knows all things so we just have to trust Him.

Hopefully, this article has been able to help you to understand more about why we should let go of our problems and let God handle them for us. God Bless!