You can have faith or you can have control, but you cannot have both.

Throwing down your staff is letting go and letting God. And that's counterintuitive for those of us who are control freaks. As our executive pastor Joel Schmidgall likes to say, "You can have faith or you can have control, but you cannot have both." If you want God to do something off the chart, you have to take your hands off the controls.

When we take matters into our own hands, we take God out of the equation.

Jesus loved, praised, and rewarded one thing: desperation for God that superseded decorum.

You don't need to seek opportunity. All you have to do is seek God. And if you seek God, opportunity will seek you.

We're called to advance the kingdom, not hold the fort. It's the difference between why and why not. It's the difference between if only and what if.

But what if, instead of spending all of our energy making plans for God, we spent that energy seeking God?

God cannot reveal His faithfulness until we exercise our faith. But because Abraham went all in, God was able to reveal Himself as Jehovah-jireh, God our Provider.

You don't have to live in fear that God is going to take away what is most important to you. After all, Isaac was God's gift to Abraham. But if the gift ever becomes more important than the Gift Giver, then the very thing God gave you to serve His purposes is undermining His plan for your life. God is no longer the End All and Be All. And when God becomes the means to some other end, it's the beginning of the end spiritually because you have inverted the gospel.

Put your Isaac on the altar! Then, and only then, will you see what God can do. He cannot give back what you do not give up. But if you surrender yourself to Him, He will provide the ram in the thicket.

We all want to spend eternity with God. We just don't want to spend time with Him.

You can take Psalm 84:11 to the bank: No good thing does God withhold from those who walk uprightly.