How To Find Full Surrender
It is hard to know what full surrender to God looks like. I was tricked by what I thought it was for most of my life. The word surrender is not clearly found in the New Testament, but the reality of it is there. A rough definition of Biblical surrender is that once we were at odds with God, we did not submit to Him, then we recognized our failure and relied on Him to make us whole. Pastor John Piper says, “We were our own masters, doing our own will, robbing God of not only everything He’s given to us, but our souls as well.” When we are born again, accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior, everything turns around. We do not feel the need to hold anything from God anymore and we are eager to be at His disposal. This means we will do anything He wants at any cost. When we do this, we are doing it with the power He provides, not by our own strength and control. We do it through His power so that He gets the glory, not us. The reality of this kind of surrender is there, even if the language is not.
I find myself asking, “How do I get to that kind of surrender?” That is a tricky question because theoretically, none of us will get to the point in our walk with Christ where we do not at points doubt our surrender to Him. We might not be totally surrendered, no matter what we do, until we are complete and with Jesus. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:3, “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not loved, I gain nothing.” Imagine this, Paul is saying that if he was to give all his possessions to the needy and was burned at the stake to save another, it would not be enough. He sacrificed everything he had but still felt like he was a fake. He sometimes doubted His Christianity. He doubted His surrender to God.
Perfectionists live in the perpetual doubt and fear of failing. I lived in doubt and fear with my panic attacks, making my family happy, losing Doug, making life altering mistakes, and my life plan not coming to floriation. That is the same thing we do when we do not surrender everything to God. We live in fear of failing Him, so we must keep some form of control thinking we won’t fail if we try hard enough. We don’t come to terms with the fact that there is nothing we can physically do that will get us into Heaven.
It is clear in the New Testament that we are not supposed to live in fear. Fear is of the enemy. I always tell myself; fear is not one of the fruits of the Spirit. God did not make His daughter to be fearful. I used to lie in bed at night and go through the day I had in my mind. I would ask myself, “Did I accomplish enough? Was I a good enough mom and wife? Did I do my work to the best of my ability? Did I say something to someone that I should not have? Was I a good enough Christian?” When we lay our heads down at night, are we pleased with the work God did in and through us? When we are fully surrendered to God, there is no room for fear. We have given Him control and we are trying to live according to His will. When we live a life of surrender, we do not doubt what we have done or not done because we are confident in what God is doing in our lives.
Confidence in what God is doing in our lives is what we should be aiming for. This brings us peace and joy at the end of the day. We can trust the decisions we make because we know He was in control of them, not us. A life of fear and doubt does not breed confidence.
When my husband was diagnosed with cancer, I had my confidence placed on worldly objects, my accomplishments, his ability to make me happy, and the comfort of the space I had created for myself. When one of those things broke loose from the pyramid I had made, the whole thing became unstable, and it was eventually going to topple over. To keep from crumbling, I had to adjust my control to surrender to Jesus, the One in control. Surrender brings us to a place where we can learn to adjust when the world does not go the way we think it should. We learn to adapt to God’s will through our surrender.
“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time.”—1 Peter 5:6
“And He was saying to them all, ‘If anyone wishes to follow Me (as My disciple), he must deny himself (set aside selfish interests), and take up his cross daily (expressing a willingness to endure whatever may come) and follow Me (believing in Me, conforming to my example of living and, if need be, suffering or perhaps dying because of faith in Me).”—Luke 9:23 AMP
Digging Deeper:
Think about your life of surrender. What does it look like?
What is God calling you to give up so you can fully surrender to Him?
Your reactions to situations matter. How can you adapt to God’s will instead of your own?
*This devotional was taken from the new book I am working on. It is about how God worked through my life as a perfectionist to living a life of surrender and trust in Him. It is about how I learned to adapt to circumstances in my life because I learned to adapt to God’s will instead of my own.