the necessity of spiritual empowerment

​The Necessity to Spiritual Empowerment (Read time ≈ 7 minutes)
Proverbs 3:5–6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
 
Empowerment, confidence, boldness, strength. The path to achieving this is not the path that seems natural to us. There's countless self-help books, motivational bloggers, social media life coaches or whatever else there is. They try to teach to focus on yourself, to do things that satisfy you or make you feel empowered or worthy or whatever it is that they push. These techniques are also self-centered and self-focused. This is the cultural norm. The status quo. However, this is what leads to some of the most damning feelings a human can feel. This strategy is the idolization of ourselves. Putting our self in the throne of God. When we do this, we will inevitably show our flawed human nature. Whatever interpersonal activity we have bestowed upon ourselves to create this false sense of completion and accomplishment will eventually fall and break. We will mess up, we will lose site, we will fail. That brutal part about being human is that as much as we fail at things, we hate being failed by others. This is why idolatry is so dangerous. Rather we place ourselves or something else on the throne of our hearts, we will be failed, and it will hurt.
 
The source of true individual empowerment is not superiority of oneself over others or emboldening of ourselves from within, but rather it is quite the opposite. There is only one source of true empowerment, which is spiritual empowerment. That spiritual empowerment is found only through a complete and total submission to God. For a season, we may be able to find a false sense of stability. It will not last. Submission to God in order to find real comfort and peace is contrary to our very nature. Our flesh says, dominate, rule over, find strength and power. This only feeds an insatiable (Def: impossible to satisfy) appetite within us and ultimately compounds our issues. It is when we find that we cannot but that He can that we find the courage to lay down all that we are in submission to Him. “In all your ways, submit to Him and He will make your paths straight”. In all your ways submit to Him and He will do in your life what you never could do! Laboring for our own empowerment by our own strength is like a hamster on his running wheel. We are running and running but we never get anywhere and only wear ourselves out. True freedom, true spiritual empowerment is found only when we submit to the freeing service of God. Our heart and our souls are naturally submissive yet we also long for freedom. We are naturally submissive while longing for freedom. The problem is that we submit to things that lie to us saying they will make us free. This almost seems like an oxymoron, an impossibility. This is Gods design for us. The quintessential necessity to spiritual empowerment and freedom is found in submission to the true God who can both, put you to work and make you free. Jesus calls to us to submit to Him. That He would give us rest in our submission, for His yoke is easy and His burden is light (Matthew 11:28-30) and He also says, He has come to set us free (John 8:36). Is this a contradiction? No. It is the very design of God. He designed us to find freedom in submission to love. He created us to love and to be loved by Him. He created us to worship Him. True freedom is not found in the ability to roam and explore all that we desire. True freedom is found in flourishing in the very thing we were created to do. However, it is impossible to achieve this without a full, dying of oneself, submission to God and His will for your life. Our own understanding says to work and push ourselves to find satisfaction in the ways of the world. But His ways say, “submit to me, and you will find the path meant for you.” And this is what empowers us to rise up to the call of God that He has placed upon our lives. That we would find empowerment through submission to Him because ultimately the very power that we so desperately need to be satisfied is not our power, but His supernatural power that He places within us by His Spirit.