This is part of my year-long series exploring human-centered alternatives to the spiritual promises in Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest. Today’s entry, “Have You Ever Been Speechless with Sadness?” promises that believers who completely “sell everything” and “strip yourself of everything that might be considered a possession” until they stand before God as “a mere conscious being” will become true disciples, claiming that total surrender makes Jesus’s hard commands “easy” for those with His disposition.
Here’s what stripping away everything actually delivered:
Brother Francis had been living as “a mere conscious being” for seven years, and he was beginning to suspect that God wasn’t as interested in his radical surrender as Chambers had promised.
It had started with the rich young ruler passage that haunted him during a men’s retreat. “Sell everything you have,” Jesus had commanded, and Francis had heard it as a direct word to his own comfortable suburban life. The sadness had been immediate and speechless—just as Chambers described.
Within six months, Francis had liquidated his marketing consultancy, sold his house, given away most of his possessions, and moved into a Christian intentional community dedicated to radical discipleship. His wife Lisa had initially supported the decision, moved by his spiritual conviction and their shared desire for authentic faith.
“Strip yourself of everything that might be considered a possession,” Francis had explained to concerned family members. “Stand before God as a mere conscious being. This is where the battle is fought—in the domain of the will.”
The surrender had felt spiritually intoxicating. No more mortgage payments, no more client demands, no more accumulation of stuff. Just simple living, prayer, manual labor, and waiting for Jesus’s hard commands to become easy through divine disposition.
But seven years later, Francis was discovering that poverty wasn’t as spiritually transformative as advertised.
The intentional community had dissolved after three years due to personality conflicts and financial mismanagement—apparently even “mere conscious beings” struggled with basic human dynamics and practical decision-making. Francis and Lisa had moved to a small apartment where they lived on Lisa’s part-time teaching income while Francis did odd jobs and continued his spiritual pursuit of total surrender.
The surrender, however, had only revealed how little there was underneath all the possessions. Without his career identity, his home, his financial security, Francis felt not like a pure conscious being before God, but like a middle-aged man who’d made a series of impulsive decisions based on religious feelings.
Meanwhile, Francis watched his brother Mark build a successful architecture firm over the same seven years. Mark hadn’t surrendered anything to Jesus—he didn’t even believe in Jesus. But Mark had used his talents consistently, employed twelve people, designed beautiful spaces that improved communities, and provided well for his family while contributing generously to local charities.
Mark’s “unsurrendered” life was producing more tangible good in the world than Francis’s radical discipleship.
The most painful realization was watching Lisa. She’d followed Francis into voluntary poverty out of love and shared spiritual conviction, but seven years of financial instability had worn down her enthusiasm for radical surrender. She worked longer hours to compensate for Francis’s sporadic income, worried constantly about their future, and had given up dreams of travel, education, and starting a family because they couldn’t afford any of it.
“Maybe Jesus’s hard commands aren’t supposed to be easy,” Lisa had said quietly one evening as they calculated whether they could afford both groceries and utilities. “Maybe they’re supposed to be hard because life is hard, and following Jesus means facing that honestly instead of pretending that surrender solves everything.”
Francis had wanted to argue, but the words wouldn’t come. Speechless with sadness, just like the rich young ruler—but not because God was asking him to surrender more. Because he was finally admitting that he’d surrendered everything and received nothing in return except the illusion of spiritual superiority.
The battle wasn’t in the domain of the will before God. The battle was in learning to live responsibly in the world God had apparently left him to figure out on his own.
That night, Francis opened his laptop and began researching how to restart a consulting business. Not because he’d lost faith in radical discipleship, but because he’d found faith in something Chambers had taught him to distrust: his own capacity to contribute meaningfully to the world through sustained, skilled work.
Surrender hadn’t made him a mere conscious being. It had made him an irresponsible one. But responsibility—that felt like resurrection.
Reflection Question: What would change if you stopped trying to become a “mere conscious being” and started using your actual abilities to contribute to the world?
This story is part of my upcoming book “The Undevoted: Daily Departures from Divine Dependence,” which offers 365 human-centered alternatives to the spiritual certainties in Chambers’ devotional. Each day explores how reason, community, and human resilience can address life’s challenges without requiring divine intervention.
God or Delusion? 