Surrender

Our church recently held a conference over a weekend about Living in Grace.  It was a very thought-provoking conference with an excellent speaker, but something in the lecture (and thankfully also in the outline!) stuck out at me.  I still think about it almost every day, and not much is able to so totally capture my attention and thoughts for so long. 

Friday night’s session focused on God’s unlimited and perfect love for us.  Saturday evening, it covered surrender.  I was having trouble paying attention, but when our speaker read this quote, my attention riveted to it as I found it on the outline in my lap.  Here’s the quote:

Surrender is believing that Jesus does not love me because I am good. In fact, as pleased as God is with obedience, my goodness can be nothing but self-centered outward compliance, based on personal resolve and determination.

I paid rapt attention after that, trying to take in as much information as I could.  Why?

Because those two sentences scared me.

Again, why?

It’s as if those lines were written for me.  I know, and have even said before, that obeying God’s laws in thought and action brings me happiness and satisfaction.  After all, if God’s commandments are the instruction manual for humanity, then everything will be better when we follow it.  I have a good deal of self-control, and I can pretty much make myself do or not do whatever I want. 

So basically, I have mastered “outward compliance” with my “personal resolve and determination”.  And by “outward”, it doesn’t just mean what we do; it means even our attitudes and thoughts and desires that are “good”.   All of those things are really outward things anyway, compared to the depths of the soul.  If my heart has not truly given up trying to be good to allow Christ to work in my heart, then any obedience is just me trying to make myself worthy of the salvation God freely gives. 

So, for about two weeks, I felt pretty down.  Anything I do eventually comes back to me trying to be good, when “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). 

Hopeless and helpless.  That was how I felt.  Not that I thought I wasn’t saved, but I just felt like I was disappointing God.  And for me, disappointing anyone is the end of the world, even if it’s someone whose opinion I don’t really care about.  If I thought that I had disappointed God, I would be crushed.

Then I looked at the first sentence again:  “Surrender is believing that Jesus does not love me because I am good.”  That reminded me of something from Friday night:

“There is nothing you can do today that will cause God to love you more.

  There is nothing you do today that will cause God to love you less.”

God’s love for me is so complete, so unlimited, so perfect that it cannot possibly grow.  How can something be longer than eternity?  Or how can there be more of something that is infinite?  How can anything be deeper than bottomless?  Or how can it be larger than something limitless? 

I’m not going to lie.  I still don’t have the whole surrender concept figured out.  But what’s better is that I know that it’s okay.  God still and always loves me…totally, completely, perfectly, eternally loves me.  And He loves you too.

[Quotes taken from Living in Grace by Paul Kooistra]