WHAT’S GOD UP TO? : SURRENDER
As I have walked with You, exercising my gift of teaching, I have asked hundreds, if not a few thousand Christians, to tell me in their own words the dictionary definition of “surrender”. Almost to a person, they say, “To give up”. And they are right up to a point. “To give up…” are the first three words of the definition. But the dictionary definition has five words and you don’t have “surrender” without the last two words. The last two words of the definition are, “under pressure”!
Surrender is not something that happens on a sunny day, during pleasant times. No army ever raised the white flag until every shot had been fired and every rat eaten. The day before, they still had faith in “Plan B”. Just like armies, we are escape artists by nature and God knows our flesh dies hard!
Charles Solomon, the author of Handbook To Happiness, said something I heard years ago and never forgot, “If you fix the fix God fixed to fix you, He will just have to fix another fix to fix you.”
The “under pressure” part of surrender is the grace of God, orchestrating and engineering circumstances to bring us to the end of ourselves. Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation” and Paul, through the Holy Spirit said “ we glory in our tribulations… “(Rom 5:3). Are we?