We are all imperfect people, with imperfect conceptions of God. There are things that we want Him to be that He just isn’t, and things that we don’t want Him to be, that He just is.
Each of us must improve our conception of God, and at one point or another that will have to involve surrendering to a Lord we never knew and never wanted.
In other words, If God has never offended you, you have not yet met the true God.
Each side wants to fix the world by overcoming the other
To make the other side surrender to their side
And by so doing, they only make the world worse
There is only one way that the world could be fixed
And that is by each side surrendering to Christ
In what way have you given up your own will
And submitted to God’s instead?
And if you haven’t
And if you won’t
Then can you call yourself a Christian?
Matthew 7:21; Matthew 16:24
Insisting that God meet you on your terms
Is the surest way never to meet Him at all
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.
In the course of this study, I have argued in favor of Jesus’s claim in Matthew 11:28-30
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Through this study I have made special effort to address the two groups that might disagree with this claim: the unbeliever who sees the commandments of God as a terrible burden, and the believer who struggles every day to be worthy of God’s expectations. Here were the main points in my study:
Speaking for myself, I am not yet done surrendering my will to God. I am still very much a work in progress. This is because even after having had some practice at it, surrendering is still hard to do. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.
As difficult as surrender may be, it is still easier than the alternative lifestyles of grit or appetite-satiation. And once that surrender is made, everything afterward is weightless. I have learned these facts for myself, personally.
So, surrender is easier, but it does not at first appear so. I believe this is by design. It ensures that no one accidentally stumbles into that better way. They have to take what appears to be the harder path, by faith, before they can finally discover for themselves that it is actually much, much easier.
This is the great secret. Many people live and die, never understanding what it was all about. They are perpetually frustrated, always searching for success and satisfaction, but never finding it, and yet the answer was there in front of them all the time. Hopefully you and I can do it better.
Christianity calls us to accept Christ as our master, and modern society would go further and say that he is an overbearing taskmaster, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Perhaps Christ’s demands are seen as heavy because he does at times asks us to do the impossible, but in practice they are actually very light, because we don’t actually do any of the heavy lifting for thme.
I cannot think of a clearer example of this than Gideon in the Old Testament, Judges 6-8. God called Gideon to accomplish a few things in His name, but the greatest of all was to stand against the Midianite horde with a small band of Israelite men. At the outset, Gideon had only 32,000 men, while the Midianites had approximately 135,000. As if that wasn’t mismatched enough, God then commanded Gideon to send home over 99% of his army, leaving him with a mere 300 men! The task seemed absolutely impossible.
But then, remarkably, the fulfillment of that task could hardly have been any easier! Once Gideon’s army was sufficiently small, God instructed the 300 men to surround the Midian army in the dark of night, then each soldier broke a pitcher, lit a lamp, and blew a trumpet. The sudden manifestation of sound and light on all sides drove the Midianites into a panic, and unable to properly tell friend from foe, they slew each other until only a fraction of their forces remained! Then, Gideon and his men dealt with the rest.
So, too, the true Christian who has committed his whole soul to the Lord may make incredible transformations in his life and accomplish wonderful things for the Lord. So much so, that it might seem superhuman what he has accomplished, and cause people to mistakenly believe that his effort was extreme. But this is not the case. Like Gideon, the true Christian accomplishes the impossible not by his own effort, but by the Lord’s.
We live in a world that demands strength and genius. In our vocations and communities, we are given a never-ending stream of demands, and we must constantly strive to meet them. God, however, requires so very little of us. Like Gideon, we do not have to be mighty, and we do not have to be brilliant. All we have to be willing to do is stand where God tells us to stand and perform the little things God tells us to do, and the victory will fall into our lap.
This is how God has “chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty,” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The foolish and the weak are sufficient, because so very little is required of them. All they have to be willing to do is surrender to the Lord, and anyone can do that.
Yesterday I shared scriptures which assert that refusing to surrender one’s will to God leads to all manner of evil, selfishness, and causing harm to the world. Today, I wanted to consider one other passage, the one where Jesus is asked which is the greatest commandment in the law:
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
-Matthew 22:37-39
Loving the Lord with all of one’s heart, soul, and mind involves offering each of those to Him, which is elsewhere summarized in the scriptures as our will “being swallowed up in the will of the Father” (Mosiah 15:7). Jesus listing this as the first commandment suggests that it is of a higher priority, but that it is not all. By putting it first, he is suggesting an order. Devotion to God naturally comes before loving our neighbor as ourselves. Thus, if not surrendering one’s will to God leads to harming the world, then surrendering one’s will to God leads to healing the world.
While the world may no longer be convinced of the importance of submitting to God, we do still value helping and treating one another with kindness. We value it, but also we are really bad at it. By inverting the proper order and putting self and fellow-man before submission to God, we have broken the entire sequence. We want to be good to each other, but we don’t want to submit to God, and so we end up treated each other horribly instead, violating our own ideal. Any cursory glance at the contention in our modern society will bear that out. The only way to get back to civility and compassion will be by putting things back in their proper order and first loving the Father and submitting to His will, just as Jesus taught.
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.
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.
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.
Spiritual Wanderings 