Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Surrender or Commitment?

Surrender or Commitment?

Published by Wesley Fryer in christian on September 9th, 2005

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Great men’s fellowship lesson this morning by Dwight Andrews. He challenged us to ask ourselves:

Are we driven by circumstance or assurance?
Are we committing our lives to God and the call of Christ, or surrendering?

He told about a recent radio program he listened to, in which a pastor from Eastern Europe was explaining how he didn’t understand the US Christian focus on the world “commit.” Usually in the Bible, when the world “commit” is used (in the NIV) it is in the context of committing sin. Yet we are always thinking about how “committed we are.”

Being surrendered is very different than being committed. It implies a willful, complete submission to authority, not a partial commitment. When we have commitments, we can have a lot of them, and we allocate our time, attention, and focus in parts to different things.

When we are surrendered, we have given ourselves wholly over to authority.

I created this quick graph to illustrate some of my thinking on this topic this morning:

Jesus calls each of us to live a life of surrender. Of submission. Which is total, not partial. This comes down to a basic issue of faith: Do we believe God is good, that Christ is who he said he is, and that in all things God’s will and power is sufficient for us?

Without this perspective of submission, I think we are driven by circumstance rather than assurance– I agree with Dwight. I also agree that we “worship whatever we trust.” We can only receive the gospel with joy when we give ourselves over to God’s authority wholly, submitting ourselves to him in a constant act of surrender.

When we do this, our level of life stress is directly affected. We experience the light yoke which Christ promises to those who lay all their worries and cares at the foot of the cross. Rather than experiencing overload in our lives, we experience margin.

We must come to the feet of Christ with the eyes, heart, mind and perspective of a child: surrendering all to the Authority we trust completely. That is a tall order, but one which I want to follow.