Letting Go and Letting God
Romans 7:7-25, Matthew 11:16-30[1]
Many of you may know that “Let go and let God”
is one of the slogans of the Twelve-Step movement. It’s based on the principle
that many have learned to be true: when we try to control circumstances and
people we wind up with a life that’s too much for us to handle. We feel
overwhelmed, we feel frustrated or anxious or both at the same time, and we may
feel defeated. All that comes from the “insanity” of thinking we can get the
outcomes we want in life with enough effort. Some of us don’t think that’s
“insane” at all; it’s simply stepping up and taking on our responsibilities.
But even if we don’t feel the frustration and helplessness of trying to control
other people, they most certainly do.
Last week we talked about how making our
religion a matter of following rigid rules leads us to a way of life defined by
whom we exclude. But the other side is what we do to ourselves when we take
that path of religious perfectionism. When we think we can “do it all by
ourselves” when it comes to following Jesus and honoring God, it’s a lot like
thinking we can control our lives and the people in it. We wind up frustrating
ourselves, or those around us, or both. More than that, we tend to express our
religion by condemning people. On one side we see people who are more
conservative than we are and we think that they’re too strict. On the other
side we see people who are more progressive and we think they’re too lax. It
seems like what we really want is to be in control of everyone around us.
That’s what’s going on in our Gospel lesson
with the strange comment Jesus makes about people being like children who
whine, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you
did not mourn” (Mt 11:17). John the Baptist lived simply and practiced a
rigorous form of discipline. And because he wouldn’t “dance to the tune” they
were playing, they wrote him off as demon-possessed (Mt 11:18).[2] On the other hand, Jesus came and lived life and laughed and welcomed all kinds
of people, and, perhaps worst of all, shared meals with so-called “sinners.”
Because of that, they wrote him off as a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of
tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19).
Here’s the problem with making religion about
following the rules: we always wind up making ourselves the measure of all
things spiritual. Like the crowds responding to John and Jesus, we condemn
those who are too conservative in our eyes, and then we turn around and condemn
those who are too liberal. But the hard truth is that making yourself the
measure of all things spiritual boils down to appointing ourselves as the
official rule-makers. And in the process, we make religion into something
oppressive. For ourselves, and for others. In contrast to all that, Jesus
announced that he had come to set people free from their burdens. He came to
free people who, no matter how hard they tried, could never live up to the
religious rule-makers’ demands. But he also came to free the rule-makers,
because what gets hidden beneath the façade of a “holier than thou” attitude is
the lingering doubt about whether you can ever fulfill all the rules perfectly.
I think we see some of that burden in St.
Paul’s anguish over his inability to keep the law. In our lesson from Romans
for today, he talks about the freedom that comes from letting go the effort to
control all things spiritual and letting those things rest in God’s hands, which
is where they belong. I’ll be the first to say that Paul’s teaching about sin
and the law in this chapter is another example of the challenge we face when we
try to read Paul’s letters: it gets really confusing really fast! But I think
the main point of what he’s trying to say is that any means we can come up with
by which we try to attain a “righteousness” of our own making is doomed to
fail!
The logic of Paul’s argument here is
complicated, and it’s difficult to sort out. But I think it points to the truth
that all our efforts to serve God in our own strength are flawed. All of it
comes under the heading of “religion”, and religion
can only remind us of how far we fall short.[3] It’s no wonder Paul is torn—not just about the fact that his own conscience is
guilty, but because he recognizes that anything he could possibly do to gain
eternal life by his own effort is ultimately futile. The only way to find
freedom is to turn to Jesus Christ. That’s where Paul winds up: “I’ve tried
everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who
can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question? The answer, thank God, is
that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted
to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve
God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do
something totally different” (Rom 7:24-25, MSG).
I think that sums it up pretty well.
The truth is that we will always struggle with
“this life of contradictions” as Gene Peterson puts it in The Message
translation. And all too often, we respond to the frustration of trying to
practice our religion on our own by simply trying harder. When we do, it all
becomes a burden that’s too heavy for any of us to bear. More than that, this
approach to religion brings with it other burdens. There’s the fear that what
we do may never be good enough. Sometimes we convert our frustration and fear
into anger. And we take it out on those we think are a “threat” to us. The
final burden is pride. When you put it all together, it’s all too heavy for any
of us to bear.
At the end of the day, as Paul recognized, the
only path to freedom from these burdens is through God’s love for us in Jesus
Christ. That’s where the wisdom of “Let go and let God” comes in. When we try
to control our lives, we take on a burden that will crush anyone who tries to
carry it. The wisdom of the ages has taught us that the burdens that we carry
only trap us in prisons of our own making. Jesus said come to me, lay down your
burdens, and I will give you rest. Of course, that’s not something we do once,
and call it good. Sometimes, it’s something we have to do every day: come to Jesus,
lay down our burdens, and accept the rest he offers. Sometimes we may have do
that multiple times a day. When we let go our own efforts to please God by
ourselves, to make our lives turn out the way we want, we can lay down the
frustration and fear and anger and pride that burden us. When we let God be the
one on whom we depend for everything, not only salvation and eternity but also
today and tomorrow, we can open our hearts to receive the joy, and love, and
life, and rest that Jesus promises.
[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm on 7/5/2026 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Douglas Hare, Matthew 123-24.
[3] Karl Barth, The
Epistle to the Romans, 252: when we undertake this effort on our own, “we
do but display the catastrophe of human impotence in the things of God.”
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