What if You Just Quit?

What would happen if you just stopped trying so hard?  What if you were to just let go of all your goals and expectations and just give up? What if you just quit?

I’ve heard people joke about not wanting to quit smoking because “I don’t want to be a quitter.” Interesting, isn’t it, how we say, “Don’t quit! Don’t give up! Keep moving forward!” until it comes to something like smoking, because if you’re doing the wrong thing, giving up is the right thing. 

Going forward will not get you where you want to go if you’re going the wrong direction. In that case, stopping is progress. 

And maybe you don’t need to quit smoking, but we are all addicted to trying to save ourselves; to trying to do life our own way, on our own terms. Yes, even those of us who believe deeply that salvation is by grace through faith alone. 

Because there are also all those verses about working out your salvation and obedience and being equipped to do hard things, and so we think we’re supposed to strike some balance between giving up and giving our all, but maybe we can only ever do God’s works after we have been completely, one hundred percent, washed clean and emptied of our own works. 

There are so many things we think we “should” be doing - not even to please God, but to know him and to be who we want to be. Read your Bible, pray, go to church, serve others, etc. 

I am not saying you shouldn’t do those things. But ask yourself this: do you believe that if you just stopped doing all of them God would still keep you? 

Does your relationship with him depend on all the things you do to draw near to him, or does it depend on him continuing to draw near to you? 

Maybe you’re afraid of what might happen if you go down that road. If you stop trying so hard to be who God wants you to be, stop trying to know him better, stop doing All The Things that you know won’t save you, but you think you need to do to be obedient. You’re afraid of turning into one of the people who claim lip service to Christ but actually are just doing their own thing. 

But there is a night and day difference between weariness and apathy. There is a difference between quitting because you just can’t do it all anymore, and quitting because you never cared in the first place. Sometimes giving up means failure; sometimes it means surrender.

And I have this theory, one that I’ve been testing lately in my own life, that if you actually just stop trying, just let go of all the pressure to do good things, the Holy Spirit will take over and you’ll do them anyway. 

You’ll pick up your Bible because you’re hungry for it.

You’ll pray because you want to talk to God.

You’ll serve others because it lights you on fire.

You’ll spend less time trying to resist temptation because your heart will simply not want the same things. 

It’s not that you’ll never have to do hard things, just that it will be a different kind of hard. It’s not that the right things will be easy, but they will be…unavoidable. 

This feels so revolutionary in my mind right now, but it’s simply the gospel.

It’s Matthew 11:28-30, giving your burdens to Jesus and taking his easy yoke.

It’s 2 Corinthians 5, being compelled by the love of Christ.

It’s the Great Commandment, loving God first and letting everything else fall into place. 

I could even tie it into the section of Philippians I’m currently working on, where Paul talks about having no confidence in the flesh, in the things that make us look like good Christians.

It’s what we all say we believe, but our human impulse to keep finding a way to save ourselves is always there and it takes a lifetime of new breakthroughs to fully internalize the truth.

Which is why this post is late in the day on a Saturday, and I didn’t even post last week, because lately I am finding so many new ways to practice letting go and not trying so hard, even in the middle of a crazy two weeks of harvest.

This blog is important, yes, and I have plenty of reasons to keep a consistent schedule, but at the end of the day it’s God’s work and if I can’t get it done without working myself into a frenzied, exhausted mess, maybe I wasn’t meant to do it.

And I have been applying this logic to so many other things in my life, but this is long enough - so I will let you keep it going in your own life.

What if you just stopped trying so hard? What do you need to quit?