You will never be enough so long as you hold part back.
You have to give your whole heart to Him,
And then you’re already enough.
How to be Good Enough
Grit vs Surrender- The Consequences of Refusing to Surrender
A Scriptural Condemnation)
I have spoken at length about the importance of surrender in the gospel of Jesus Christ. To put things simply, there is no such thing as being a true disciple of Jesus Christ and also not surrendering your will and autonomy to the Lord. Jesus surrendered himself to the Father, and every follower of him must do the same, or they are not really his follower.
But why is surrender such an essential part of the gospel? Why did Jesus need to do it, and why do we need to? What cosmic or fundamental principle requires it? That’s an excellent subject for another series, one that I may try to tackle later. Today, though, I want to point out how the scriptures make clear the negative consequences that follow if we will not surrender our autonomy to the Lord. Let us look at a few verses.
For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.
-James 3:15 (NIV)
Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.
-Proverbs 18:1 (ESV)
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
-2 Timothy 3:2-4
Each of these passages begins with those who set their own, autonomous self above all else. They are focused on their own desires, their own love, and their own ambition. Rather than surrendering their will they have set it upon the highest pedestal, and in each of these passages it is clear that what follows is harm and evil. The unmistakable message of the scriptures is that those who do not surrender will inevitably cause hurt and suffering.
We live in a society where people constantly speak of waking up to the notion that they “need to put themselves first.” That may sound nice and affirming, but anyone that follows it should know that they are embarking on a path that the scriptures have declared to be ruinous. One may, of course, reject that assertion, but if they do, at least they will know that the consequences that follow were foretold.
NOTE: In the process of editing this post, I accidentally published it twice before it was ready. I apologize for any confusion caused to my email subscribers.
Grit vs Surrender- The Core Disagreement
The Outsider’s Perspective)
I began this study focused on the secular humanist, who balks at the idea of God’s commandments restricting his pursuits of pleasure. Afterwards, I shifted to the confused Christian, who is frustrated by his attempts to obey God while still holding part of his heart back. I’ve spent some time in that latter category, and would like to briefly shift back to the secular humanist, and how he often misinterprets adherence to the laws of God.
From the secular humanist’s perspective, God and His commandments are understood as a checklist, one series of behaviors that are forbidden and one series of behaviors that are required. Thus, an individual’s level of obedience can be measured by a simple comparison to that list. The more points where you align with God’s law, the better you are in His eyes. If you get enough points right, Jesus will cover the rest and you get to go to Heaven, but if you are off on too many points, God will send you to Hell.
Thus, many secular humanist say they reject Christianity because they are not willing to conform to lists of rules that they don’t believe in. Many of them believe that God doesn’t exist, or that if He does that Christians fundamentally misunderstand Him, and that He really want people to be true to their own autonomy. Or if the Christian God did exist, the secular humanist concludes that He is a tyrant, and being true to one’s own autonomy and being damned for it would still be more noble than subservience to a cosmic taskmaster.
Autonomy as a God)
In short, the secular humanist sees autonomy as the ultimate ideal. It is the highest god that it would be blasphemous to sacrifice for anything else. Any discussion about commandment-following is therefore a distraction. True, the secular humanist might not want to adhere to those commandments, but the deeper, core issue is that they worship the autonomous self over any creator God.
To the secular humanist, the following of the commandments would be torture, because they would refuse to let go of their sense of autonomy. Every commandment would be like a shard, cutting deeply into them, fundamentally opposed to their most-precious ideal.
I think if Christians and secular humanists understood this, they could actually discuss the real issue, instead of quibbling over this side business of following rules. Yes, the true gospel of Jesus Christ leads to obeying God’s commandments, but that’s not really what it’s about at its core. It’s about letting one’s will be absorbed into the Almighty’s, and the Christian who isn’t willing to do that is outside true theology just as much as the secular humanist.
I won’t take the time to exhaust all of the reasons why the surrender of autonomy to God is essential in Christian theology, I am only interested in making the point that this is the true disagreement between it and secular humanism. I will, at least, use tomorrow’s post to share one of the reasons that the scriptures tell us that surrender is essential, but beyond that I would have to do a separate study to truly explore the matter.
Grit vs Surrender- Surrendered Autonomy
An Acceptable Offering)
In the last post we discussed how God has given to man his autonomy, but that the proper use of that autonomy is for man to then surrender it back to God. This was the example that Jesus set for us, where he had power that no man could take his life from him, and even personally desired that the cup of his sacrifice might pass from him, yet he surrendered his autonomy, submitting his will to the Father’s.
It is remarkable to me how lifelong Christians still don’t recognize the need for following this pattern in their own lives. I made this mistake myself for many years. I spent nearly three decades trying to be “good enough,” while still reserving as much autonomy as possible. I wanted to follow God, but only in my own way, and only to the extent that I was comfortable with. The rest I would hold back.
How did that work out? Not at all. I put in so much effort into trying to do so much good, but it just never felt like it was enough. I felt like I was cursed. I felt like Cain, where I made offering to the Lord, but they just weren’t being accepted. I could tell that something was missing, and I would try to fill that void with more “doing good,” but it was all in vain. What I wasn’t realizing was that it wasn’t a quantity problem, it was a quality problem.
Trying to be “good enough,” while still reserving as much autonomy as possible, is still withholding part of the heart from Jesus. And that’s a fundamental problem for us, because “the Lord looketh on the heart,” (1 Samuel 16:7). No matter how much else we put on the altar, while trying to conceal the part we won’t offer, we’re still not all His. There still remains a part of us that we don’t trust Him with, and that leaves a gulf between us that nothing else will fill.
Obsessed With Autonomy)
The western world is obsessed with autonomy. Total autonomy is actually a good thing, when it is used for a total surrender to God, but typically, that is not what we actually do. Instead, our society trains us to seize our total autonomy, and not to surrender it to anyone else, ever. Not even to God.
This only sets us up for a lifetime of always feeling insufficient and empty. We try to make ourselves fully good without giving ourselves fully to our Creator, which is only an exercise in frustration. It sets us up for a life of pushing and trying, but never actually being made better.
How great the revelation when we realize that we don’t need to worry about how to make ourselves better, we can instead let go of the ego, the need for control, and the appetites that drive us. When we let those things go, we don’t even have to make ourselves better, we just are better naturally.
Where effort only ever led to defeat, surrender is the path to victory. Where making better choices never works, capitulating all choice to God always does. Where the giving of strength never breaks shackles, the giving of the heart brings true freedom.
Grit vs Surrender- Autonomous or Not?
The Mixed Man)
Yesterday I shared about my personal struggle with addiction, and how I only found liberation as I surrendered my will to God, taking the steps that He set before me and not my own. Then, true healing and freedom blessed my life, but I want to be very clear that it did not, and never could have, come about in the way that I wanted it to. I had to do things that I didn’t want to do, but that God chose for me.
This points to an interesting paradox in the gospel. Autonomy is essential to God’s plans for us. Right from the beginning, God created a man and a woman who were designed with the capacity to make their own choices, and He even gave them a tree to exercise their choice one way or the other.
“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee,” (Moses 3:17).
If God did not mean for man to make his own choices, God never would have set things up this way.
But also, part of God’s plan is that man should surrender his will. Thus, we are all meant to have the ability to choose our own path, but to then give it up to the Father.
“Submit yourselves therefore to God,” (James 4:7).
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service,” (Romans 12:1).
The Ultimate Example)
Notice how Jesus followed this pattern perfectly. His autonomy was supreme and no one else had any power over him:
“I lay down my life. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again,” (John 10:18).
Of course, when it actually came time to lay down his life, Jesus’s own will, his autonomy, pulled him from it. It was his desire that “this cup would pass from him.” Even so, he surrendered that autonomy, declaring to his Father, “not as I will, but as thou wilt,” (Matthew 26:39).
Tomorrow let us think some more about what this means for us personally. We will consider questions such as, how do so many of us, even Christians who fully believe the message of the Bible, fall into this false belief that we can satisfy God while holding onto our autonomy? And what does it look like to truly surrender to the will of the Lord?
Spiritual Wanderings 