Surrender and Re-Surrender
Monday, January 26, 2009 at 06:00AM 
The first "S" word we'll look at this week is "surrender".
Christians talk a lot about the joy of surrendering to God, but who among us can surrender to Him once and stay surrendered? Surrender means admitting and accepting my own weakness versus the strength of another with whom I have some conflict.
You may now be thinking, Oh hold on, now, I certainly have no conflict with God, but forgive me when I tell you that such a claim makes you a liar. Human conflict with God, while He works to reconcile us to Himself, is the major theme of the Bible and the major problem in all of our lives.
Surrender to God means saying, "I'm weak, I've had enough of fighting you Lord, and I give up. Do with me what you will." As wonderful as it seems to surrender to the source of all power in the moments when we recognize our weakness or we are tired or distraught, God created us with free will which continually leads us to forget our promises to God in favor of our own desires, and the cycle of fight and surrender begins again.
Ezra, a biblical scribe and scholar (whose book is between 2 Chronicles and Nehemiah in the Bible), tells the story of over forty thousand Israelite captives who were freed by the Persian king Cyrus so that they could return to Jerusalem and rebuild God's Temple. God had commanded Cyrus to allow this, and the freed Israelites were happy to go and do the will of God.
When the Israelites arrived in Jerusalem, they were so frightened of the strangers who lived around the ruined city that they could think of nothing but praising God and built an altar immediately on which to worship Him. Some years later, though, after the Temple has been built and the Israelites are living more or less peacefully among their neighbors, God looks down and demands that they be sifted, the godly from the ungodly because so many of His chosen people have chosen foreign spouses and begun to worship false gods, so that the community of believers has become polluted.
We may think we are smarter or holier than those ancient Israelites who allowed foreign gods and false beliefs to waylay their faith in the one God, but are we? When we put too much importance on our jobs, homes, or cars; when we put too much faith in our bank accounts, our own brain power, or our spouses; when we spend more time planning what to wear or what to watch on television than we do in prayer--how surrendered are we to God? Those other concerns become alternate gods when we place them higher in our thoughts and plans than we place our own Creator.
We can't surrender to Jesus once and think we are set for eternity. Paul told us to "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling"(Philippians 2:12b, NIV). This doesn't mean we should work for our salvation; we should know we are saved by faith alone (read Romans 9, and the book of James). But salvation is like a puzzle to be worked out. We're given all the pieces (and the picture to model them after) when we first accept grace, but we spend the rest of our lives putting those pieces in place and then having to re-do the puzzle each time with remove a few pieces by getting caught up in someone or something other than our Savior. Even religion can cause us to pull pieces out of our salvation puzzles.
Every day I need to re-focus my mind on Christ and remember our relationship and the grace that granted it. My family, my job, my finances, my happiness are all important and take work to maintain, but none are more important than my identity in Christ and none of these people or things has any lasting meaning without what He has done for me.
Do you need to re-focus and re-surrender to Christ today? Are you working out your salvation?
(Photography by Ryan Forkel)
Reader Comments (1)
I've recently started reading your blog, and it's always encouraging. I like how you break it down to the basics. You don't assume people will know Biblical background, but you take the extra effort to explain details - "Ezra, a biblical scribe and scholar..."
I wish you success in whatever your hand finds to do!