"Take My Life" - message written by Devin

"Take my life, Take my mind,
Take my soul, Take my will,
I am yours now, and I give it all to You"
(Take My Life - Jeremy Camp)

So simple of words. So easily said. So hard to truly do.

How often do we want this? How often do we tell God that we are ready to give it all up? How often are we truly ready?

We sing this song time after time after time. Sometimes we sing just to sing. Sometimes we mean it. But how do we truly mean it? We long for it...yes. But we know it is so hard to truly give up something. We're human...we LOVE control...heck we long for it. We set our whole lives up in order to obtain control of something. But to not only say, but to take the action of giving up TOTAL control in and of our lives by faith... wow.

We all have our little secrets. Things we don't show the rest of the world. But that doesn't mean they're not there. God knows it. ,God knows us. These secrets... we hate them from the bottom of our hearts and our souls... we want them gone because we know they are wrong.. but we will grasp onto them for dear life when they may be taken away. We don't have the will power to give them up. But we need to. Not only for our sake, but by holding onto these things we are giving the devil a foothold and not bringing glory to God.

And there is our answer. God. Only with God can we give these things up. We cannot want to give them up to better ourselves for our own selfish reasons, but only in the realization that this is not bringing glory to God and is in fact bringing poisonous sin upon our lives that gets stronger every day that we are reluctant to release our secrets. Our lives. Our everything.

We need Him. He does not need us. By giving up our lives to him and letting down our guard in order to let Him come into our lives and make a difference, we are as good as dead.

Take my life. It was never our own to begin with. He gave it to us. He gave us the free will to do what we want, thus causing the problems we see in our personal lives and in our society. We can only help ourselves by offering our life to him.

Take my mind. The mind is always flooded with thoughts and images from our environment urging us to sin. We offer our mind up...we offer our sin up. We can be graced to know and embrace the Truth and the peace that comes with it

Take my soul, take my will. Lord save us, save our souls from the eternal hell we are sentenced to because of our sin that only accepting your son, Jesus, can wash away from us. Lord take our will, we are not strong enough on our own...only your strength and grace can lead us the right way and glorify You.

We are yours now. We have always been yours. We will be yours forever.

We give it up to you.

(posted with Devin's permission... he says "I wrote it to be read"...)