Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. Isaiah 6:8
When I was a young boy, my dad mowed grass for commercial properties, and I used to help him. One day, as I was picking up the trash in the grass to keep it from getting chopped by the mower, I came across a twenty-dollar bill. To a kid, twenty dollars might as well be a million. I was ecstatic; I had hit the jackpot! Unfortunately, when I picked the bill up, however, it was chopped in half. There was less than fifty percent of the bill there, so I couldn’t even take it to the bank to exchange it for a complete twenty. I learned a valuable lesson the hard way that day: half dollar bills are worthless. If you tried to spend a half of ten-dollar bill in a store, the clerk would probably laugh at your joke. No one would take you seriously because everyone knows that you cannot do anything with a bill that is ripped in half.
So many Christians, particularly young people, treat their lives as if they were half dollar bills. You cannot spend a half of a dollar bill in a store, and you cannot give a half of your life to God and expect Him to use it. Stores will accept the whole bill or nothing, and God uses the same principle in using an individual. Many people would say that they want God to use them, but they are not willing to surrender their entire lives to God. They will give Him certain parts, but the rest they want to keep for themselves. They may be willing to give some of their time to God, some of their money, or some of their talents; yet, they keep back the parts they feel like they cannot give up. God can have the parts they are willing to surrender, but he cannot have their music. He cannot take away their television or internet time. They may be willing to surrender to teach a Sunday school class or be a deacon in a church, but they cannot surrender to go to Africa as a missionary. They may let God have the time it takes them to attend church, but they cannot surrender to God the time it takes to work in a ministry or attend door-to-door visitation.
No one would expect to spend a half of a dollar bill, yet many expect God to use them when they only give Him half of their life. Though trying to use a half bill would be useless, good things can be purchased with whole bills. When you surrender all of yourself to God, He can do tremendous things – far greater things than He ever could do with only half of you. Now is the time to surrender everything to God.
Read also: Isaiah 6:8-13
Quote of the day: "A ship at harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are for.”
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