Sweetly Surrendered

 For some reason many people live their Christian faith as minimalist. Their attitude is what is the least they have to give to the Lord. Others live as Christian maximists. They live wanting to offer God everything. No sacrifice is too big. No assignment is too large or too insignificant. They live sweetly surrendered. Which one better describes you? 

It is the pattern in Scripture to live surrendered. To offer Jesus everything even to the point of our very lives. Living sweetly surrendered seems pretty foreign among the people of God. This was normal for the early disciples. Jesus told them to deny self, be willing to suffer and to follow wherever He leads. [Luke 9:23] This is the pattern. Paul exhorts us to lay our lives down before God as a living sacrifice. [Ro 12:1]. Paul modeled this example in [Acts 20:24]. The biblical pattern is to sweetly surrender. Whether it be God calling Noah to build an ark or Peter to forsake a great catch of fish and his boat. Both sweetly surrendered to follow the will of God. 

There are those who will defy the will of God. They will stiffen their necks. They will harden their hearts like petrified rock. They will bow up in rebellion like Jonah and the nation of Israel. These will fight to the end not to surrender. They would rather go to their grave than surrender to what God wants. They somehow justify rebellion as hanging on to what they think is best. They fail to reason that God alone knows what is best. 

Christians have no claim on their lives. We have been bought with a price. Jesus owns us and we are called to sweetly surrender. Many see this as a place of fear and anxiety. It really is a place of freedom. God knows far better than any of us how to engineer our lives. He knows what is best. Sometimes  His best leads down roads of suffering and other times down roads of bountiful blessings. He gets to determine what road we travel. 

Living sweetly surrendered is to live without fear or anxiety. We relinquish all control and do not have to stress about the details. We are to follow His guidance in His word day by day. [Ps 119:105] Day by day He gives enough light for that day. We surrender daily and go where He leads, and in doing this we will end up at His intended destination. 

It is liberating to live with no will of our own. It takes the pressure off in decision making. God makes those decisions for us. He does the calculating. We just follow where He leads. How would life be different if God's people lived sweetly surrendered? How would that change your life? I think about the lyrics to the old song I Surrender All. All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give, I will ever love and trust Him, and in His presence daily live. Those words should flow through us like blood through our veins. We should live sweetly surrendered to Him no matter what He calls us for us to do. A surrendered swarm of soldiers marching against the kingdom of darkness. We listen and submit to the marching orders of our Commander In Chief the Lord Jesus Christ. We serve where He assigns. We love those He calls us to love. We give what He demands we give. We follow wherever He leads. That is simple. It only gets more complicated when we rebel and refuse to surrender.