The Wisdom of the Cross vs. The Way of the World | First Corinthians

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, status, and climbing the ladder of success, the message of the cross sounds entirely backward. Travis Aicklen continues Radiant Church Visalia's journey through First Corinthians by unpacking the jarring contrast between human wisdom and God's wisdom. While the world demands power, influence, and flawless performance, God intentionally chooses the weak, the despised, and the overlooked to shame the strong, ensuring that no human can boast in His presence. By exploring the true, scandalous nature of the Roman cross—a tool of torture rather than a polished piece of jewelry—this message challenges us to abandon our self-reliant striving, stop trying to fast-forward through our struggles, and rely entirely on the Holy Spirit to reveal the upside-down victory of God.

Main Points

• The Illusion of Human Strength: How modern society's relentless drive for efficiency, status, and control actively works against the nature of God's Kingdom.
• The Scandal of the Cross: Stripping away the modern, decorative image of the cross to understand its original, shocking reality as an instrument of death and humiliation.
• God's Unlikely Roster: Why God bypassed the religious elites and worldly "champions" to build His church using the weak and lowly, proving that victory comes solely through His grace.
• The Necessity of the Holy Spirit: Acknowledging that our natural instincts reject the humility of the cross, and why we desperately need the Holy Spirit to rewire our hearts to embrace God's wisdom.

Biblical References

• 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:16

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:41

Hey, if you're new here for the last few years, we've been planting a church in San Francisco. Tim and Kelsey Harms are leading the team up there at Sanctuary Church, and there's really cool stuff going on. And they're hosting a come and see weekend where they're hoping that people really from all over the globe will come in, see the work that's happening in San Francisco, and potentially stay and serve the work. At the very least, just carry the work in San Francisco and your heart, continue to lift them up in prayer. If you're here and you want a little adventure in life, you're sick of the pace of the Central Valley, you're looking to make an impact. That starts by just going and seeing and meeting the team up there, seeing what they're up to. If you're here and you know you can't move, you wish you could move, but you can't move. Uh, but you want to continue to pray and hold this church plant in your heart because you care about that city. Also want to invite you up to San Francisco. So Tim's email is on the screen and the weekend is coming up. But yeah, uh, take a trip to San Francisco and see what the Lord may say. If you're living with some sort of divine discontent, like this rumbling that God maybe has something for you, go go inquire and see if he might be leading you to San Francisco to serve there. We're a part of a family of churches called Confluence. And last week Tiffany and I traveled to St. Louis um as leaders to be led. So Tiffany and I had to sit around sit in a room, and a number of questions were asked about the health of our church, and not just the health of our church, but the health of our marriage and our family. And so we had a sweet time uh with other leaders. Uh a senior leader within our movement was was in the mix, and so he was asking some tough questions, but we had a really beautiful time together. We left on Thursday morning at 3.30 a.m. was a bad, it was a bad deal. So we get picked up at 3.30 by someone who works at the church there in St. Louis, a gal named Sam, and she works at Jubilee, and we get in the car and she's trying hard to make small talk with us at 3.30 a.m. and it is not working. So one of the things she says to me to try to soften me up is that I listen to your preaching a lot. I listened to the podcast, and I've been going through the book of Exodus with you guys, and I listen a lot to your sermons. And my first response was thanks. That's really encouraging. But the second thing I said was wild because it just fell out of my mouth. Uh because, and I don't know if I was just already angry because it was that early, felt sick to my stomach, kind of thing. But I just immediately turned to her and I said, If I ask you a question, will you be honest with me? And she was like, uh yeah. And I was like, Do you do you speed me up? Do you listen to me at 1.5 speed? And I could tell that she she knew it mattered to me, and she didn't want to give the wrong answer, so she's like, I I don't know, you know, like maybe. And I was like, because it matters to me. It matters to me. Because it's super rude to speed people up. So it hurts my feelings. And uh she wouldn't, she wasn't honest with me. But the reason I know that it's rude is you would never you'd never speed someone up if you were in the presence of that person. Right? So it's only in my absence do you know that it's okay to hurry me along. Have you ever tried to tell your coworker or your spouse to go ahead and pick up the pace? You ever told them, like, I know we all think it. I'd all I'd like to put a lot of people on 1.5 speed. I think it a lot, but I would never say it because it's super rude. I want to stay employed. I want to stay married. So I don't ever say to my wife, hey, could you do could you maybe pick it up to 1.5 for me? I've heard this part before. Try it. Just try it in marriage and see how that goes. And you can meet with Danny Can Tell Me and his new offices in Amigo Row. You know it's rude. So you only do it when I'm not around. How many of you listen to everything on 1.5? Every message from work? How many of you listen to me on 1.5? Thank you, Karis, for being honest. It's rude. And I think what's what's worse is that your impatience is disguised as your like intelligence. Like basically, I'm just too intelligent to put up with the pace at which you're spouting information. So just just pick it up a step. We are information gluttons. We can't get enough information and we can't get it fast enough. We struggle to incorporate what we know into our lives, because how many know there's a big difference between knowing something and then acting according to what we know? There's a huge gap. Most of us are here in community because we recognize a large gap in our lives between what we profess or what we know and what we do and how we behave. So we keep taking in more information, uh, thinking it's gonna fix it. But I actually think the answer might be something different than another podcast or taking in that podcast even quicker. So the city of Corinth, they could have also been described as information gluttons. It's technically a Roman city at the time of the Apostle Paul, which we're about to read about, but the background of the culture is still very Greek, and the Greeks are obsessed with information. They call it wisdom. And here's the common mantras of the day. These are things that were commonly just said in the city of Corinth. The wise man is king. That was a saying they had. Another one, which is similar, is to the wise man all things belong. So they loved information. We see their kind of mindset, we see their approach to life in the book of Acts. And this passage in Acts is describing a group of people in Athens, but Athens was just a short distance from Corinth. But listen to how it describes the people of Athens. They spent their time doing nothing, but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. Dang. That's so relevant. That sounds so much like our culture, right? Glenn Power translated the passage like this. Some of them spent their time doing nothing but listening to various podcasts at 1.5 speed. So today Paul's gonna take a concept that would have been really familiar to them: wisdom. And he's gonna turn it on, turn it on its head. He's gonna declare that God's wisdom is very different than theirs. And he's gonna contrast the wisdom of the age with the wisdom of the cross. And he's gonna challenge all that they know about information. Remember, the church is up against a few other things that were described last week. This church has assimilation issues, uh, meaning that the church had a problem because it looked a lot like Corinth. So the problem was not that there was a church in Corinth, but the problem was that Corinth was in the church. They were no longer salty, they could no longer communicate a counterculture to the culture they were in. So they looked too much like the city they were in. And so Paul's gonna write to them and say, This is how you can stand out again. And this is what it means to go the way of the cross and not the way of the crowd. Also, consider that this church is really divided. Pride is at work and there are cliques. The body of Christ is divided, and Paul's gonna communicate with them like, hey, this shouldn't be the case. You should be united and you should humble yourselves in order to work together. The problem was not that the church at Corinth had problems, every church has problems. The problem was not that they had issues, even good things have issues. The problem was that they couldn't agree on the problem. And their issue is that they didn't understand what the issues were or how to address them. So Paul's gonna help them with that. So in today's text, the big idea is this the wisdom of man is foolishness to God, and the wisdom of God is foolishness to man. These two things are squaring off in a battle for the ages. This is kind of like a fight card today. There's three different fights taking place. The wisdom of this age is pitted against the wisdom of God in the text we'll read today. The rulers of this age are pitted against the Lord of glory. Who are you betting on? And the last one is that the temporal is pitted against the eternal. So the last comparison, the last contrast made is about the duration, right? And the wisdom and the rulers of this age are coming to nothing. And the wisdom of God and the Lord of glory will stand forever. So here's how 1 Corinthians 1, verses 18 through chapter 2, verse 16 starts. For the message of the cross is foolishness. To those who speed up podcasts, those people are perishing. But to those of us who are being saved, it's the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise. The intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate. And here's a little there's a little pre-fight trash talk. So where's the wise person? Where are you at? Where's the teacher of the law? Where's that guy? Where's the philosopher of the age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? So the wisdom of God will frustrate conventional wisdom. And how? How will God make foolish the ways of this world by the ways of his cross? Well, the wisdom of God is gonna be displayed in the cross of Christ, and it's gonna be confusing to us. The wisdom of God is gonna be displayed in the Corinthian caste, that's also gonna confound us. And the wisdom of God will be displayed in Paul himself. So Paul will go on to defend the wisdom of God by talking about the cross, the Corinthian caste, and his own calling to lead in the church. Here's the first thing he says in verse 21 through 25. He said, the wisdom of God that you would call foolishness is first and foremost understood in the cross of Christ. As in the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. Verse 21 for since in the wisdom of God the world, through its wisdom, did not know him, they missed it. God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand a sign. Greeks look for wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. At the very center of our faith is a symbol. The symbol of Christianity is that cross. We can't get away from that wonderful cross. The symbol of every other world religion and system of thought is a ladder. The ladder. You know, the stairway to heaven. It's come to symbolize human effort, achievement, ascending to higher levels of consciousness. That if we perform, we can prove ourselves before God, we can live good lives, we can be good people, and we can punch our ticket and get through those pearly gates. The latter has come to symbolize the way the world works. This is how your team works. This is how it works at work. This is how it works in our relationships. If you perform, you'll have a place. And if you fail to perform, you don't have a place. We ascend through our effort. We take steps towards good, towards God, and we get a place. The cross says something very different than come up here. The cross said God has descended. God has descended and secured a place for you and I, not based on our performance, but his. And let me tell you something, we don't get it. The ladder makes way more sense to us. The cross of Christ confuses us because everything in our lives works on the ladder. Try telling your coach about the cross. You're like, well, hey, I have a place on this team, even though I'm not performing, because Christ has secured that for me. And your coach is gonna say to you, and you've secured a place on the bench because you're not performing. Try saying to your boss, no, my identity is not in this work. I have a place here, and you're gonna pay me, not based on my performance, but based on your performance. This is what makes sense to us. Even often in our church settings, the grace of God is confusing to us. We don't get the cross. The cross confronts us, confounds us, frustrates the wisdom of this age. The cross says this, and please hear this again for the first time. Because that cross has revolutionized the way we think about God, and I fear that we've heard it so much that it doesn't land with the weight it should. The cross says you should win by losing. The cross says God's going to defeat death by dying. The cross says God's gonna redeem suffering by suffering. The cross God's gonna conquer by Himself being conquered. It makes no sense to us. The cross elevates humility above pride. The cross elevates selfless sacrifice above violence. The cross was supposed to be Rome's victory. And instead it was Christ's victory. Like they thought we dealt with this dude. Little did they know that this dude was dealing with them. They did not see this coming. No one did. Listen to this. Hear it again. A crucified criminal, a crucified criminal has become the most admired, worshipped person in history. Surely 2,000 years has taught us that God uses weak things to shame the strong. He has in the end won out. I often think about this when I think about I'll watch some MMA. I'm on a real fight card today. But I watch MMA, and I remember the early days when it was different disciplines squaring off against one another, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu was fresh on the scene. And you would see a guy who was clearly undersized in a gi that you felt like would get in his way immediately go to his back. And you're thinking, that's a bad mood. You're gonna get pulverized. And then this guy systematically would absorb blows, the person, his opponent would wear himself out, and then sure enough, he'd turn him over and choke him out. The cross has taught us that we win by going low. Our Savior went to his back and then overthrew powers and principalities. And this is what we've learned. It's really obvious. It's really obvious as we look back over the staying power of Christianity, that weak things have shamed the strong. I was reading a guy named T. R. Glover, and he put it this way: evidence that the weak things have shamed the strong can be found in the reality that we name our dogs Nero and we name our sons Paul. Christianity took over the most powerful empire in the world. And I believe that we run a risk, as people who've heard this story over and over again, that we can forget how revolutionary this message is. How much it confronts human wisdom. We all know the answers, but knowing these things and doing these things are two different things. If you want to be first, you should be last. And if you want to be great, Jesus says, great, cool. Become a slave. And if you want to be rich, give it all away. And if you want to live, die. And if you want to be strong, embrace weakness. And if you want to be really weak in this life, keep pretending like you're strong. If you want this life to matter, think about the next life. If you want to save your life, if you want to lose it. It goes against everything we know. And everything we instinctively do. No one saw this coming. The text we're about to read says, not even the devil saw this coming, or else he would have gone, I gotta get another plan. The cross defies conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom says, climb the ladder. The cross reminds us that God is victorious through death on a Roman torture device. And again, I just fear we've become too familiar with this. Evidence of that would be that you could create a wall of crosses in your house by shopping at Hobby Lobby. And we buy these crosses and they're they're they've got like lace around. I've obviously never bought one, so this is gonna get bad, but they're beautiful and there's different shapes and sizes, and we put them on our wall. That is a Roman torture device. The equivalent would be having guillotine earrings or a necklace with an electric chair on it.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Yes, I should have to.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

And what would you think if you walked into someone's house and they had a wall of different electric chairs that they bought at Hobby Lobby? You'd be thinking this is the last time we come to this Sicko's house. This was despised. This was an embarrassment. And yet, on that embarrassing cross, Christ covered our shame. What a deal. What a deal. The cross is the wisdom of God confronting what we think is wise. God's ways are not our ways. Our thoughts are not his thoughts. We win by crushing our opponents. Christ wins by being crushed on the cross. Unbelievable. No one comes up with the cross but God. Certainly not the Greeks. The second thing Paul would say that's going to confront our conventional ideas about wisdom is the Corinthian caste, meaning the community that had gathered in this church. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many of you were influencers. Not many of you were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are. So that no one may boast before him. It's because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us the wisdom from God. That is our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, let the one who boasts go ahead and boast in the Lord. Many people believe that the greatest coach in NBA history is Phil Jackson. Phil Jackson has won 11 championships. Six of those happened with the Bulls. Five of those happened with the Lakers. And I don't agree. I don't buy it. Here's what I think. I think Phil Jackson has the greatest roster in NBA history. I think it's possible that his players were so great that he could have been a mediocre coach. I wonder sometimes if Phil Jackson just was really good at managing these egos. Because when I look at the roster that the Bulls had during that era, and when I look at the roster that the Lakers had, I tend to think to myself, I could have coached those teams. We could have won championships because you had once in a generation talent on your teams. My line of thinking goes something like this. If you're the greatest coach ever, you should be able to take mediocre talent and win. Not you have the greatest players in the history of the game. I think part of me thinks you might have mediocre talent as a coach and still be able to win. Enter the Corinthian cast. Not many of you were Michael Jordan. Not many of you were Kobe Bryant. Not many of you had a resume. He doesn't say not any of you are wealthy. He just says not many of you are wealthy. You came with no, we should have the Corinthian cast comes in looking like the bad news bears. And it's a great coach who can take that level of dysfunction and win. And when he does, they don't say, wow, these players are amazing. They say, I can't believe what that coach did with mediocre talent. That's us. Not many of us. Not many of us had a resume. Not many of us were a first pick. But God chose us, chose the weak things to shame the strong. He's going to win, and when he wins with us, all glory is going to him. It's not going to be shared with Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. They're going to say, look at how great, look at how glorious God is. Conventional wisdom. What we understand is, hey, pick the best players, start the best players. Grab those who are exceptional if you want to win. Get those who can perform. And God takes the weak. And with a very weak team, he shames the strong. It's his power on display. I grew up kind of in the Christian subculture, and I remember as a junior higher seeing the power team. Has anyone ever seen this? They would like come to your school assembly and they would claim that by the power of the Spirit, they were going to tear a phone book in half. And I would think, well, if God's going to get the credit, why don't you have a 12-year-old high school girl tear a phone book in half? How is it that you can have those biceps and then God would get all the glory from tearing that in half? Why is it that the strongest guy pulls the sword from the stone? No, it's the weakling who pulls the sword from the stone. And in that, we know, oh, this is God's glory at work, not his steroids. And that's the idea. He chose us. And in the end, he's going to get all the credit. Because not many of us were drafted in the first round. The last thing Paul would say that's going to just stump us, confuse us, but it is a display of God's wisdom is in Paul's life. So not many of the Corinthians had a resume. Not many of the Corinthians were impressive, but Paul was. He did have status. He did have brilliance. He did have gifting. In fact, he would say this if someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I've got more than you do. I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, in regard to the law of Pharisee. As for zeal, I was persecuting the church. As for righteousness, based on the law, faultless. Sounds like a first-round pick. This is what he says. And it's the same way with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom, as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God, for I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness, with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on my biceps, but on God's power. And it's only a God who can take someone who's an enemy and make them an employee. You now work for me. Only God can build his church through a man who wanted to destroy the church. Think about this. Just again, let this land on you afresh. A man who used to tear the church apart with his orders is now building up the church with his words, not just in the first century, but here and now. We're still reading his words. And his orders are still building up the church. He was killing people who believed what he would one day be killed for believing. How profound is that? What a reversal. How confusing is that to us? He was killing people who believed what he would one day be killed for believing. The Apostle Paul used to be Saul of Tarsus. And he planted this church, but before he planted this church, he would go house to house dragging Christians from their homes, sometimes killing them, putting people to death for their Christian faith, and then one day he would die for his Christian faith. Who picks an enemy and says, You're going to be my number one? You'll be my employee. You'll run this company. Again, just hear this again for the first time. What would it take for you to convert to another major religion? To not just become Muslim, but to go around building mosques and write the Quran. What would it take? What would it take for you, a farmer, a Trumper, a Californian, to vote for Gavin Newsom in the next election? And to not just vote for him, but to go door to door and then die for his woke progressive cause. Yes. What would it take? What would it take for you, a diehard Dodger fan, to become a giant fan? Or a giant fan to become a gift. It's not happening. I can see. This guy's going door to door killing Christians. And now he's like, I'm going to write scripture. Isn't it? I'm going to give my life to plant churches. It's unbelievable. The biblical answer to the question, what would it take, is a whole stinking lot. You would have to see the risen Lord to make this kind of a change. And that's exactly what happened for Paul. And Paul's saying, hey, I'm not faulting the Corinthian church. I was once the enemy of God. I was going in the wrong direction. And I saw the light. And now I'm going to give my life to build the church. And to God be the glory, because this wasn't my idea. I didn't come up with this, says Paul. Conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom says, hey, if you're going to pick someone to build the church, don't get the guy who's bent on destroying it. I'd be like, not him. Surely there's someone more eligible than the guy who's killing people. No. We'll take him. And we'll use him. And it'll confound the wise. It'll leave everyone scratching their head, going, You gotta be kidding me. You use Paul, you use the Corinthian church, and you use a Roman torture device. This confounds the wisdom of the age. So if you haven't picked up on this yet, we don't think like this. This is not the way we would conduct business. And so you, as you read this, you're probably or should be asking yourselves like, how does one learn to think in such unconventional ways? What is the source of this wisdom? This wisdom that seems like foolishness to us. How does one get their head around this? Well, Paul goes on to write that the source of this wisdom for us is the Spirit of God. And when anyone thinks about the Holy Spirit, especially in context of the book of 1 Corinthians, they think about the gifts of the Spirit, or they think about the way that this church was disagreeing over the way worship should be ordered in a church. When we think about the Holy Spirit, we think about 1 Corinthians 11 and we think about 1 Corinthians 14. But the Holy Spirit is mentioned more in this one chapter than it is in those. And it's the Spirit of God that helps us to understand the way of the cross. You're not going to learn this in school. You'll learn this as the Holy Spirit teaches us to humble ourselves, teaches us God's ways. We do, however, Paul says, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age. They are coming to nothing. No, we declare God's wisdom, it's a mystery that's been hidden, and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written, what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived, the things God has prepared for those who love him. These are the things that God has revealed to us by his spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, for who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we can understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught to us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they're discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. So it's the Spirit of God at work within us, revealing the wisdom of the way of the cross? How many have been led by the Spirit into a greater understanding of that cross, specifically in your relationships? How many have learned the hard lesson of going low? How many of you have learned by the Spirit at work in your life that God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble? Yeah, the Spirit has led us in that. The Holy Spirit teaching us the wisdom of the cross, teaching us about a God who chooses the least and the last and wins. Jesus says much about the work and the role of the Holy Spirit in his upper room discourse. The upper room discourse is Jesus saying, I'm going to go. And the disciples are like, That's a bad idea. We can't carry on this ministry. We can't do it. We don't understand these secret things. We don't understand the way you roll. We're really attracted to it, but this is foreign to us. We don't know these realities. You can't go. And Jesus says, I can. And when I do, I'm going to send you the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit's going to do a number of things in the life of a believer. I see as I read the upper room discourse, many of the things that were just listed out by Paul here. Jesus says that the Spirit of God is going to be in you, and the Spirit of God is going to be with you. I'm going with you. Which was really comforting to a bunch of disciples who are thinking, How are we going to go without Jesus? How are we going to take on the family business? How are we going to do what he does? I'll be with you, and I'll be in you. And then he says in John 14, it's the Spirit that's going to teach you. And then in John 15, he says it's going to testify to you about me. And then in John 16, it says the Spirit's going to come and convict you. So here's the idea the very Spirit of God lives inside of you. And he's going to teach you. He's going to lead you into these truths. And then when you're doing it right, the Spirit's going to testify, oh yeah, that's the way of Christ. That's the way of the cross. And then when you start going the way of the world, the Holy Spirit's inside of you going, that's not the way. Don't walk in it. That's not the way of the cross. That's the foolishness of the crowd. And you'll know it. Worship team, would you guys come and church? Would you stand? Yeah, 1142. 1.5 that. The clock was out, so I was starting to freak out. The Holy Spirit is a gift, a gift that we receive and in a posture of humility and as a way of renouncing our pride and our own strength. Would you be willing to hold your hands out? Let's just receive the Spirit. Lord, we just confess that we don't even know how to go through this life and operate in this world following these ways. We still want to save our lives. We still want to be first. We still want to look out for number one. This still feels like a foreign language to us, some of the things you're asking us to do. And so we come, we practice humility, and we just say, we we need this Spirit of God to teach us. Spirit of God, would you show us the way of the cross? Spirit of God, would you testify to Jesus? Would you reveal Jesus to us? And Holy Spirit, would you convict us when we're going the way of the world and operating by the wisdom of this age? It's passing away. We can see that. Rome passed away. Chicross stands forever. Spirit of God, come and fill your people. Increase your presence and leadership in our lives. We surrender to you. Amen.