Music.
Lasting life change for your good and for God's glory this week we're gonna be diving into not so much of a topic as much as a.
Specific prayer There are you know a number of prayers that people might be familiar with probably the most familiar prayer in the entire world is
Lord's prayer, you know our Father who art in heaven heaven, hallowed be thy name." That's probably like the most well-known prayer
in existence. It's the prayer that ends up in movies and everybody seems to have
at least heard once or twice in their life. There's a couple other prayers that,
rank near that one in as far as popularity and being known by heart. One of those maybe is the Jesus prayer. It's a little bit less known, but that prayer
simply, you know, Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner, very short prayer.
And then I would probably put somewhere up in the top three, maybe number two
would be the serenity prayer, prayer that many people know, uh, and has been made
popular through the programs like AA, um, Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery
circles often use this prayer.
Not always, sometimes it's kind of generalized a little bit to speak about God generally.
Obviously, I'm talking about this specifically with Christian God, with Jesus in mind.
It's well known by a lot of people in those circles, and so you may have heard of it from there.
A lot of times the prayer is kind of said in a shortened version.
The first part of the prayer is the most well-known part of the prayer,
but there's actually longer versions of it. The prayer was originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr.
He was a theologian and pastor, and he wrote this prayer, and it's since then
been adopted by anonymous programs and 12-step programs across the world.
So I thought this prayer is well-known for a good reason, because it's got a lot
of really helpful principles, and it's got some really deep theological and
spiritual truths that can really help shift us and orient us in our direction
of recovery of seeking life change.
So I thought today we would spend some time kind of just breaking this prayer apart.
So I'll open our time together with just reading this prayer aloud so that you
can hear the whole thing in its entirety. Maybe you've only heard the first part of it, but, uh, I'm sure that you've
probably maybe heard this once or twice before, but let's.
Dig into it.
So the serenity prayer goes like this. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
and the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as
it is, not as I would have it, trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender
to Your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with
You forever in the next. Amen.
Now the short version of that that most people know is that first four lines there, God grant
me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things
that I can and the wisdom to know difference.
But that other part of the prayer goes on into just such deep territory and reflection
on Christ's character and all of that.
So let's unpack this prayer together. see why it has stood the test of time, why it has become so well known, and what truths
we can glean from it.
So let's start with just those first four lines right there.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the
things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Man, that is a big deal, right? So often, we get stuck because we're stuck wishing we had control or the ability to change
things we simply cannot change.
And then we ignore the things that we can probably change, we just maybe don't want to.
That is a big deal. It seems like we're called in two seemingly opposite directions at once.
A direction of action and then also a direction of surrender.
God is inviting us to know our limits. God, we are not God, in case you're not aware of that fact.
I'm not God, you're not God. We are not supreme. We do not control all things.
We are not responsible for all things.
But sometimes we wish we were God. We wish we could control everything.
We wish we were responsible for everything. We wish we could just kind of micromanage everything.
Or we treat ourselves like we ought to be. And that's, that's not a way to be living.
To understand that we are not gods and that we cannot control everything.
We're invited to say, you know what, that's outside of my control.
That is such a simple thing, but it's so hard to do, but it's also equally hard to say, you know what, this is inside of my control and I can take action on that.
We're invited to take what's been given to us inside of our control and to be
good stewards of it, to say, what is God calling me to do right now with the,
thing I can control, even though there's things that I cannot control.
This should ultimately be a relief for us. This should be a calming and a letting go of something.
We might be tempted to think that we can control everything around us, but we simply can't.
Can't. We aren't supposed to. And when we offload the weight of trying to control
everything or everyone, we can more appropriately tackle what God has asked
us to do. That's big. How many times have we gotten into a situation where we're
just like, I'm so mad at this situation over what's happening. I wish I could
just fix it. You can't fix it because somebody else is involved, right? This is
This happens in family dynamics all the time, right?
Maybe we've got a family member who is just consistently making decisions that are making our life harder.
And we're just like, I'm trying to control what that person does.
If only they would listen to me or do what I said, then it would be better. Right. and.
You know, maybe that's true. Maybe if they did listen to you, it would be better, but they're,
not. And they're a person. They're an individual. You actually can't control what they do. Only you
can control what you do. You can control how you respond. You can set up a boundary saying like,
hey, like if you behave this way, like this is how I'm going to respond in kind, right? Like not,
I'm not trying to be mean, like that's just me trying to take care of myself.
So we often get stuck because we begin to wish or want or try and control things that we simply
cannot control. That's so often when we get into a place where we're just running a situation over
and over in our heads, it's often because we're like, I want to find a way to fix it.
And we keep running it over in our heads and we're not figuring out a way to fix it is because ultimately we can't fix it,
It's not inside of our control. We see this,
Exemplified to us in Job. Job is a phenomenal book of the Bible. It's also Immensely dense. It's really long. It's like 43 chapters, but it's a book that is so often
misunderstood, misquoted, and not really held up for what it says because so
How often we get into a place of saying...
Of trying to figure out why something happened, which is a really normal thing that to happen, right?
If you're walking in a dark room at night and you stub your toe, you're gonna scream, ow, out in pain.
And then the second thing after you're done, like yelling out in pain,
maybe saying an explicative or two, you're going to want to say,
what was it that I hit my toe on? What was it that I hit, ran into?
I wanna figure out if it's a toy, if it's a coffee table, what was it I ran into?
And the reason you wanna know what it was, why did that happen is because you wanna avoid it
from happening again. We don't wanna encounter that pain again.
And so, so often and so much discussion over the bad things that happen in our life,
are stuck answering this, trying to answer the question of why did this happen to me?
And there's a ton of biblical reflection and people have a lot of answers
to why bad things might happen to you, but Job is probably the most comprehensive reflection
on it in the entire Bible, but it gives an answer that we're not very fond of.
It gives an answer that we're not God, we don't necessarily get to know why.
And this is kind of exemplified, Job kind of wrestles, and he's having these conversations
with his, with supposedly friends who keep saying, well, maybe God did this to you, or maybe this is
happening to you because you didn't have enough faith or because you weren't faithful enough or
because you've sinned or because someone in your family sinned or something like that. Try, they're
trying to give him all these reasons and Job just is like, no, none of that's it. Like, and then he
gets mad and he calls God and he says, God, you've got to give me an answer as to why this happened.
And then God shows up in dramatic fashion and then when Job sees who God is.
He realizes that, Oh, actually I'm not God. I don't need the answer because God's got the
answer and I'm just going to trust him. And this is Job's response here in Job 42,
Job 42, verses one through three, Job replied to the Lord and said, I know that you can do
all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, who is it that obscures my plans
without knowledge. Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to
know." Job says, like, God comes out and says, who is it that's asking me this question? Who's.
Demanding I give them an answer? Who's wants me to explain to them all of the things that I know?
And Job's like, oh, that was me, God. I spoke without thinking. I spoke of things I did not
understand of things too wonderful for me to know. He's saying like, God, you know
what? You're right. Like, you are God. I am NOT. I'm not in control of everything and
I don't necessarily... I'm not owed an answer. I'm here to kind of trust God and
submit to him. And that is a radical mind shift. That's so different from the way
that we operate and live in our world. We want answers. We want explanations. We We want the details.
We want the case file. We want everything.
We want to know all the nitty gritty and we want it now, right?
And we think we're owed it. But Job says, no, no, no, I'm not God. I'm just a man.
God created me. God is over all things. I'm going to leave it in God's hands.
And that's a place of surrender.
And it's a place where Job finally begins to experience some peace in the midst of his
Yes, awful things happen to Job, and he's absolutely
torn up about those things, but he's no longer running around demanding an explanation, or demanding that things
that are outside of his control be given to him, or that he be able to fix things, right?
So much of our own suffering and pain and being stuck, particularly when we get stuck in suffering,
when something awful has happened to us, to us or we're in a bad situation and we get stuck,
we're just running it over and over in our heads,
it's because we wanna control something, we wanna change something, we wanna figure it out,
when actually we need to kind of let it go.
We're not going to be able to control it or figure it out or have the answer as to why.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't things for us to do, because that's the second part of that prayer.
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
And then the second thing is that it asks is the courage.
The courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
See, God also invites us into a new way of living. You are invited into an integrity of being,
by living out the teachings of Jesus. In 1 John 2, verses 3-6, this is the apostle John
talking about the obedience to what Jesus Christ taught here. He says,
We know that we have come to know Him. He's speaking about Jesus. We've come to know Jesus
if we keep His commands. Whoever says, I know Him, whoever says, I know Jesus,
but doesn't do what Jesus commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person.
But if anyone obeys His word, obeys Jesus, love for God is truly made complete in them.
This is how we know that we're in Him. Whoever claims to live in Jesus must live as Jesus did.
So have you ever felt stressed or overwhelmed in anxiety? Or maybe you're just reliving something
over and over again. It might be because you're holding on to too many things that are not inside
of your power to change. Jesus is inviting you to say, come, lay them down at my feet.
And then you can begin to discern what are the things that you can change in obedience,
and what are the things that you can't. Christ is saying, what is too heavy? What is not
fair for you to carry? Come to me. We talked about this last week. Come to me all who are
weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest for your souls. Take upon my yoke and
learn from me, for my yoke is light." Christ is saying, let me bear what you cannot bear,
what is out of your control, what you simply wish you could control, what's painful, what
you wish you could change but you can't, what you wish you had answers to but you won't
have them, come give that to me. Trust me with those things. And then, what's left?
If you give over all the things that you cannot change, that are outside of your control,
what's left? What's inside of your control? Those are the things where Jesus says, all right, let's start.
Small steps, beginning to live into these things that are inside of your control in
a way that's like me.
In a way that's like Jesus.
WWJD is a helpful question for a reason. What would Jesus do?
How would Jesus live in or respond to this situation? Someone does something that I wish they hadn't done.
It puts me in a difficult situation. How can I respond like Jesus would have responded?
And how can that be a freeing experience? So that's the first part of that prayer.
And that's the most powerful and not most powerful, but it's the most familiar part
of that prayer for a reason, because it's a place of just simply saying, you know what,
like I need to figure out what's outside of my control, surrender it to Jesus, what's,
inside of my control, and then ask Jesus to help me live like him in the midst of it.
And the wisdom to know the difference. So often we get stuck into places where we don't have
control, and that's when we run into our addiction. It's when we run to our coping mechanisms. It's
when we run back into old habits because we want to control it, and we don't want to deal
with the emotional unrest that is welling up inside of us because of what's going on.
And Christ is inviting us to experience serenity, experience peace in the midst of the storm by surrendering it to Him.
Now let's go on to the next couple lines of this prayer. It goes as this,
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time, time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as
it is, not as I would have it.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway
to peace, taking as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.
See Jesus entered into the world to save it. God has turned the understanding of glory and redemption upside down.
And so what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that we have one particular way that we would like things to kind of play
out.
If you were to think about like a new skill that you're learning or the change you're
trying to make in your life or your spiritual life or the way things go, we want things
to go from good to better.
And we generally want that to be a straight line. If you think about like a line graph, right?
You've got your axes here and it kind of goes up as it goes along time and you're just like,
yeah, like, you know, we want things to get better over time.
Maybe we'll have a small dip, but it will just jump right back up to where it was
and it'll go keep and go trending upwards.
That's what we like to see, right? Whether it's in our business profits or if it's in our finances
or if it's in how the change or habits,
we like things to be constantly going in the direction we want them to be going, positively.
We might say, okay, yeah, yeah, We know like there will be some tough stuff.
It'll bounce right back, right? But that's not life. That's not my life, that's not your life, right?
Life is a lot more messy than that. Things rarely go in a straight direction.
We often wish that our stories were in a straight line from, even if they start out bad,
we wish they went from bad to good to better.
And the thing is, is that what we often do is we often feel like we go from bad to good to bad,
the worst to better, to good to bad, the awful all the way back up to just okay, right?
We feel like we're just kind of spinning our wheels that we're constantly in this place of,
running around in circles, and that just doesn't make any sense to us.
And I think this is an interesting question. If you and I were to imagine,
all right, God's going to save the world.
How would he save the world? What would he do?
Well, I don't think we would come up with Cross. And what I mean by that is that when you think about a superhero,
a superhero swoops in to save the day.
And how do they save the day?
By kicking the bad guy's butts, right? They swoop in, they're just like, yeah, here I am.
Have no fear, underdog is here, right?
I'm strong, I'm gonna take care of this. I'm gonna save the damsel.
And they're gonna do it all, looking good. and they're all powerful, right?
And even if they've got like a weakness, they still, they overcome it, right?
That's the story that we tend to write, and it's the story we want for ourselves,
but it's not the story that God chose.
God, the creator of the entire cosmos, decided to come into human history,
into the mess of humanity,
take on human flesh and all of its frailties, and then die on a cross.
That's upside down, that's not the way our brains work. It's not the way we would think it would work,
but God did choose that, and in choosing so, he brought about the redemption of the world.
If the death of God on a cross can save the entire world, what can God do in the midst of your difficult circumstance?
In the midst of your suffering, in the midst of your pain, what might God bring about through it?
Now, don't you mishear me. I'm not saying that that's the reason why something bad happened to you.
Not saying that God caused something bad to happen to you because he wanted to do something better.
No, no.
I'm saying that God doesn't waste anything. I'm saying that something has happened to you.
You don't know why. I don't know why.
And God wants to do something in it. That God wants to bring about something glorious in it.
This is one of my favorite passages when I think about this concept in 1 Peter 1,
verses, starting in verse three.
Peter says, praise be to God and Father, our Lord Jesus Christ.
In his great mercy has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Saying like, that's the hope is the death of Jesus Christ and his resurrection gives
us a hope and we have been given an inheritance that can never perish, never spoil, and never
fade. This inheritance is kept for you in heaven, who through faith you are shielded
by God's power until the coming salvation is ready to reveal in the last time. There
is coming a day where Jesus is going to reveal himself and he's going to take all of his
believers and make all things right. And in all of this you rejoice greatly.
Though for now, right? There's this promise of this future of God making all things right,
But there is a for now Though for now a little while you have been made to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.
These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith Greater worth than gold which parishes even though refined by fire
may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you,
have not seen Him yet, you love Him, and even though you do not see Him now, you
believe in Him, and you are filled with a joy, an inexpressible glorious joy, and,
you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your soul. God
might be bringing you through something that feels like a fiery furnace, that
feels like the heat has been turned up, feels like it is just melting everything
away, and it's because He's refining you.
He wants to bring out something that is worth more than its weight in gold, salvation of your soul.
God does not waste anything. And so what we're invited to in that prayer of serenity is to accept the
world as it is, to find a pathway through peace of, through suffering, through
suffering, suffering has a role.
We'll talk more about this in coming weeks, but we so often want to run and hide from suffering, and of course we do, there's nothing bad with
avoiding suffering if we can.
But what do we do when suffering does come? Because it will indeed come.
Can we see it as a pathway to peace?
The Serenity Prayer goes on with this final section saying, Trusting that you will make all things right,
If I surrender to your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
life, and supremely happy with you forever in the next.
Is the goal the avoidance of pain altogether, or does God promise us a life free of discomfort
if only we would follow Him? The answer to that question is no. If you're listening to any Bible,
teacher or preacher or pastor or book writer or author who says, if you follow Jesus, everything
Everything will always go exactly the way you think it should, where you will never
experience suffering or pain if you follow Jesus.
All the right things will happen to you if you start following Jesus. That's not true.
Jesus is a great example of that. He was God.
He got crucified on a cross, right? We follow a Savior who was wrongfully murdered on a cross.
Job, another perfect example, there are so many people who were faithful to God who still
experienced suffering in this life and.
So we're not trying to seek this perfect life where we never experience pain,
We're trying to experience a life where even in the midst of pain even in the midst of the storm we can have serenity
See, that's the thing about the serenity prayer, is we think of a very serene kind of picture in our head.
When we think of serenity, we might think of sitting by a lake that's perfectly still in the morning hours,
and there's maybe some ducks, and there's a little fog on the lake, everything's just so quiet.
And the and everything's so peaceful it's very serenity it's very just you know and there's a little babbling sound water and there's nothing to disturb it
right that's what we think of in serenity when what I think is probably a more accurate picture is when Peter is walking with Jesus on the water in the
middle of a storm Jesus calls Peter to step out of the boat and walk on the
water with him and Jesus doesn't say hold up Peter wait wait wait don't get
out of the boat yet I'm gonna calm storm and then I'll have to get out when all
the all the waters all calm down he says no no while the storms happening get out
of the boat and walk with me right that serenity is walking in the middle of the
storm with Jesus and knowing that Jesus has got you that's serenity because we
can't control the storms of this life. We can't get them to go away by snapping
our fingers, but we can walk with Jesus and we can know that he's got us, he's,
It's got all the things we can't control and that it will be okay.
That is what serenity is. God is not a vending machine, maybe like we wish he was.
We don't come up to God and say, you know what, I'm going to pray this prayer,
I'm going to do this thing, I'm going to do it like this, this many times,
and I'm going to get exactly what I want.
That's not how God works. God will give us good gifts, and he does provide what we need.
But God also will uphold us when we're fainting in the middle of the storm.
Let this last passage be an encouragement to you. This is Psalm 121.
I lift my eyes up to the mountains, where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip.
He who watches over you will not slumber. Indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord watches over you. The Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all harm. He will watch over your life.
The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.
Serenity is not the absence of pain or suffering.
It's not everything going exactly our way. It's the quiet, quiet assurance that God is with us and that you sit in his hands.
It's saying, I know that my help comes from the Lord.
I look up to the mountains, I look up to the high places, I look up to where, where else
can I look and God comes and he meets me. He will not slumber, he will not abandon me, he will not let my foot slip.
He watches over me in the midst of the difficulties I'm going through.
That's serenity, that peace that comes when we understand that truth, when we've let go
and given God the things we cannot control, and then we've sought to be obedient in the
things that we can, and then we say, God, what is the thing that you're doing through
suffering in the midst of this circumstance?
And Lord let me trust you and find serenity here and now, even though things are not serene.
Ciao.
That's just some reflections on the serenity prayer. I'll have it linked here in the description if you want to read the full text and use that in
your own personal life. I recommend you maybe take it and save it as a screenshot for the back of
your phone, or you can put it and print it out and put it on your mirror, put it on your window,
like find a place where you can commit that to memory, learning to constantly come and say,
What Lord I'm gonna surrender this to you and once you memorize it It's not something we just say and it makes all things better. It's something it's a heart movement
We move our hearts through in order to become more in aligned with Christ,
Let me give you a question or two to wrestle with today I might encourage you to ask yourself. What might God be calling you to surrender to you him that you've been holding on to
What's that thing that you are holding on to and you're like,
I don't want to surrender.
I don't want to give it up. What's that thing?
What's that thing that you need to let go of so that you can find serenity?
And what might God be calling you into deeper obedience in? Right.
Okay. If we're surrendered this thing, because I simply cannot control that.
What am I supposed to be obedient in? What do I have control over?
Control over and what is Christ calling me to do in that place.
And then the last question is, what does it mean for you to have serenity in life right now?
What would it mean? Not for all your circumstances to magically get better, but what would
it look like if you were to experience right now today, as you were listening
to this, serenity, a assurance that God's got you in the midst of your difficulty.
What would that look like?
Thank you for joining me this week. I hope to catch you all next time.
Time. Send me any messages in the comments.
Music.