Discipleship Network Forum

Rediscovering the Lost Secret to a Fulfilled Life

If you’re like me, there’s hardly anything in life more frustrating than when you lose something that’s important to you. The day is off to a bad start if you can’t remember where you put your car keys, your cell phone, or the computer file you’d worked on all day yesterday.

Everything else is put on hold until you find what you lost.

On the other hand, nothing is more exhilarating  than to find something you thought might be gone forever. Jesus tells three stories about this kind of experience in Luke 15, where a lost sheep, lost coin, and lost son all were regained with great joy.

Have you ever had this kind of experience?

Recently I uncovered a “lost” secret to having an adventurous, discovered-filled life. I feel like the man in Matthew 13:44 (MSG) who unexpectedly found “a treasure hidden in a field for years.”  How could I have missed or neglected this “treasure” for so long?

The secret is amazingly simple, found in a single word. It’s a word that probably sounds wimpy or even defeatist at first—yet it’s anything but that.

The word is filled with explosive power and potential, but this may not be obvious at first. It is a lot like nuclear energy—power hidden away for millennia inside of tiny atoms until activated.

Even though this word is never used in the Bible, the concept is found throughout. However, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard a sermon by this name.

So here it is, the forgotten key to a happy, impactful, and prosperous life:

RELINQUISHMENT

Dictionaries define relinquishment as surrendering, releasing, letting go, or yielding. The closest Bible “proof text” I could find was an obscure marginal reference in Psalm 46:10 (NASB): “LET GO and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

The secret to having God exalted in our lives is in simply letting go—relinquishing  something we treasure to Him. Or, as Jesus told us, we must lose  our life in order to find  it (Luke 17:33).

Relinquishment takes a person’s life from ordinary to extraordinary…from bland to blessed…from victim to victor…and from boring to bold. In contrast, nothing is duller or more depressing than trying hold on to what we already have.

Abraham’s son Isaac was just an ordinary young man until Abraham relinquished  him to the Lord and put him on the altar of sacrifice (Genesis 22).

Once Moses relinquished  his ordinary shepherd’s staff (Exodus 4:1-5), it was transformed into “the rod of God,” able to perform mighty miracles.

There was nothing extraordinary about the five loaves and two fish the disciples had on hand—until they relinquished  their supply to Jesus (Matthew 14).

The stone waterpots in John 2 contained only ordinary, colorless, tasteless water, until Jesus took the bland water and did a miracle—turning it into sparkling, tasty, intoxicating wine. You see, whenever RELINQUISMENT takes place, God does miracles and life gets exciting.

So why is it so easy to miss this? The answer is simple: Because of fear and unbelief, we tend to hang on to our meager resources rather than entrust them into the hands of God. How sad, for He has shown throughout history that He can do far more with the resources than we can.

The life of faith is never ordinary, bland, or unexciting. But the “religious” life is a completely different story. Religion always turns the wine back into water and removes the fizz from the adventurous life of discovery God planned for us.

Jesus relinquished the rights and privileges of His heavenly life in order to embark on the great adventure of redeeming humankind and giving us a right to enter the kingdom of heaven. Still today, He beckons us to a life of relinquishment, where it is “more blessed to give than to receive”  (Acts 20:35).

Instead of being a life of boredom or defeat, a life of relinquishment is a life of anticipation, success, and victory. What could God do with that “thing” you are holding in your hand? You’ll never know until you relinquish it to Him. That’s when the fun starts and the fizz returns.

In one of Jesus’ most famous sermons, He told three different parables about things that were lost: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son (Luke 15). If He was giving the same sermon today, He probably would add the Parable of the Lost Jetliner.

The facts of the story would already be well known. A commercial Boeing 777 carrying 239 people suddenly vanished from the sky. Despite pervasive modern technology such as radar, communication satellites, and Google Earth, the simply plane could not be found. Debris sighted in the ocean turned out to be a false alarm, having nothing to do with the missing jetliner. Black box “pings” were heard at times, but then the batteries apparently went dead.

People all over the world were captivated by the story. Everyone loves a good mystery, after all.

Video clips of anguished family members were shown by cable news. Unbelievable pain, anger, and confusion fueled tears and tortured screams. Oh, what love…what loss…what agony.

Meanwhile, TV pundits and aviation experts spouted never-ending theories on what could have happened. Was terrorism involved? Did one of the pilots take the plane on a suicide mission? Was there some kind of catastrophic electrical failure? Had the plane been hijacked and landed in some remote location? One CNN anchor even asked if a black hole might have been involved!

After more than a month of fruitless searching for the hapless jetliner, billions of dollars had been spent by countless countries and humanitarian organizations. But despite the focus of the entire world and a massive outlay of resources, the plane and its 239 people remained LOST.

At this point in the parable, Jesus would segue to some personal applications for His followers. In particular, He would note a strange fact: While people around the world devoted enormous time, money, and technology to recover a lost plane and 239 lost people—people who were already dead—there were hundreds of thousands of LOST people in every major city in the world. “Where is the passion, anguish, and commitment to find and rescue those lost people?” He would ask.

Jesus then might remind us that when He stated HIS mission statement, He was also giving us OUR mission statement as His followers: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost”  (Luke 19:10). I don’t think He was referring to lost jetliners. He meant people—sinners in need of a Savior.

Shouldn’t we be challenged to have the same kind of anguish for lost souls as the relatives have for their loved ones who were on Malaysian Airlines Flight 370? Shouldn’t our devotion to rescue the perishing surpass the energy and resources shown by the search teams combing the Indian Ocean? Where are our tears for the lost people all around us?