A Call to Faith and Surrender

One of the hardest truths of the Bible is our call from God to surrender and sacrifice the things we think are important to us.  By nature we don’t like that—our nature wants to be independent and self-sufficient, not dependent on God.   God’s call for us to yield and submit to Him is no doubt the hardest part of following Jesus! 

We don’t understand the idea of surrendering to God all at once.  This is something God teaches us over time.   Romans 12:1 gives us a unique perspective on how we can know the will of God—we need to “offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God.”   And that invitation in that verse has the idea of sacrificing ourselves on a daily continual basis.

Jesus on a number of occasions invites us to surrender.  He used words like dying to self, picking up a cross, hating our life.   Christ’s teaching seems strange to many in today’s culture that has become increasingly self-absorbed and narcissistic, a culture that believes the good life is to be found by giving more attention to self, not less. 

But Jesus doesn’t let us get away with that.  He wants us to understand that the best thing we can do for ourselves is to surrender our lives to God.  “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”   “If anyone comes to me and does not hate… even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.  And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer who gave up his life in his faith journey against the Nazis of Germany during WWII wrote this, “Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.”