Letting go for more

January 18, 2024

STUCK ON A slippery slope, the dead weight of his incapacitated climbing companion slowly pulling him off the mountainside, Simon Yates made a difficult decision: he cut the rope.

That dramatic moment may serve as a metaphor as you contemplate a personal situation that is going to end in disaster if you don’t do something radical.

But Yates’ situation in the Andes may remind you of another man, on another mountain, with another knife. This one happened halfway round the world and some 4,000 years earlier: Abraham on Mount Moriah with his son, Isaac.

Having followed God’s call to leave where he was and follow Him into an unknown future, in his old age Abraham had finally received his son. The one through whom God’s promise of blessing—for him and, through him, the world—would be realized.

And now Abraham was being asked to sacrifice Isaac. Then, as he raised the knife, the angel of the Lord intervened: “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (Genesis 22:12).

God gave back what He had asked Abraham to give up.

Yates experienced something similar. Having reluctantly come to the decision to cut the rope to save his life, he thought that his friend Joe Simpson must surely have perished in the subsequent fall. But a couple of days later, he was amazed to see the badly injured Simpson inching his way down to the base camp where Yates had been recovering from his traumatic experience.

Two remarkable back-from-the-dead moments.

If you feel you need to cut away something that is dragging you down, maybe you will receive a similar resurrection gift. But maybe not. This is not a formula or a charade where we pretend to let go of something, knowing that God will return it to us.

We just have to let go and trust God with the rest. If we get it back, wonderful. And if we don’t get it back, still wonderful: because we have given it to God to do with what He chooses. It is no longer ours.

This is easier in theory than in practice, of course. Some years ago, I was stuck on such a slippery slope. I reluctantly came to the place of cutting something away that I knew was dragging me down, even though it seemed good on the surface.

It wasn’t a one-and-done exercise. Because, as one commentator noted of the exhortation in Romans 12:12 for us to present ourselves as “a living sacrifice,” living sacrifices have a habit of crawling off the altar. So, every morning, for some months, I’d mime cutting a rope.

I never got back what I let go. And the pain of letting go lingered for a long time. But today, I am so glad for the way things turned out because I have far more than I could have held onto.

My experience, which I believe is confirmed by the Scriptures, is that whenever God calls us to give something up, it is not to impoverish us. It is so that, in some way, at some time, somehow, He can enrich us more than we can ever imagine.