“Surrender is death to the self,
John Ortberg, Steps
but it is not death of the self.
God loves ourselves more than we do.
The surrender of the self brings new life,
just as when a seed is planted in the ground.
When we die to ourselves, we are not being buried.
We are being planted.”
This fall, our church is walking through the Twelve Steps.
Not as a program for “those people with a problem,”
but as a map for anyone who has ever tried
to white-knuckle their way into being okay.
I’ve been slowly trying to get acquainted with something I know very little about, reading different books about the process and why it’s been so successful for almost a century now. The first three steps are meant to go in a linear process that someone begins to not just know, but internalize and metabolize into their daily life. Whatever problem or addiction a person is trying to address it all starts with the same three things and they can be summarized like this:
I can’t.
God can.
I think I’ll let Him.
Step one is admitting you’re powerless.
Step two is believing Someone else isn’t.
Step three is the only sane response to those first two facts: surrender.
freedom.
Late last year I sat in a session at a conference where Dr. Henry Cloud said something I haven’t been able to shake. He said the people with the most freedom in the world are not the ones who finally win the fight against their weaknesses.
They’re the ones who stop fighting.
They give in.
They give up.
They come face to face with whatever it is, the addiction, the compulsion, the thing they swore they’d outgrow by now, and they unclench their grip from the insanity of control.
Picture the person who has spent years trying to white-knuckle their way to a year sober. Every relapse becomes proof they just need to try harder, want it more, build a better system. Cloud’s point is that the breakthrough doesn’t come from a better system. It comes from finally admitting the system was never going to save them.
The grip itself was the problem.
There’s a piece of my soul that resonates with this more than I’d like to admit, the desire to be unchained, not just from a habit, but from the inner voice that narrates every move I make, scoring my performance in real time. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think most of us are running some version of the same program, just with different inputs and variables…but it all looks the same.
The Serenity Prayer is something that most recovery programs and processes have adopted and it has become culturally notable.
Most of us know exactly one line of it:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
We say that line like it’s the whole prayer, and then we stop because full acceptance feels like defeat.
We weren’t raised on stories about people who accepted their limits.
We were raised on the chosen ones.
On main characters who refuse to accept the world as it is and bend it instead. Accepting what you cannot control feels, if we’re honest, un-American, a little inhuman, and nothing like every movie that taught us what a hero looks like.
Still now, even while I’m writing this it feels wrong to fully lean in to this. Grasping with the tension of a holy discontent and letting go of what I can’t control feels so foreign.
But the prayer doesn’t end there. It keeps going:
…courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Here’s what I want you to notice, because it’s the whole point of this message:
wisdom comes last.
We treat wisdom, knowing the difference, like it’s the prerequisite for everything else. Figure out what you can and can’t control, then you’ll know how to act. But that’s not the order the prayer follows.
Acceptance comes first.
Courage comes second.
Wisdom, the part we think we need before we can move at all, comes last, almost an afterthought.
Which is great news, because some of us are living through a season where we genuinely do not have the wisdom to know the difference. We confuse information with wisdom, but wisdom is not learned, it’s formed.
In fact, our access to information has outpaced our ability to discern any of it. If the prayer required wisdom up front, none of us would get past the first line.
It doesn’t.
It asks for surrender first, and trusts that courage and clarity will follow, not the other way around.
Most people don’t realize there’s more to this prayer. The fuller version recovery communities have carried for decades doesn’t stop at wisdom, either:
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will,
that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.
I think that’s where the prayer was always headed.
Not toward resignation.
Toward joy, the kind that doesn’t depend on the world finally cooperating with you.
surrender doesn’t feel safe.
Part of why this is so hard is that most of us didn’t learn to grip out of strength. We learned it out of fear. Henri Nouwen wrote about the difference between our “false self”, the one we build out of achievement, approval, and being needed, and the self God already loves before we’ve performed anything at all. The false self can’t surrender, because surrender feels like death to the only identity it knows how to maintain. Of course we grip. We’ve been told, by everyone except God, that letting go means disappearing.
And surrender isn’t a decision you make once and move on from. Recovery might be the most honest picture of what that actually looks like. No dramatic finish line. No single moment where you’re finished surrendering. Just the same decision, made again tomorrow, and the day after that.
the seed has to disappear first.
Jesus put it more plainly than any of us could: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it produces much fruit (John 12:24). He said it again a different way, whoever loses their life will find it (Matthew 16:25), and again when He told us to take up our cross daily, not once (Luke 9:23). This isn’t a one-off metaphor. It’s the shape of the whole Gospel, repeated until we believe it.
To die is to live.
To lose is to gain.
To give is to receive.
It’s the only logic the Kingdom runs on.
So when Ortberg says the seed isn’t buried, it’s planted, he’s not offering comfort, similar to how Jesus is unconcerned with your comfort, safety or happiness.
He’s describing biology. The seed has to fully disappear before anything else can happen. It has to stop being a seed before it can become anything else. The fruit that eventually grows isn’t something the seed produces through effort. It’s something that happens to the seed, after it’s given up trying to remain a seed at all.
I cannot make fruit grow.
God can.
I think I’ll let Him.
We assume the path to peace runs through knowledge:
gather enough information,
get enough clarity,
and courage will follow,
and peace will arrive as the reward at the end.
That’s the order we’d build if we were in charge.
God has never worked that way. He asks for surrender first, not because He wants us blind, but because He knows we’ll never gather enough knowledge to feel safe enough to let go. So He flips it.
Peace comes first.
Courage grows out of peace, not the other way around.
And the wisdom we thought we needed before we could move?
It shows up after we’ve already started walking.
I don’t know why I’m always a bit shocked coming to grips with any of this.
He’s always worked this way.
And it doesn’t look like He’s planning to stop anytime soon.