Why Is It So Hard to Surrender my Life to Christ?
I deeply understand how tough it can be to truly surrender your life to Jesus. I struggled with this personally and as a pastor for many years. Yeah, this is a journey, on the one hand. What you need to really understand is what’s behind your lack of surrender. Why is it that you’re afraid? That’s what you want to get after. And my experience is, most of us don’t believe God is good. In other words, I will surrender to someone that I know has my best interest in mind. And so, really, the issue isn’t surrender, the issue is unbelief.
And I have to tell you a couple of resources that helped me. Number one, a little book called The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer. It’s on the attributes of God. If you’ve never read the chapter on the goodness of God, just flat out read it. I mean, I read it like every day for about 30 days and then every week for about ten years just to get in my head that God is for me. He’s good.
Second is I tried to experiment. You might want to try this, is I read through the Gospel of John, and you know how we tend to read and we’re sort of the disciple and there’s the bad guys and the sinners, but I’m listening to Jesus and I’m one of His followers? Well, I read through it and every time there was sort of a person on the outside, I’d put my name in there. And so I got to experience how Jesus responds to people that have messed up and have done some bad things and aren’t very responsive. And that began to help me to realize, this is how He feels about me.
And then the final thing I do have to tell you is there is no halfway house. I mean, He is God. He is Lord. And don’t start convincing yourself that I can sort of partly surrender. I mean, if you’re married, I don’t know anyone’s mate who says, you know, I would like about 80% of your loyalty, but 20% with some other people is okay. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with people, it doesn’t work with God. If you’re in subtle, mild rebellion and think that you can just sort of stay away from God that way, He will bring what I call the velvet vice of disciple. You know, He loves you so much He’ll allow some circumstances and maybe some relationships to start going in directions to really get your attention. He loves you, He’s for you. Tell Him, I want to surrender, help me, and He will.
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