His queen is bearing down on my defenseless king. I know it. He knows it. It’s my turn and I have no meaningful options, except to delay the inevitable. So what will I do? Offer a draw? Resign? Never. I logout.
I don’t like the word, “surrender,” and I don’t think many of you do, too. The word gives off a message of admitting defeat. After all, isn’t it a battle term? When we sense an imminent defeat, and we surrender, we wave the white surrender flag, we lay down our arms, and we give up complete control to the enemy from that point forward. Just looking at the word gives me anxiety.
But what do Christians mean when we say, “surrender”? You will never find the word written anywhere in our English Bible, but the idea is everywhere. We use it all the time in the church, in Bible studies, when we speak to our friends. We say, “Surrender our life to Jesus,” but what are we really saying? In my mind, to surrender is to agree it is good to live according to God’s will, and to give up our will in exchange for the will of God.
Galatians 2:20
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
As wonderful as that sounds, we still struggle to surrender. It is hard to surrender because that is not in our nature. It goes against the grain of our selfish hearts. We don’t like to surrender, even for only part of the time. This is our life. We like to do what we like to do with it. The struggle to surrender goes back centuries to the Old Testament. The Israelites repeatedly chose to forget about God’s goodness toward them, and rejected his good Law. They did not surrender. We do the same. What wretched men are we!
But what is the real reason behind our reluctance to surrender? What exactly is it that we fear? What are we desperately trying to protect? The reasons may be many, but I sense the main reason we don’t like to surrender is because we don’t believe God is good. We don’t believe what the Bible says about our God is true. If I surrender to God, will he give me what I am after? How will I know he wouldn’t give me what I don’t want?
Luke 18:19 “No one is good—except God alone.”
When you and I were little, we knew how to leave it to our parents to give us the best. As adults, we know how to leave it to our closest friends to protect us, to stand up for us, and to fight for us. But when it comes to God, how come we all of a sudden don’t know how to leave it to him to do the same for us? The Bible says God is, after all, the only one who is truly good. He always does what is right, true, and good. His nature is good, all the time. In his goodness, he did not spare his Son so our sins could be forgiven. Can we honestly say that about anyone else we know?
In conclusion, surrender was never about surrender. Surrender has always been about lack of faith. You and I don’t believe God is good. A meaningful way to chip away at our disbelief is to read what the Bible says about him. The writers of the books in the Bible are trying their best every day to tell us that God is good. The more we read about him, the more we come to believe that God is good. The more we believe that God is good, the more natural it is for us to surrender to him. Let’s learn together, you and I, how to surrender to the Good One.
Psalm 34:8 Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.