Photo Credit: SlideServe
Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. – Proverbs 3:5-6
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.” – Matthew 16:24-27
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
– John 12:24
Going a little farther, he [Jesus] fell face down and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” – Matthew 26:39
All in.
As Jesus prayed in the garden, just hours before He would give His life for us on the cross, He wrestled with the Father. He was willing; He was always willing. From the beginning of time…or before. He was all in.
Yet the weight of what He was about to accomplish must have pinned Him to the ground. Before He would be pinned to the cross.
All the sins of the world. All. The worst of it…my sins. He would take them all on His sinless self on the cross. To provide a path for us back to God. To restore us to holy God. For us “not His people” to become His people (1 Peter 2:10). God’s justice, love, and mercy revealed perfectly in Jesus.
This Sunday, at Movement Church, we sang that beautiful old hymn I Surrender All. I am so grateful that our worship leader, most Sundays, includes a hymn in the songs we sing. This time as we were singing, something happened to the computer/projector setup, and the lyrics vanished for a couple of verses.
A few of us kept singing without the lyrics in front of us (maybe because we knew the words from our own childhood). Growing up in an era of summer revivals and extended altar calls gave rise to knowing most songs from that section of the hymnal (often and thoroughly sung in revival services).
The words finally popped back up on the screen, but in the between time, my mind went back to those days in my youth of singing that song, over and over, at the end of a service.
Surrendering all is beyond our ability. We need the One who truly surrendered Himself fully to saving us. For this life and the next. My struggle in surrendering my life daily to Christ can be sullied by duty and self-interest. Worship leader Zac Hicks had this to say:
“The truth is that you and I are horrible surrender-ers. We don’t really surrender our lives to God with as much wholeheartedness, conviction, and forthrightness as we sometimes think. To make matters worse, when we find ourselves in a moment of “genuine” consecration and giving up of ourselves, we almost immediately and instinctively begin to feel good about ourselves and pat ourselves on the back. We are sick and diseased. Our only hope comes when we look to the Man who really did “surrender it all” to God, for us and for our salvation. He made himself nothing, taking the very form of a servant, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross (Phil 2).
If I’m honest, I can’t in good conscience say “I surrender all” to Jesus. What I can say, sing, even shout is, “Jesus surrendered all for me.” Not to us, not to us, but to Your name be the glory.” – Zac Hicks [Read the whole piece here.]
I do believe that we can desire to surrender all…as we move through our lives. As, by His Holy Spirit, we are being renewed in our minds, in the process of being conformed to the image of Christ, “daily daily” to the things of this world. Remembering, as Zac Hicks wrote, to ever remember and give glory to Jesus who did surrender all.
Robin Mark, a Christian singer songwriter from Northern Ireland sings I Surrender All. Mark wrote Days of Elijah. His “When It’s All Been Said and Done” is the background song on my Mom’s memorial page (if there was ever one in my life who was all in – as much as was humanly possible in her life – it was my mom).
Worship with me to this great old song – remembering what the Lord has done for us.
All to Jesus I surrender,
All to him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust him,
In his presence daily live.
Refrain:
I surrender all,
I surrender all,
All to thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Humbly at his feet I bow,
Worldly pleasures all forsaken,
Take me, Jesus, take me now.
(Refrain)
All to Jesus I surrender;
Make me, Savior, wholly thine;
Let me feel the Holy Spirit,
Truly know that thou art mine.
(Refrain)
All to Jesus I surrender,
Lord, I give myself to thee,
Fill me with thy love and power,
Let thy blessing fall on me.
(Refrain)
All to Jesus I surrender;
Now I feel the sacred flame.
Oh, the joy of full salvation!
Glory, glory, to his name!
(Refrain)*