God’s will

The Gift of Surrender

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By Linda Rex

This morning I read an excellent devotional by Steve Arterburn called “Surrender or Fight”. In it, using the example of King Saul from the Old Testament, he pointed out how often we as humans are faced with the choice between surrendering our lives and wills to God or continuing to fight God’s plan for our lives.

King Saul was notorious for being a people-pleaser, who valued the opinion of the people more than he did his relationship with God. Rather than doing just as God asked, he did what would gain him the most approval from those whose opinions he valued. For this reason, King Saul failed as ruler of his people, and was eventually replaced by God with King David.

Surrendering to the will and purposes of God is one of the most difficult things for us as humans to do. At times it is really hard to accept what God permits in our world and allows to happen in our lives. This is especially true when it means the loss of something dear to us, such as a beloved family member or friend, or our reputation, or our comfortable way of life.

In many parts of America, being self-sufficient is an honored tradition. Dependency upon God is seen, not as a necessary part of our existence, but as a weakness or flaw. Acknowledging one’s dependency upon God may even be seen as unmanly or foolish. Truth is, in this country, a person could live their entire life without recognizing their need for or confessing a belief in God. Every need is fulfilled, and everything can be explained without introducing any thought of a higher power or a supreme being.

Believers in Christ can also fall prey to this way of thinking. We can go through our everyday lives with very little thought as to what God wants us to be doing or not doing. We have rules we can follow and laws we can obey. We have the expectations of our church and its members which we can work to fulfill. And we can be so busy doing all this, we miss God’s call to surrender completely to him. Instead of living in moment-by-moment humble, obedient, dependency upon God, we rely upon our own efforts and wisdom, and we work to please those around us.

This is an ongoing struggle. Relationships ebb and flow, and this is also true about our relationship with God. As human beings, we struggle to maintain any form of consistency about how we live our lives and handle our relationships. Maintaining a consistent and fruitful relationship with God, if left entirely up to us, would be an exercise in futility.

This is why we are called by Jesus to come to him and to find our rest in him. Jesus was fully surrendered to his Father, and yielded entirely to his Abba’s will even when it meant dying an ignoble, agonizing death. He wrestled with our humanity in the garden of Gethsemane, with tears and groans, begging on the one hand for another path to follow, but on the other, surrendering in humble obedience, saying, “…yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matt. 26:39b NASB).

The surrender God calls us to is a denial of self. As Oswald Chambers says in My Utmost for His Highest, “It is a question of being united with Jesus in His death until nothing ever appeals to you that did not appeal to Him.” This is a surrender of all our preconceived ideas of what it means to be a good person or even to be a Christian. Following Christ means he has the right to redefine who we are and how we live our lives.

Surrender means giving up our idols—those things we count on, or depend upon for our value and self-worth, our security and our sense of well-being. Surrender sometimes means releasing our hold on those we hold near and dear to our hearts. It can mean letting go of a toxic relationship, or setting free that loved one who is hovering near death. Surrender can also mean doing the difficult thing, like telling the truth in a difficult situation, or being willing to admit fault and ask for forgiveness.

But any surrender we attempt to do finds its roots in the wholehearted, complete surrender of Jesus Christ. We are called to rest in him, and participate fully in his communion with his Abba both now and forever. In some respects, surrender is a way of being—a frame of reference out of which we live our lives. Our decisions, day by day, are drawn out of this orientation of surrender to our Abba through Jesus in the Spirit.

In high school when talking of a particular war, one of my teachers liked to use the term “capitulation.” According to dictionary.com, to capitulate is to: 1) to surrender unconditionally or on stipulated terms, or 2) to give up resistance. God is calling each of us to capitulate, to surrender unconditionally to his perfect, loving will, and to give up our resistance to his Spirit at work in and with us and in our world.

Our capitulation, or unconditional surrender is our response to what God has done in Christ and is doing by the Spirit to bring our broken humanity into conformity with Christ’s perfected humanity. Our response, however feeble it may be, though, is swept up into Jesus’ perfect capitulation to his Father. This means we rest in Christ, in his perfect surrender or capitulation to his Abba’s will and purposes.

God brings us, at different times in our lives, to places of surrender. Circumstances in our lives, the evil Satan seeks to work in this world and in us, also create situations in which we are faced with the decision to either surrender to God’s will or to fight it. Growing in our intimate knowledge of God, learning to trust in his perfect love and grace as demonstrated to us in Jesus, enables us to capitulate. We rest in Christ and yield to the will and purposes of God, believing he will, in the end, take whatever is happening and work it for the best of all involved.

Thank you, Abba, that you are completely trustworthy and faithful. Thank you, Jesus, for fully surrendering to the will and purposes of your Father, and for including us in your perfect capitulation. Grant us, by your Spirit, a heart of surrender, and grant us the grace to rest fully in you, Jesus. Free us from our stubborn resistance to you, dear God, through Jesus our Lord and by your Spirit. Amen.

“Then he said to them all, “If anyone wants to become my follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it benefit a person if he gains the whole world but loses or forfeits himself?” Luke 9:23-25 NASB

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Prayer as Participation

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By Linda Rex

Last night I watched one of the episodes of “A.D.” in which the disciples were gathered together praying on Pentecost. The movie showed them repeating over and over the words of the prayer Jesus gave them.

I found this quite disturbing because I have a really hard time believing after walking and talking with Jesus for three years they had nothing else to say to God other than this. Surely they witnessed many conversations between Jesus and his heavenly Father. And the intimacy in that relationship could not have been hidden from them, especially when Jesus spoke about how the Father was in him and he was in the Father.

Inherent within this prayer though is the one lesson Jesus taught his disciples over and over: The kingdom of God was not going to be the kingdom they expected it to be. In other words, the kingdom to come would not be a restoration of the human kingdom of Israel, but rather a kingdom formed without hands—God’s kingdom of heaven established on earth through the Messiah Jesus, an eternal kingdom of divine rule, of God’s will being done, in every part of our human existence.

Sometimes when it is hard to find anything to say to God, it is helpful to be able to recite a prayer from memory. This is why these written prayers, or the prayers given to us in the Bible, are helpful. They provide a way for us to reach out to God in some way, even when our hearts are resisting the relationship.

In truth, prayer is an integral part of our relationship with God. Praying, in whatever form it may take, is our conversation with God. It can be as natural as breathing, as we go through our day and include God in every moment. It can be a spiritual discipline, being expressed in many forms both privately and publically, in which we take our concerns to God and intercede on behalf of others.

But in prayer, we must always remember the direction Jesus gave us—it is God’s kingdom and God’s will we seek to be done here on earth. In other words, we release our personal expectations and desires and allow God to do whatever he believes is best in the situation we are praying about.

God has a lot of unique ways in which he deals with problems. We tend to take a pretty direct approach, asking God to fix things and fix people. But often instead of changing the thing we think needs to be changed in a situation, God opts to change something completely different. And in doing so, he succeeds in bringing about what really matters—the transformation of human hearts and the restoration of relationships.

God’s heart is expressed through and in loving relationships. It is his nature to build, heal and restore. Sometimes God will tear something down so he can build it up again in a new way, or so he can build something entirely different. His wisdom surpasses us so much—we need to trust him to do the right and loving thing in every situation. We need to believe that he is indeed good and that his heart is full of everlasting love and grace for us.

The main thing that the disciples were doing that day of Pentecost was waiting. They were waiting on God, on Jesus to send the Holy Spirit from the Father. Their participation in what God was doing through Jesus was prayer. They prayed and they waited. When the Holy Spirit came and Jesus began to give them direction, then they acted.

Because they were living and walking in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the empowering, transforming Holy Spirit was made evident in a dramatic way whenever the disciples prayed. Their prayers were effective as they were prayed in accordance with the will and purposes of God. They prayed as Jesus directed them to pray and as they were led by the Holy Spirit to pray. So when they prayed, awesome things happened.

When we pray today in agreement with God through Jesus and in the Spirit, things happen—God works in new ways. Through prayer, we participate in God’s work in the world. We are included in his missionary work of bringing his kingdom to earth and accomplishing his will in the world. May we each be diligent in prayer, participating by the Spirit in Jesus’ perfect relationship with the Father, and seeking God’s will to be done in all things through Jesus our Lord and by his Spirit. Amen.

“Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]’” Mt 6:9–13 NASB

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