Sunday night we had church service at our house. My team, Kaitlyn’s team (another all girls team), and two girls from another team got together to fellowship and worship. We started off the night by just thanking God.
Thank you God for freedom… community… love…truth… your word… our senses… family… adoption… our squad… Bolivia… our contacts… and so much much more. There are so many things that I am thankful for.
Thanking God just brought us all into His presence and what a great place to start the night. Continuing on we listened to a podcast by Francis Chan on Surrender. There’s so many times that I’ve heard that word, “surrender,� but what does it really mean?
Surrender: to give up, abandon, or relinquish
According to the Bible:
Luke 14:25-27 “Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.�
You might be thinking right now… God wants me to hate my family? No, God wants you to love your family, but He must be first. If you are not willing to put God before those things, even yourself, He’s says that you cannot be His disciple. In the book Radical by David Platt, he talks about this verse and he says it like this, “the love that you have for God should make the love that you have for your family look like hate. “
What does it mean to surrender your life? Do you give up areas in your life that you’re willing to give up or maybe even a couple of things even that you don’t want to give up? If God told you He wanted you as a missionary in the Middle East, would you go? Or how about if He told you that He wanted you to remain single instead of being married? Or on a smaller scale, spending time with Him tonight instead of going to that big game this weekend all of your friends have been talking about?
I’m not saying these things to make anyone feel bad or anything like that. I’m saying these things because there are different areas of my life that I don’t feel as if I’ve surrendered to Christ. If that’s the case, do we get to pick and choose what areas of our life we can surrender? Like okay God, I won’t go to the game tonight but if you expect me to stay single all my life you’re out of your mind. No that’s not how it works. When you surrender your life you surrender all of it, even the parts that are really hard to give up.
This is something that I feel God is teaching me right now and I pray that I continue to surrender my life daily to Christ! I also pray that when you surrender your life, you surrender all.
JESUS, HERE’S MY WHITE FLAG! I SURRENDER RIGHT NOW!!
