Big God, p114-115

This rattles me every time I read it. It's a long excerpt, but so good.

The Myth of Security
Not only did Jesus say that we should love Him more than anyone else, He also, "Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it." (Mark 8:35) We must surrender our lives to Him to find a life worth living, but something gets in the way - our need to control. Uh-oh. We all have it, don't we? We have a real need to control and to be in control, because if we feel that we're in control, then it perpetuates the myth of security in our lives. All of us have bought into that idea that we can be secure somehow - it's part of the American dream! But notice I called it the "myth" of security. It's a myth because you can never know what waits around the corner. We each create our own infrastructure and build up walls around us that appear to provide security. But no matter how hard we try, that security is just a myth. You have no idea what tomorrow holds. You may lose your job, your home, your spouse, all that you hold dear.
The security, a core ideology of Americans, so important to us is really a myth because of the unknown. And yet this sense of security causes us to take risks for our benefit all the time. We tell ourselves, "I built up this nest egg. Therefore, I can do this for myself and I'll be okay." But simultaneously this myth of security paralyzes us from taking risks for God, because we think, "I've got it together! I have a comfortable life and a little nest egg set aside. I can't risk that. I can't put it all on the line and go do that new thing You're calling me to do, God. I can't lay aside the family business. I can't lay aside that house. I can't aside these comforts." We get paralyzed by that satanic, false sense of security. And God wants to deal with that. Because the only secuirty we can truly have is found in the person of Jesus Christ and the gospel of God, the only real security. As Christians we need to be willing to take risks according to that reality - risks that bring glory to God and benefit His kingdom, instead of benefiting us.

Read it. Big God by Britt Merrick. "What happens when we trust Him"