The video is a sermon on the topic of brokenness and the principle behind it. The speaker refers to John chapter 12, where Jesus talks about the concept of a grain of wheat falling into the earth and dying in order to bear much fruit. The speaker emphasizes that in life, we are constantly being shaped and molded by God, just like a potter with clay on a wheel. He explains that brokenness involves surrendering, yielding, and coming into submission to God's will, and it is a process that encompasses our body, soul, and spirit. The speaker encourages the audience to stay engaged with the series of messages on brokenness, as it will help them understand the purpose of suffering, pain, and trials in their lives.

The most painful and difficult times of my life have been those times when God had me in a period when he was breaking me. I didn't like it because there was enough independence within me that I didn't like what God was doing. I never have liked to be broken any more than anybody else does. But one thing I discovered that following brokenness is some of God's greatest blessings in periods of times when our life is the most fruitful. Most people do not understand what the Bible teaches about brokenness. And the last thing they want is a good case of it. And so what they do is they try to avoid it at any expense, at all costs, run the other direction. And in a day when there is so much talk about prosperity and God healing all of our sicknesses and God wanting us to be happy and everything just perfect, I want to tell you the message of brokenness does not appeal to those who do not want God's best, but who want some kind of personal satisfaction. But here's what I want to say to you. In this series, you're going to understand what God has been doing in some areas of your life that you wonder, God, why do you keep on letting this happen? Likewise, you're going to be able to look back and see some times and experiences and some hurtful times, times of pain and suffering that you've complained, questioned God, doubted God, complained to your friends, argued with God about it. You're going to be able to look back and thank him for continuing the process even though you didn't like it. So I want to encourage you, my friend, not only in this message, but all of those to follow that you'll not miss a single one of these messages because here is the heart of what God is trying to do in all of our life. And I believe if you'll stay with this, you'll understand something about your life, about suffering, about pain, about sickness, hardships, trials, and hurts that maybe you've not quite understood. And I want to begin by turning to John chapter 12. And if you'll turn there with me, Jesus is beginning to talk to his apostles about his death. And in two verses of this passage, he sort of lays the groundwork of this whole series. The title of this series is Brokenness, the Way to Blessing. And the title of this message is Brokenness, the Principle. Here is the underlying principle behind everything else we're going to say for the next few weeks. And in every point concerning brokenness, I'll probably take some biblical character to illustrate that aspect of brokenness. But look, if you will, in verse 24 and 25 of John chapter 12. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it. He who hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal. Now, in essence, here's what Jesus is saying about the whole matter of brokenness. He says, you can take a grain of wheat or any kind of seed. As long as you have it in your hand, it's only one grain. You can place it on the barn floor. It's still one grain. But once you take that seed and drop it into the earth and you cover it up with the soil and it, so to speak, dies, the elements in the soil, the heat, the moisture begin to work on the outer shell of that wheat. And before long, the outer shell is broken. And then there is that little green sprout that pushes its way up through the soil. And before long, you have a stalk. And on that stalk, there may be 50 grains, could be 100 grains. Did you know that from one grain of wheat that dies in the soil, you could plant a million acres of wheat if you just kept on replanting all the wheat of the fruit of one single grain? Jesus says, as long as it remains alone, it bears no fruit. But when it dies to itself and the world about it, it is able to bear much fruit. Jesus used an illustration to describe what was about to happen to him. As long as he remained alive, all of us would remain unforgiven. As long as he remained alive, all of us to be born would be lost. As long as he remained alive and did not die, you and I would miss eternal life. For it was in the death of the Lord Jesus Christ that our sins were paid for in full. His substitutionary, sacrificial, all-sufficient, atoning death made it possible for all of us to experience life. Therefore, Jesus said, I must die in order that you might have life. And Jesus Christ has multiplied his life millions of times, millions times millions, in those of us who have accepted him as our Savior and have been forgiven of our sins, have had our names written in the Lamb's Book of Life, because he was willing to die. Now, he says in that verse, if you'll notice, the verse following, he who loves his life, that is, has such attachments to life and affections for life, will lose it. That is, we'll lose what God has for us. But he who hates his life, that is, willing to die to his or her affections, willing to die to his or her dreams and desires and ambitions and goals, willing for the Lord Jesus Christ to have his way, that person finds life to the fullest and to the maximum. Now, when we talk about brokenness, I want you to listen carefully, because this is the foundation of everything I'm going to say. And I'm going to say several things that I'm going to repeat every single week, because I want them to ring in your ears, lodge themselves in your heart, root themselves in your mind until you begin to think the way God thinks. Now, the greatest obstacle to understanding brokenness is this, that we have a viewpoint of the Christian life which interprets the Christian life as something we do. We go to church, we sing hymns, we pray prayers, we give money, we read the Bible, and some may even share their faith with others. And so we add some things to our life that were not there before, and we subtract some things that should not have been there. My friend, that is not the Christian life at all, because you see, the Christian life is not a life of doing. The Christian life is a life of being and becoming, and as we become, there will be conduct, and there will be work, and there will be service to God, which is the overflow and the outflow of something within us, and not something we are adding, and we are subtracting, and we are doing in order to act like a Christian. A true believer does not have to act. A true believer overflows, and what overflows is that which is within us. So the average out of the Christian life is coming to church, listening to hymns and singing, and doing the things that it appears Christians do. The Christian life is being. The Christian life is becoming. The Christian life is receiving the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, and then allowing the life of Jesus Christ who is within us to be lived out through us day by day, moment by moment. That isn't doing. That's being. That's becoming. That's what the Christian life is all about. Not what I do, but what I'm becoming by the grace of God as the result of someone living on the inside of us, expressing that life through us. Now, let's ask for just a moment and think about what do we mean by brokenness in the light of these two verses. Because God, I want you to listen carefully, because God has purpose to bring every area of our life into submission to His will, He continually, He continually removes, continually removes from us every hindrance that would keep us from being fully surrendered to His will and fully trusting Him. You see, God wants us to learn to live in full trust. As long as I depend upon anything else in my life, it isn't trust in Him, it is trusted in myself. Brokenness is God's method of dealing with the self-life. What is the self-life? The self-life is that desire within me that desires to live independent of God. It is that inner desire of independence. All of us have some of that in us. There's some areas of our life that we'd like to be independent. And we say, oh yes, I've committed myself to Jesus Christ. But for many, they have built a wall around the segment of their life over here. And there's a big sign on this wall that says, God, keep out. Lord, you can have all this other 75 or 95 percent of my life. This I have reserved for myself and I don't want to give up control. You see, the problem is all of us like to have control over our life. We want to be able to go where we want to go, buy what we want to buy, do what we want to do, have the kind of friends we want to have. We want to live where we want to live. We like to have control. And God says He wants us totally submitted to Him. And so we resist that and therefore we continue to hold on to certain areas of our life we refuse to give up. Now, I want you to listen again very carefully. There is an area or maybe an area or areas of your life that you know today He doesn't have control of. Oh, you talk to Him about them. And you rationalize it that nobody's perfect. And you tell Him that after all, you've been dealing with this a long time. It looks like you just can't have victory. So you're going to relax. And the truth is, you're saying, I'm going to relax in my area of rebellion and my area of independence. All of us either have or have had areas of our life that we have acted independently about. We don't want God messing, dealing with. We don't want Him snooping around this private area, this private sector of our life that we have decided to keep for ourselves. You see, the self-life is that area or that feeling, that attitude of independence God keep out. My friend, that is exactly what God zeros in on because His desire is to deal with every aspect of independence so that we are living in full dependence upon Him. Now, one of the best ways for me to explain this, every fall I love to go out west and just roam around in the wilderness, sleep in a tent when it's cold, ride horses, either photograph or hunt, but it's just being out there and riding and being away from everything and being in the solitude of the wilderness. Well, to do that, you have to ride horses because we don't want to walk. Too much walking. Mountains are too steep oftentimes. And so usually, of course, when you get to an outfitter, you're assigned a horse. Now, sometimes I've had very gentle horses. That is the slightest movement of the reins. That horse knows exactly what to do. And there's instantaneous obedience. Sometimes just a spoken word. He knows exactly what to do. But on other times, you've got to pull, jerk, kick, whatever you do. He insists on doing what he wants to do. And so I've ridden some horses that were very independent. Supposedly, they had been broken, but not broken very well. Sometimes they've gotten me in very dangerous positions, lunging forward down a hill or through to a little narrow passageway, acting independent of the one who's riding upon him. Now, when a horse is fully broken, what happens is this. It doesn't destroy his spirit, but it brings him to a place where he gives instant obedience to the rider on his back. A horse that is fully broken gives instant obedience to the rider upon his back. When a child of God is broken, God does not destroy our spirit. We don't lose our spirit and our zest for living. But rather, our will is brought into submission to the will of the Father, the will of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that we, too, give instant obedience to the whom we call Savior and Lord. We act just like a partially broken horse and unbroken horse. We act independently of the will of God. Now, that gets us in lots of trouble when we insist on having it our way and doing our thing, no matter what God has said. Brokenness is that condition whereby our will is brought into full submission to His will, and when He speaks, there is no argument, there is no rationalization, there are no excuses, there is no blame, but simple, instant obedience to the Holy Spirit living within us, giving direction and guiding our life. Now, all of us have those areas of our life at times we don't want to surrender. And my friend, God has drawn a bull's-eye in that area of your life. He has targeted that for brokenness, because He's not going to let you alone. One of the reasons that some people go through great trial and hardship in their life is that God is breaking them in a given area. What He's after is self-will, self-reliance, self-dependency, self-sufficiency. He's after everything that smacks of self within us. He wants to destroy that so that you and I are living moment by moment, day by day, in full dependence upon Him. And therefore, He must wrench from us, shatter within us, break through pain and suffering, hardship and sorrow, whatever's necessary to remove those obstacles in our life that keep us from being fully surrendered to His will. Now, already, many of you, most of you who has an area that is yet unsurrendered, unyielded, you already know what it is because the Spirit of God has already surfaced it in your mind. You know what it is. Maybe when it first popped up in your mind, you said, oh, not that. And there it is. There it is. You can't get rid of it. God has drawn a circle around it. And He says, I've targeted that in your life because God knows that that area which you have not submitted is hindering God's purpose and design, great, beautiful design for your life. But we're afraid to give it up. We're afraid to lose control. We're afraid our needs will not be met. Our desires will not be fulfilled. We won't be contented. And we'll have to go through life lacking and missing and not experiencing the things in life that we want to experience. My friend, would God take anything away from you that is good for you? Would He break you from anything that would cause you to become what He wants you to be? Would God take away from you anything that will bless you and build you up and edify you and strengthen you and build character into your life and bring contentment and peace and joy in your life? Would God take away those things that would help you to become the maximum of your potential? No. Therefore, if God is in the process of working in some area of your life, He knows that in order for you to become what you really want to become and to be able to achieve what He wants you to achieve and to do the things that He knows your heart desires within His will, He knows that those areas must be broken and shattered and removed in order for you to become and to be, to achieve and to do and to reach your goals. Isn't it amazing how we admit with our minds, yes, God does know everything and He knows what's best, but somehow in our will, God says, here's the best, but something inside of us desires to be independent. You see, that's why Paul said, I am a bond slave of Jesus Christ. Everything there is about me has been saddle busted and brought into submission to the one who lives and reigns and rides within my heart, the Holy Spirit. He understood what it meant. That's why he said, I have crucified this world to myself and the world to me. God has targeted all kinds of self-reliance and self-confidence. He wants us living in, walking, depending, resting in, relying upon Him for every aspect of our life. In that way, in that way alone, can God live out to the fullest all that He is within us? It is not adding to and subtracting from, it is Christ within you, living through you the life. Now, but sometime we have difficulty with that, and so I want to explain the necessity and how this takes place. If you will look for a moment back in John chapter 12 and notice this verse, he said, he who loses his life will save it, but he who loves it is going to lose it. That is, if I'm going to attach myself and refuse to surrender, I'm going to lose the best. But if I'm willing to hate it, to die to it, to let it go, I'm going to win, I'm going to gain. Now, God has said this in different ways in several passages. Look, if you will, in Matthew chapter 10 for a moment, there's a passage here that says a little different, but I want you to get these verses in your thinking because I want you to see something here. Verse 37 of Matthew 10, he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. He who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. He who has found his life shall lose it, and he who has lost his life for my sake shall find it. Now, all of that sounds like contradictions, but the truth of what he's saying is this. I must be willing to die to the self that is within me. That does not mean that we have no personality and no life, but I mean that part of me that is independent of God, that principle of sin that is still within me. He says we must be willing to die to that. Look, if you will, to the 16th verse of that chapter of that book, Matthew chapter 16, and the 24th verse says, Jesus said to his disciples, if anyone wishes to come after me, let him take up his cross, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it. What will a man be profited if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? What will a man give in exchange for his soul? Now I want you to turn to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, and I want us to see what God is referring to and how this takes place in a person's life. So we know that he's talking about dying to something, giving up, surrendering, yielding, coming into submission to, holding on, I lose, letting go, I win. In 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 verse 23, here's his prayer, Paul's prayer. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved, complete, without blame at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are made up, truly, as he says in this passage, of body, soul, and spirit. Now we can see the body, the soul, and the spirit we cannot see. With our body, we relate to our environment. We have five senses. We smell, we see, we taste, we hear, we touch. That's the way we relate to our environment. He says your body, your soul, that is our mind, our will, emotions, our conscience, our consciousness. We cannot see that, but that is a part of us. And with our soul, we relate to ourselves. We have a self-consciousness, awareness of ourselves, and we also relate to one another. We can laugh with each other, love one another, receive each other's love, or we can become jealous and angry. But our emotions are there, our thought patterns, our consciousness, our conscience, that which warns us of danger, that's a part of man. But then there is man's spirit. He says your spirit, soul, and body. The spirit of man is that inner man, that is, that part of us with which we relate to Almighty God. Now, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, they had a perfect body, a perfect soul, and a perfect spirit. God said, in the day that you eat of the fruit of this tree, ye shall surely die. They ate and they died. What died? Well, at that time, it was not their body, because they remained. It wasn't their soul, because they were still relating to each other. What died in them was their spirit, that is, their capacity to relate to God. When Paul says in Ephesians chapter 2, wherein in times past you were dead in and by your trespasses and sins, he's certainly not talking about the human body, nor about the soul, but what died was the spirit. So that a believer is a threefold person of soul, of body, soul, and spirit. The unbeliever, listen now, the unbeliever has a body. The unbeliever has a soul. The unbeliever has a natural spirit, which is dead to the things of God. Therefore, in essence, he's only two-thirds a whole person. Only a believer is a whole person whose spirit is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, thus making us whole. When Jesus made men and women whole, He simply did not merely mend the body, but the body, the soul, and the spirit. When you receive the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, the Bible says the Holy Spirit came to indwell you. What did He do? The Spirit of God, your having been forgiven through the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God came into your life to unite with your spirit, to bring to life within you a spirit that now can relate to God, so that you can relate to Him. Now that you're a believer indwelt by the Holy Spirit, you are sensitive to God. You are aware of Him. You can talk with Him. He speaks with you. You open the words. You understand the Word of God. The Spirit of God gives you guidance and direction, convicts you of sin. There's a whole new life. You've been born again. Your spirit has been born again. There's new life, a new spirit. Now, by your spirit, you relate to God. By your soul, you relate to yourself and to others, and with your body, you relate to the world. Now here's the problem. The unbelieving world knows nothing about the spiritual life. They don't understand why we think and act the way we do. They live by their senses. If it looks good, get it. If it feels good, touch it. If it smells good, have some of it. If it tastes good, eat it. If it sounds good, keep listening. That is, they live by their senses. They live by what they see and what they touch. It's a matter of feeling. You see, we are all sensual beings. Now, I do not use that term in the light of speaking only of sexual sensuality, but we all have a body. We have appetites. We have appetites for beauty. We like to look at beauty. We have appetites for sex. We have appetites for food. We have appetites, all kinds of appetites, all of which are legitimate. It is when in the Garden of Eden, man fell because of sin that man began to act from without rather than from within. A spirit-filled believer is one in whom the Holy Spirit from within has brought everything in that life under control. So when we talk in terms of a person who has been broken, we're talking about God's design on all of our life. God understands we have this physical human body. He understands the appetites we have. He also understands that you and I were born with a sin principle within us that will be there until the Lord calls us. It is still the remains of that independency within us that desires to have it our way. This is what causes difficulty in relationships, difficulty in business, difficulty in the home, difficulty with our plans versus God's plans. God says, I want you to give this. We say, oh, God, I couldn't afford to do that. Acting independently of God, we choose to do something else. God says, I want you to go to this person. Here's what I want you to say. I want you to confess and get right. Oh, God, I'm not sure I can do that. Arguing with God, desiring to be independent of the will of the Father in that given instance. I want to ask you again, what is it that God surfaced in your life? Drew a circle around it, put a bull's eye on it this morning that you know that you are already acting independently of God in that area of your life. You don't want to give it up. You are fearful of giving it up. You're fearful that God won't meet your needs, fearful that God won't meet your supply, fearful that you won't be able to do what you want to do, become what you want to become, go where you want to go, live where you want to live, drive what you want to drive, have the vocation you want to have. Are you unwilling to place your full trust in God? Anytime God zeroes in on an area, it is because I fear that if I give it to him, it won't turn out the way I want it to turn out. God is saying, when you surrender it to me, it's going to turn out much better than you could ever dream it would ever turn out. The essence of brokenness is this, that the Holy Spirit who lives within me now is able to exercise the will of the Father through my soul, through my body into life. That is, no longer responding to life based on the senses, no longer responding to life based on self-will, but now responding to life based on and in submission to the Holy Spirit who lives within us. What is the Christian life? The Christian life is an expression of the life of Christ through your human body. How does that happen? Only when you and I are willing to submit to the Lord God's will in every area of our life, bringing our thoughts, bringing our soul, bringing our body into submission to his will and allowing him to call the plays instant obedience to the one who sits upon the saddle of our heart, instant obedience to the one who rides within our life, instant obedience to the one who knows what's best, who has promised God's best, and who has the power to provide the absolute best in every area of our life. Brokenness is not an instantaneous act on the part of God, though it can be, and it may be once in a while, but most of the time it is a process, which we will discuss in other messages, but it is a process that begins over conviction over some area of my life that God has zeroed in on, and then he begins to do some breaking. Now, what do we mean by breaking? Well, you think about what is a part of our life. All of us have those areas of our life that we depend upon unless God has broken us. We depend upon our past experiences. We depend upon our abilities and our gifts and our talents. Some people depend upon their status, their position, their power, their authority, their relationships. Some people put their trust in their looks or where they live or their position in society. My friend, whatever you put your reliance on, God has targeted to shatter and to break and to remove in order that your dependence and your reliance would be upon him and him alone. God wants no other gods in your life, no competition in your life for your obedience and allegiance and devotion and love and worship of him and whatever's there, he's going to break one way or the other. Now, folks don't like this. Oh, tell me about prosperity and God answering all my prayers and healing all my sicknesses and helping of my life to be one glorious, wonderful trip through life. Well, the only way I can do that is to exchange this Bible for some erroneous book because it's not in this one. Listen to what Jesus said. He says, you want to know how to make your life fruitful and profitable? Then he says, look at that grain of wheat. As long as you hold on, it'll only be one grain, but the moment you're willing to drop it into the earth and cover it and let it die in the soil, before long, what appears to be nothing but death will bring forth life. 50 grains, 100 grains, 1,000 stalks, 10,000 stalks, 100 acres, 1,000 acres, a million acres of wheat. Listen, wheat growing, producing, feeding millions of people. How do you drink grape juice? Only because somebody crushed the grapes. And how do you have bread? Only because somebody crushed the wheat. My friend, how does a person become productive in their Christian life? How do they become useful for God? How does God use us to the maximum? How is it that God can bless us to the fullest? Only when we are willing for God to break everything in which we have placed any reliance, any dependence, and any of self. Remember what I said in the beginning, brokenness is God's method of dealing with the self-life, which is that part of me that wants to act independently of God. Turn, if you will, to 2 Corinthians chapter 4 for a moment. Listen to what Paul says in this passage. In the 16th verse of 2 Corinthians chapter 4, he says, Therefore, we do not lose heart, but though our outer man, this physical body is decaying, it's getting older, yet our inner man is being renewed, what? Day by day. How? By momentary light afflictions. Now they may last for years, but against the background of eternity, it's only light. For momentary light affliction is producing for us something that is weighty in value, far beyond all comparison. While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. The things which are seen are temple, but the things which are not seen are eternal. The pain and the suffering and the heartache and the difficulties and the tears and the weeping that we go through, we thank God. Why all of this? Where's the joy and where's the peace? God, my friend, zeros in on that area of our life that needs to be broken. And I want you to listen carefully because I'm going to say this probably every week. You know the people that God has the most difficult time with breaking? Those who are the most gifted, those who are the most talented, those who have a characteristic of being determined, those who have the most self-confidence, those who have the most things going for them as far as the world is concerned. Those are the kind of people God has the most trouble with because they have so much to rely upon that appears, listen, that appears to be getting them through life. What they don't see is what they're missing. What they don't see is how God could be using them. What they don't see is what God's real design for their life is. What they don't see is this massive blessing that God has in store for them that they have missed completely for fear of losing it. They lose it. And so they hold on to the reins of their life. Lest God, if they give up all reins to their life and become a slave to Jesus, who wants to be a slave, you can never lose surrendering it all to Him. You can never lose giving it all away. Is that not His whole principle? Give and it shall be given to you? That doesn't mean just money. If every time somebody talks about giving, you think about money, you're materialistic. I'm to give my life. Every facet of it must be brought under His control so that He who sits upon the saddle of our heart must have instantaneous obedience. That's God's design. Remember who you were made for. The Bible says you're not your own. He says, we were made for Him. We are the temples of the living God. He who is living within us deserves and demands the right and the authority to have everything else about us under such control that He at any given moment is able to express His life through us, through our lips and through our eyes and through our hands and through our feet, through our body, through our thinking, through our emotions, so that you and I are not merely reflections, but we are living, walking expressions of the life of Christ. Now think about this. He says that in the eternity future that you and I will be trophies. Think about that. You and I will be trophies of the grace of God. And because we're trophies of the grace of God in Christ's death, burial and resurrection, His power to save, we will forever be a heavenly reminder of all the angels of the grace and love of God. In this life, we are preparing for the life to come. In this life, we're going to school. In this life, God has us on the potter's wheel. Now, you know, when the potter throws a lump of clay, and so often I've seen this, throws a lump of clay on the wheel, and with a gentle touch of his fingers and his hands and maybe a little paddle here and there, he forms a beautiful vase. If he forms it and it doesn't come out exactly right, you know what he does? He crushes it, throws it back on the wheel, and goes through the same process again. What does God do in your life and my life? Whenever and wherever and however he sees a flaw in our life, when he sees any area of independence which he knows will hinder his great purpose in your life and mine, he throws us back on the wheel, back into the crucible of brokenness, and he keeps on breaking and fragmenting and shattering and pruning and chiseling away at our life, breaking again and again and again, until he has formed us in the likeness of his Son. That's what the Christian life is all about. It is becoming. When my will has been saddle busted, I belong, heart, soul, mind, body, spirit, everything belongs to him, then it's up to him. You know why you argue with God? Because you have an independent streaking that hasn't been broken. My friend, when I look at the Bible and read what God says about the Christian life, I'm awed by what he says versus how we act. And God says, I've zeroed in on every unbroken, unsurrendered, ungiven area. Brokenness is God's method of dealing with the spirit of independence within our life. What area has God zeroed in on in your life this morning? What is he targeted? What is he working on? Have you wondered why you're going through such difficulty and hardship and heartache and trial? Oh, you'd like to blame it on somebody else because it's much easier to do it that way. But my friend, could it be that God has zeroed in on an area of your life and he has the pressure on, and he just sort of keeps tightening the vice in love by his grace, never too much and never too quickly, but he keeps tightening the vice, putting the pressure on in order to break you from self-dependency, self-will, self-sufficiency, that independent street that God knows is the greatest deterrence that you're becoming what God wants you to be. If I should ask you today, how many of you really want God's best for your life? Probably most of you would raise your hand. If I should ask you, how many of you want to become what God pre-designed you to become before you were ever born? You'd probably raise your hand. But suppose I ask, how many of you are willing for God to do anything that is necessary to bring you to a position of total surrender so that all he wants to do for you and all he wants to make out of you, he's free to do it? I wonder how many of you would raise your hand for that. Can you say today, God, I'm willing for you to so break and so work in my life that all that you are within me would so compellingly, overwhelmingly control my soul and my body that I would be a living, walking expression of the Lord Jesus Christ? Are you willing to tell him that? Now, this gets real simple. Here's how simple it is. Either I'm going to surrender and let God have his way and live my life discovering what God wants to do and what he wants to provide. I'm going to very ignorantly, selfishly, blindly, mistakenly, hold on to my little bit of fear of loss and miss God's great blessing. So I want to ask you one last question. What are you holding on to that you're willing to keep on holding on to and live your life missing God's best over something that is temporal and passing and insignificant compared to what God has offered you? Isn't that foolish? You can't even think of anything. You can't even think of enough of anything that weighs and has the value of you holding on to it and missing God's great design in your life. All revival follows brokenness. It does not precede it. It follows it. Are you willing to say to him today, all to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give, I will ever love and trust him in his presence and by his power daily live. My friend, I don't know about you, I've never found anything in all of my 50 some years of living that I would exchange for knowing Jesus Christ and having him in full charge of my life. Now I've been broken, shattered, beaten, smashed, pruned, chiseled on. I didn't like it any more than you like it. But I can tell you this. I can look back over these years and I can honestly thank God for what he's done. Every chisel blow, every hammer blow, every cut of the knife, every slice into my innermost being, every tear, every pain, every hurt, every disappointment, every disillusionment, every moment of despair, I can tell you it is worth it all to be able to know in your heart that he has it all. One day you're going to stand before him and in that day you're going to recognize how insignificant, foolish was what you held on to when you see what you missed. When I think about all of you young people here, many of you singles, you've got your whole life before you and Satan's tricked you, deceived you. You're holding on to this relationship and this sexual desire and this vocational commitment and all of these things which are passing. God can satisfy them, everyone, in his perfect fulfillment. If you'll give it up, he'll give you something better than you could ever arrange, manipulate, or create. It is yours for the dying to your old selfish independent streak, yours for complete and total surrender. Father, in Jesus name, I pray that we might recognize that we stand and sit today in your awesome presence. Known only to you is that vast host of blessings, that vast array of potential which you see in each one of us, ready, willing to be brought to fruition if we would but surrender and die to our selfish independent spirit. I pray today in Jesus name that there might be confession and repentance as you have surfaced those areas. A renewed commitment today to be broken, whatever is necessary, that the total life be brought into submission to your will. I pray for those who are unsaved and need to make that place their trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. That they might understand that they're willing to confess their sins and ask for your forgiveness based on the death of your son Jesus at the cross, where their sin debt was paid in full. At the moment they're willing to ask in faith that you will forgive and cleanse and bring to birth a new life. I pray in Jesus name as you offer your invitation father, that many will stand to their feet and whisper this prayer to you quietly. All to Jesus I surrender, all to you I freely give, I will ever love and trust you in your presence daily live. I pray that your spirit would move into the saddle of our hearts today in Jesus name.