Surrender is the topic of this blog, and it’s a theme I think some people, I hope many people, are interested in. Surrender is a difficult thing to define and leading someone to a place of surrender is way more challenging then one would think. Ultimately God is in charge of our surrendered state of mind and heart, so I pray that this blog will be a tool that the Holy Spirit can use to assist people in getting to that place of surrender.

Our surrender to God takes place in the spiritual realm, a dimension that is very real but seems just beyond our reach. Our orientation to this physical, seen world is etched in our minds and we are acclimated to its patterns and behaviors. The spiritual world is, in a sense a mystery to us. It is filled with more questions than answers.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.” If that is true, and I believe it is, then it is imperative for us to better understand that spiritual world.

Whenever you deal in the spiritual realm you are dealing with the intangible, with the unseen. This earthly world we see and experience is subject to a greater, more real world that is all around us, the spiritual unseen realm. The spiritual realm is difficult to grasp because there is so much we do not know about it, nor can we totally perceive, or understand while we are here in our physical world.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. ¹⁸ So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

What an interesting turn of words Paul uses here. How do you fix your eyes, or sight on something you cannot see? And, the things we can see are not the permanent but only temporary.

Paul is giving us several comparison’s here:

• we are wasting away – yet – inwardly being renewed
• our light and momentary troubles – are achieving – an eternal glory that far outweighs them all
• we fix our eyes not on what is seen – but – on what is unseen
• what we see is temporary – but – the unseen is eternal

It is in that unseen, eternal world where surrender is born in us, and it comes from the beckoning heart of God.

Surrender is that subtle “knowing” that there is more of God, and a more transforming life here in the seen world, than what you are currently experiencing. It’s the tug that you feel toward the eternal unseen in those quiet moments of wonder when you are in His word or enveloped in prayer.

The reason we feel that subtle drawing is because God wants His people to recognize their need for more of Him, and then to come to Him to fill that need. We, too often, fill that need with everything but Him, until the filling (of our own making) doesn’t satisfy the way we thought it would. Then when we can’t “feel” Him we are quick to accuse Him falsely for not showing up.

God gave us the perfect example of one single individual in history who did live a perfect, surrendered life, Jesus Christ. He wants us all to follow the example of Christ and be surrendered followers – not all will do it.

C.S. Lewis says, “God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.”

If He is drawing you personally to surrender, it is because there is more of HIM He wants YOU to have. The gracious, beckoning heart of our God may be drawing YOU because He wants YOU to experience HIM more fully. What an amazing thing! The God of the universe wants more of you, so you can have more of Him!

There is something “more” that He wants to give you through surrender and only through surrender does God deliver the “more”.