On faith, surrender, and the danger of asking God to bless my will instead of changing it.
Satan’s goal is not simply to make us do evil.
Whether through something obviously wrong or something that looks perfectly good,
the goal is the same:
to pull us away from God.
Pastor Jung-min Cho once put it this way:
“Religion tries to change God’s will. Faith allows God to change mine.”
The longer I have been a Christian, the more I realize how difficult that really is.
I can pray more.
Read Scripture more.
Spend years in church.
And still refuse to surrender the one thing that matters most:
my own will.
If all those years of faith still leave me unable to lay down my own way before God,
I cannot imagine a more tragic kind of spiritual life.
Maybe deception is much closer than we think.
Perhaps Satan does not always whisper,
Stop worshiping.
Stop praying.
Stop reading the Bible.
Maybe sometimes the whisper sounds more like this:
Pray harder.
Worship more.
Be even more devoted.
Just do not surrender your will.
And that may be why discernment is so difficult.
Sometimes the thing that looks the most righteous,
the most faithful,
even the most good—
can still be the thing furthest from the will of God.
