OK, I Surrender!
June 2, 2008
by Maria Simone
About a year and a half ago, I went up to the altar for prayer at my church. I had been feeling overwhelmed by all the things going on in my life at the time, and was about at the end of my rope. A precious woman of God began praying for me. All of a sudden she stopped praying and said “I’m sorry, but God is screaming something at me and I just have to tell you”. She then spoke two words to me that I will never forget – “CEASE STRIVING”. You see, I can be a little thick-headed at times, and I have been known to ignore some very obvious signs from the Lord, so this time He decided to “make it plain”. He had been trying to tell me for quite some time that the reason I was feeling so overwhelmed and fearful, and had even begun having frequent headaches, was because I was trying to do everything on my own.
Webster defines the word strive as “to exert oneself vigorously; to try hard; to make strenuous efforts toward any goal”. Makes you tired just reading it, doesn’t it? Jesus said in Matthew 10:30, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it”. I had been trying so hard to control everything in my life, that I was definitely losing it. I needed a lesson in surrender. Having spent most of my life in striving-mode, I didn’t know any other way to live. So God began teaching me what surrender means.
First, He showed me that I won’t surrender to someone I don’t know well enough to trust completely. At the time, my Bible study and prayer was inconsistent at best. So the first step was getting to know better the One who knows me through and through and loves me more than I can imagine. 2 Peter 1:2 (NLT) says “May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord”. The more I spend time with Jesus, the more I will know Him, and the more I know Him, the more I will trust Him, for He is absolutely worthy of my trust. And finally, the more I trust Him, the more peace I will have.
So what does surrender look like? Christian psychologist Dr. Linda Mintle has a few thoughts for us. Surrender says God is Master of the universe. Surrender says God’s perspective is higher than mine. Surrender says my circumstances are part of God’s eternal perspective. Surrender says I must allow God’s plan to open up before me. Surrender says I am not alone and never will be. Surrender says I accept life knowing that all things will work together for my good. Surrender means trading my plans for God’s plans. It means remembering, as Isaiah 26:12 says, that “all that I have accomplished, [He] has done for me”. It means realizing that I can truly do NOTHING of Kingdom value on my own, but if I remain in Jesus, I will bear much fruit, as He says in John 15:5. Jesus says “abide in the Vine”, and He will take care of the fruit. Now THAT sounds like the perfect prescription for surrender….
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