In this sermon, the speaker discusses various aspects of living a life surrendered to Jesus. He starts by referencing the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with two fish and five loaves of bread, emphasizing the importance of surrendering our resources to God for His blessing. The speaker then shares a personal journey of surrender and highlights the need to yield our lives to Jesus as the potter molds us. He also emphasizes the significance of serving others and giving our lives away, sharing a story of a man who experienced a miraculous financial breakthrough but failed to show mercy to someone who owed him a small amount. The sermon concludes with the example of Jacob, who had to come to a place of desperation and surrender before experiencing God's blessings. The speaker encourages listeners to choose deliberate surrender to God and live according to His calendar and purpose.

We really think and ask questions. It's hard for us to really learn. I'll never forget when I first went to Europe. Everything was different. The way you eat, the way you handle your spoon, your knife, and the way you sit. And it took quite a bit of time for me to understand. Because my orientation, dal fry and chapati, you don't look for fork and knife, right? You break it and dip it in one hand, you dry the flies and you eat it. So something different and new, we naturally don't give any significance and value to that, because it's not our natural thinking nor our upbringing. This is true of spiritual things. Usually we hear somebody teaching or preaching or whatever, a lot of things go over our head. And if they say something, we can laugh and we laugh with it. But God expects us to love Him, to be His with all our mind and all our heart. So that takes deliberate choice. So we are living by the calendar, God's calendar. We are on a journey. From the day you are born, you start this journey and the journey will end sometime in time. But it continues throughout eternity. But in time, there are events God has designed for us to understand His ways and live for Him. For He made us for that purpose. That's the difference between us, human beings and animals. And Christ died and He rose again and He went back to heaven and He sent the Holy Spirit. We read in the book of Acts, and all of a sudden these people were empowered and filled with the Holy Spirit, baptized in the Holy Spirit, and their lives were completely transformed. Immediate, instantaneous, supernatural, spontaneous, humongous thing that happens. You read that in Acts too. But then you don't read that happening every day as you read those 30 years of history in the book of Acts. You find their lives just like our life, ordinary, normal lives, but they had to make a commitment now to live with the power of the Holy Spirit. It can only happen by their responding, their acting, and their obeying. You read that throughout the book of Acts. So in this journey, what we have is, you remember the story of a man Jesus talked about, a man who owed so much money to his master, it is in crores. And he was called in to settle the account. That means to pay back the money. So did he have the money to pay back? You read that in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18. He didn't have any money to pay back, right? And then this man started crying, Please, your mercy on us, I don't have any, please. He was going to be thrown in prison, and his wife and everything else, and he was in terrible shape, and he just imagined he was crying and wailing. And his master had compassion on him. I mean, you think about it, a beggar who is very sick, and maybe has leprosy, he comes and looks into your eyes and says, Please give me something. I am sure you will try to find anything in your pocket. Or even if you are eating some chapati or banana or whatever, if nothing else, you will give that to that beggar, right? You have done that, am I right? I have done it. I was eating some food, and all of a sudden a little boy walked at the train and asked, I don't have any money in my pocket, so what I do, I just give my food to him. We all have done that. But all of a sudden this man is so terribly excited, because a huge amount of money was completely erased from his account. He owes nothing. And he is so happy, he can imagine he must be running and jumping. I don't know if he said Hallelujah, or Hallelujah, anything like that. But people are watching him, and they were surprised by whatever happened to him. Did he go mad? Or whatever happened? He said, No! This is what happened. And he was so happy. But along the way, he finds someone who owes him 10 rupees. And what he does, he grabs him by the throat. Aargh! He got scared. And said, Give me my money! He said, Saab, I will pay it, please, please. No, no, no, now you have to pay it. So this man was so cruel. And then his friends saw this and went and told the master about it. You read the story where the master then calls this man back and says, You just had this enormous, unbelievable, marvelous encounter of mercy and kindness and forgiveness. Why? You couldn't forgive and show mercy. That kind of tells us, Yes, we read the Bible, we have devotion, we pray, and we are filled with the Holy Spirit, and we know the experience of being forgiven and His mercy. But the question is, what do we do afterward? So that must help us now to live this out. So broken to be blessed. The first passage you read is in Genesis chapter 32, right? It's a story of Jacob. And Jacob had an older brother. Remember his name? Esau, right? Yeah. In Malayalam it is Esau. But here's the problem. God's plan for Jacob's life was beautiful. As a matter of fact, God promised that he's going to be number one and he's going to be blessed. And he'll be the one God has chosen for a special purpose. But one little problem. Jacob was a clever man. And he was too clever for his own good. Very conniving. As a matter of fact, God's name itself means deceiver. So he lies and he tricks his father and he robs, steals the birthright that belonged to his brother. But the problem, Esau now gets upset and wants to kill him. So he had to run. He's running away to his uncle, Laban. And if Jacob is four times obese, Laban is three times more obese. So he ends up with Laban. You know that. And then Rachel, we talked about that earlier. And he likes her. Then he gets married and finds out he got the wrong girl. And then again, 14 years of hard labor. And his job was taking care of sheep and all that. And 20 years of his life and he's running and running and running. Finally, we read in the passage, he's tired of this life. Trying to live with his own smartness. But keep in mind, Jacob was blessed by God already, but he's not able to experience it in his life because God simply said, okay, until you come to the place of giving up, fighting for yourself, I will leave you alone. This is all of our story. All of us, we have a little Jacob in us. And finally, you'll find Jacob come to a place where he's desperate. He's scared to death. And all of a sudden, he has an encounter with God. And you read there where he now becomes helpless. The man who was able to run very fast, now he began to limp. And he couldn't walk without a stick. And he gave up. In other words, finally he was broken. When you go out there, you will find mango trees and jackfruit trees and caulkin trees, a lot of these trees. But have you ever considered that mango tree came out of a seed, right? Long time ago. But only that tree, as big as it is, now bearing thousands of mangoes, it all began with one seed that said, Okay, I give up. And surrendered itself to somebody's hand. And that person took it and dug the place and buried it. And the moisture and the sun, everything worked on it and it broke. It's no more hard shell, it broke. And out of that breaking, all of a sudden, the new life starts. You can have 10,000 eggs sitting there, you'll be starving until you break that egg and fry it. Or even if you boil it, it will sit there until the shell is broken. Look at all the clothes you are wearing. You think all these clothes, everything we are wearing just came from somewhere else? It is no. If you really go back to the beginning, at the beginning of everything we have, it happened. Even your own very life, you'll find out, came out of something breaking and surrendering. And so the story of Jacob is not God is intending and wanting to destroy him, but rather God wants to bless him. Now, brokenness and blessing, those are two opposite words. How can you say, my life is full of turmoil, and tension, and pain, and agony, and misunderstanding, and gossip, and my expectations not being fulfilled, and I'm betrayed, and I'm physically not well, emotionally sick, and you are trying to tell me that this is going to be the reason, the means of your life going to be blessed. It just doesn't make sense. It's illogical. But then you go to the next passage, Psalm 1. It says, this person is blessed. When everything goes bad, his life is full of blessing. It's a tree planted by God himself, by the reverse of water. But then that life is qualified by choices he makes, she makes. No, I don't want to be part of this. I don't want to be part of this. I don't want to do this. There is a life of choosing to be rejected, to be misunderstood, to be alone, to be separate. And that process is not easy. Influence is one of the more serious things about our life, and the friendship we have, even for our family members, and whatever. And now you have what you call the convergence culture, where you have, you know, newspapers and radio and, you know, Android phones and, you know, thousands of voices you hear and people talking, but in the midst of all it, how do you close your eyes and plug your ears and say, I just want to walk alone. And that takes suffering. But the result is amazing. Then the third passage, we read Romans chapter 9, verse 1 to 5. Again, it is a very personal diary where this great Saint Paul says, you know what, I just don't know what to do to save my people. I don't know what to do to help them. And then he says, if, if I could give my very life and sacrifice it, and if that would save, I would do it. That means he understood the principle of giving up, sacrifice. And sometimes we forget that when God calls us to be a blessing to others, it can happen automatically. No. There is a price to be paid. Whatever that is. Either you're fasting, you're praying, or sharing your resources, or asking forgiveness, or, you know, being silent when you could be fighting about it, or forgiving someone who is really mean to you. All this takes you to give up. And through that, others be blessed. And that's what Paul said in Corinthians, 2nd Corinthians, you'll read there, so death works in us and life for you. Think about Mother Teresa. Think about Father Damien. Think about thousands of people like that. We are amazed by their life and what they have accomplished and what they do, but sometimes we don't understand the sacrifice, the pain, the agony they embraced so others can be blessed. And this is what Jesus is all about. Okay, finally, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 14, you have the story of feeding of the 5,000. Yeah, there were two fish and five loaves of bread and 5,000 people plus a lot more other people. But how they're going to be blessed? He took that and He blessed it and He broke it. And then the miracle happened. So because of the time factor, we have to end here, but I wish you would pick it up from here and study this. But this I can tell you without telling long stories, my own journey. You can live another 20 years or 50 years and you will be frustrated, frustrated, angry, empty individual. Or you can choose to say give up. I surrender. And Jesus is Lord and I yield, I surrender my life to Him. You know the song, how Thine own way Lord, how Thine own way. You are the potter and I am the clay. Break me, melt me and mold me after Your will while I am waiting, yielded and still. So it is by dying we live. It is by giving our lives away we find it. It is by going out of the way to serve the poor and the needy and the helpless we are blessed. The one who holds on to their life, they are right. Bible says they will lose it. But those who lose it, they will find it. And now you can think about where you are in your journey and it will not happen overnight. It will be maybe years as we continue to walk and as we experience this. But one thing for sure, God's plan before the world began, it is for your blessing. And the blessing we understand things in physical terms, material things, but it is far more significant when Lord had all the world riches and popularity and everything and Abraham stand there empty handed, God came and whispered in his ear, Abraham, I am your reward. All you need is me. Let him have the whole world, but I am yours. That is the richest individual and the happiest person. And that is our promise.