I think these 4 things rob us of our capacity to yield to God: Insecurity, pride, fear and impulsiveness. 

When we are insecure, our desire for the affections of others eclipses our desire for God’s. We measure ourselves by people’s opinions rather than our significance to God, who always acknowledges us as we are and is an unending source of affirmation.

Insecurity begets insecurity. Chasing validation from someone makes us forget to encourage someone else who may need it. Getting caught up in how others treat us leads us to mistreat others too. 

When we are prideful, we prioritise proving our love over actually loving others. We are impatient to see results, rather than seeing the people we are serving. We become poor stewards of the gifts we were given.

In my immaturity, I have many a time abused a spiritual gift because I was less interested in a person’s life than I was about playing a role in it.

When we act from fear, we cannot act from love. When I was afraid I wasn’t loved, I would try to verify that I was rather than finding instant comfort and support in God. My fears were always irrational and contradictory to what God says about me.

When I was afraid my love was not good enough, I was ashamed to be wholehearted. When I was afraid others perceived my love as not good enough, I was ashamed to be expressive.

Also, fear and shame desensitise us to needs around us. We don’t notice how we desperately avoid being hurt, resulting in the deep scarring pain of those we run and hide from.

When we are impulsive, we compromise our callings for something lesser. We give up pieces of our destiny, a destiny Jesus paid for.

The one time I told God explicitly I wanted to quit on something, I did not believe then that He would never ask something of me that He would not sustain me through.

God has never withdrawn grace from me, but I failed to accept it when I was blinded by pain. I forgot that all things were invitations further into His heart, and was more fixated on what my own had been dragged through. 

Feeling God’s heart is supernatural, and at the core of it, unconditional, selfless and faithful. The degree to which we yield to His perspective is the degree to which we love unconditionally, selflessly and faithfully. 

When we struggle to yield to God, we think we are ready for something He has said we are not. He can be in the middle of a process in our lives and we stop Him short. The corners we cut accumulate, snowball, and lacerate us. We may only feel the effects later.

And when we fail to embrace His process, we are too easily satisfied with stepping-stones to full breakthrough. 

Sometimes God wants to enlarge our capacity, but we lack the faith to see where He wants to take us and think we will remain small and inadequate to the task. So we give up.

But when God gives a dream, He expands us to accommodate that dream. We quit only because we do not trust Him to see things through.