Janine Mason (00:00.844)
Hey, good morning and welcome to the Heaven and Business podcast, you're with Janine Mason. And I'm here talking about the messy intersection between faith and business and family, all of life. And you know how it sometimes gets messy. Today I wanna talk to you about the whole thing of surrender. And I'm in a season where the Lord's been talking to me about surrender. And I get the sense that he's talking to many of us about the same thing.
I've been saved since I was about 13. So that's a lot of years now. And I would say that in all those years, I have listened to the voice of God to the best of my ability. I've been obedient, I've responded. But in this season, I feel like I'm learning this new language of surrender. And you might ask, well, how come it's taken you so long? I have that same question myself. And I think part of it is the fact that I grew up in a family with two older brothers.
Their favorite sport, I like to tell people, was picking on me. And part of that was, you know, pinning me down, sitting on top of me, forcing me to surrender to them, making me feel powerless. And in all those circumstances, I learned to kind of steel myself and say, I won't surrender to anybody. And I was, I am, was and am a very determined person, a pretty stubborn person, some people would say.
And I think I yielded and surrendered to a certain extent to the Lord. But in this season, I feel him inviting me into a greater level of surrender, of coming to that place where I say all that I am, all that I have is yours. And if you'd asked me a year ago if I was in that place, I probably would have said yes. And now I can look back and say, I'm not so sure that I was on the journey of surrender.
When the Lord started talking to me about this and asking me to kind of news it aboard to tell other people, I thought, God, this is a bit of a hard sell. How do you tell people who think they are totally surrendered that actually there's a greater level of surrender and that it's totally worth it? Yeah, give up your life. This is a great, easy thing. Give up all of your life and just serve the Lord and take whatever comes to you. I know as business people, we like to turn...
Janine Mason (02:24.706)
talk about return on investment and it on the surface, it kind of looks like there's not much return on investment because there's no guarantees when you surrender your entire life, everything about you, all your desires, everything that you have and everything that you are, that it will go how you think it will go. But what I'm discovering is that the more I surrender, the more I find the depths of who he is.
and the more I feel his closeness and nothing else matters. And things that used to bug me just don't bug me anymore. And I can feel myself changing in the light of his presence. So what does this look like? I don't know. Actually, Andy asked me a few months ago, he said, you seem to be in this new place with the Lord and I can see change happening in you and around you. And it's quite remarkable. And he asked me,
How did you get to this place? Was it one big thing or lots of small things? And so I spent some time thinking about that question, like, what was it that brought me to this place of laying my life down afresh and saying, Lord, you can have all of me. And I can look to lots of little different things, but really at the heart of it all is that the Lord has been pursuing me and that the Lord has been pouring out his goodness. I know one of those threads of
him pursuing me was bringing me to the end of myself. There was an area of my life where it refused to yield to hope and I just would think about the future in that particular area and feel somewhat like hopeless because I'd had so much evidence of why it wasn't going to go right. And I decided to go on a journey and I felt like the the Lord's invited me into this place of
really going after a solution for that issue. And as I pressed in and talked to people and asked for prayer and got the help that I needed, what came out was this place of being in a greater level, surrendered to what he had for me rather than what I wanted. And I discovered that actually what I was desiring was feeling good about myself. I wanted this thing because I wanted to feel
Janine Mason (04:47.106)
good about myself. I came from a place of having zero self-confidence and I had come so far. And then I realized, man, I'm still got, there's a place in my heart that is still looking to feel something. And as I surrendered that and said, Lord, I'm willing to never feel satisfied, to never feel like I'm doing something significant. If only I can meet you in that place. What I just started to discover was that the Lord met me in that place.
There's lots of different ways that he's been pursuing me and bringing me and inviting me in. And the method doesn't matter so much. My journey doesn't matter so much because what I do know is that the Lord is pursuing each and every one of us. And he's inviting us into this place of total surrender. I came across this scripture. It's in Psalm 66, verse 13. And I'm going to read it to you. says,
I come before your presence, Lord, with my sacrifice. I'll give you all that I've promised, everything that I have. I have a collection of scriptures that are on sticky notes on a wall where I pray downstairs. And this has become a staple, like every morning when I read that scripture again and I look, say, God, I come afresh and I surrender everything that I am, everything that I have. You can have it all.
I was reflecting on this question. The Lord often talks to me in questions. And one of those questions was, what does it look like to live a consecrated life? And another question was, what does it look like to be in covenant with the Lord? Those two things in my mind, at least, overlapped. And as I started to dialogue with the Lord, I realized covenant is about all of me for all of him.
I'm in a marriage covenant with Andy and I don't bring 50 % and he brings 50 % to make 100 % in the middle. We each bring 100 % of ourselves, all of our finance, all of our debt, all of our quirks, all of our sense of humor, everything that we are, we bring together and we give to one another in that marriage covenant. And in the same way, the Lord comes to us and he offers us a covenant and it's all of him.
Janine Mason (07:08.056)
for all of me. And if you pause just for a moment, you'll very quickly realize that I get the better end of the deal every time. That the more I lay down, the more I surrender, the more I yield to him, the more of him, in essence, that I get. We actually get the Holy Spirit deposited in us from the moment that we get saved.
We have 2nd Corinthians 4-7 says that we are jars of clay that hold this great treasure that is the Holy Spirit inside of us. We are being filled continually. Ephesians 3 19 through 21 talks about we are filled with the fullness of the Lord as we experience his love that he can do immeasurably more than we can ask or think or imagine. There's multiple scriptures
Colossians, I think of Colossians 1.11 that talks about us being energized with all his explosive power. All these scriptures talk about the great deposit of the Holy Spirit in us. And so we're fully armed and equipped with his presence. Second Peter 1.3 talks about, he has given us everything we need for life and godliness. Everything we need is inside of us, but we access that through yieldedness, through surrender to him.
The more that I yield to my desires, my agendas, my priorities, my values to him and that I take on his priorities and values and I take on his heart, the more that that happens, the more he can trust and invest his power and his authority in me to be outworked through me. Another scripture I wanted to share with you, John 7.38.
He who believes in me, as the scripture says, out of his belly or out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. Galatians 2.20, I've been crucified with Christ. It's no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me. Everything that I'm talking to you about is this place of absolute surrender, where I recognize that the Lord has more for me than I ever realized.
Janine Mason (09:22.06)
And what I'm discovering as I start or as I continue in this journey of yieldedness is that everything I longed for is found in this place of abiding in Him. I've also realized that I've spent my entire life trying to grow and trying to get better at doing Christian things, of trying to be better at expressing who He is rather than...
leaning on and yielding and recognizing my own weakness and simply recognizing that it's Christ in me that does the work. I have felt guilty, I think for decades probably, that I can't sustain absolute passion and hunger for God in every moment. I've always followed Him. I've never, since I got saved at 13, I've never stepped away. I've never had a season where I walked away from the Lord.
But have I pursued him passionately within every moment? No, and I wish I had. I wish the answer was different. And I felt guilty and ashamed of that. And I suddenly realized, and within the last couple of months, maybe I'm not even supposed to do that thing. Maybe I'm not responsible for that. Well, you might be like, well, yes, aren't we told to pursue the Lord? I kind of think we've got it back to front.
because we love because he first loved us. We are in response mode. I like to think that God is the CEO of my life and not the chief executive officer, but the chief everything officer. And I'm the CRO, I'm the chief responding officer. So he initiates everything with me. He pours out love and I get to respond.
He pours out of his peace and I get to choose whether I respond to that and accept it and walk in that or whether I'll choose anxiety. So I want to encourage you today. Where are you at in this journey of surrender? I know that it seems like the more I give away, the less I have. But when you're giving away, when you're laying it down and you're leaning into the Lord, when you're leaning into the fact that you're in covenant with him,
Janine Mason (11:41.59)
you get far more than you could ever give. I was on a call with our Growth Path members this week, or last week it was actually, and one of them said, I keep trying to out give God. And he was telling the story of how the Lord, he had given one item away. It was a fairly big item in terms of what they sell in the store. They had given it away to ministry and then.
Within a few days, God outgave him. There was trucks and trucks of goods and services that were given to them, and they were to the point that they were trying to figure out, how are we going to store all this stuff? This week, he told us that he had had the best, one of the best five days ever in the last four years. Why? Because he yielded and he responded, and God gave him more than he could ever have thought was possible.
I'm inviting you in, or the Lord is inviting you in, to a greater level of yielding, a greater level of surrender. It means that it affects everything. It affects how you see people, it affects how you serve people. When I recognize that I am simply a bond servant, a slave to the Lord, slave out of love, then I recognize that I have the privilege of serving his people.
That shows up in the way that I do life. It shows up in the fact that Andy and I are quite different in how we deal with garbage in our house. I may stuff another inch or two of garbage on top of the trash can before I empty it. And he really likes, as soon as it's at the top, to empty it. What it means is, as I surrender to the Lord, that when I see the trash getting full, I think about, man, I am a servant of the Lord.
and therefore a servant of the people that are around me. And it means that my preference is to, I can probably get some more trash in there, but I serve out of love and devotion to the Lord. So you'll find me now emptying the trash can before my husband can get to it, taking it out and putting a new bag in there, simply out of delight for the Lord because I'm living a surrendered life.
Janine Mason (13:57.278)
It means that when people cut me off in traffic where before I would have got angry and frustrated, there's still a little of that in me. But then I realized that this is a broken person who's perhaps in a having a bad day has not been, you know, challenged as not being taught how to drive properly thinking of others. There's a grace and a mercy response that's coming out of me.
because I'm living in this place of surrender to Him. And as I surrender more and more of my desires and my values, my priorities to Him, and as I receive His love and I receive all of Him inside of me, it's actually changing the very fiber of my being. What does this mean for you in business? I think many of us, you will have heard us talk at Heaven and Business, you would have heard us talk about
partnership with God and that's still a great phrase that encapsulates what we believe is possible that you can partner with him that he wants to help you. But there's a deeper level that's available and that is total surrender, total yielding to him that changes everything about how you do life. It was interesting as we sat with these Growth Path members this week that three out of the four on the call
We're talking about that level of surrender. We're talking about yielding their heart to the Lord. And three out of the four of them also had stories to tell about the Lord's goodness being poured out. Does that mean that it's always gonna work that way? Absolutely not. But it does mean that in every moment as you learn to abide, that you're aware of his presence, that you're aware of his goodness. I am in this place where
Knowing that he's with me is more than enough. Right now, this week, I just met with my two older brothers on a Zoom call to talk over some health issues that my parents, my elderly parents in New Zealand are facing. In the past, that would have stressed me out, like I'm all the way on the other side of the world. I can't do anything. I don't really know what's going on. My mother is going blind and my dad is facing some challenges also.
Janine Mason (16:17.694)
And I feel powerless. And in the past, would have kind of had that whirling in the back of my mind. I would have been distracted. And I'm learning as I walk in this place of surrender simply to lay it in front of him and say, Lord, these are your people. They're my parents. You bless me with those parents, but they're actually your kids. And I trust their future. I trust even the time that they will pass their house to you.
And I asked that you would give me grace just to walk in that place of trusting him. He is pursuing you today and he longs for nothing more than you to be in total covenant with him where your yieldingness, where your surrender to him allows him to pour out more than you can ask or think or imagine. Not of all the benefits. Psalm 103 talks about the benefits of walking with God.
But the primary benefit of walking with him is him. It's his presence, it's his closeness, it's his joy, it's his peace, it's his love. I give all of me and what I can give is pitiful compared to what he gives back. As I embrace my weakness and exchange my weakness for his strength, I get to walk in a different way and you do too. I wanna pray for you before I sign off.
And so I pray that you would have a fresh revelation of his love, that you would understand all that is being offered to you as you lay down your life, as you crucify yourself as it were with Christ, that you would no longer live, but allow him to live in and through you. I pray that you would discover his presence. I would pray that you would discover the beautiful place of abiding in him, that you would access more of his love.
that you would access more of who he is, his very nature, his power, his authority, as you learn to surrender and yield your life to him. I pray this all in the mighty and beautiful name of Jesus. Amen. Hey, you can check out the events that are coming up on the Heaven and Business website. Check out it, it's under the tab of events. Lots of good things coming up. Check those out and we'll catch you next week.
