Surrender to God and win!

We Christians know this truth: "Surrender to God and win!"

But, speaking personally, I tend to avoid it.  I'm afraid God will ask everything of me.  In effect, I doubt in my heart he will fully satisfy me with himself if I give everything to him.

However, I'm learning there is no getting around this truth.  God does know what's best for me.  And when I don't obey, I live a half-hearted - even discouraged - life.

There are ample examples of people who live fulfilled, active and effective lives by surrendering everything to God.  The apostle Paul is an excellent example.

Heart-felt surrender in prayer is a prime way to obey and find the spiritual rest that comes from God.

Joyce Meyer discusses this well in a chapter on consecration and commitment in her fine book The Power of Simple Prayer.

"Prayers of consecration involve giving ourselves to God and prayers of commitment involve giving our situations to him," she says.

"When we pray the prayer of consecration, we choose to give ourselves, our entire beings, and everything about us to God," writes Meyer.  "This means an intentional decision to give him our bodies, our minds, our abilities, our weaknesses, and our attitudes and motives."

Meyer begins her morning with these words from Psalm 25:1: "Unto you, O Lord, do I bring my life."

In effect, she says, that prayer means that she brings everything to God in her life - herself, her family, her possessions, her money, her abilities, and her weaknesses.

"When we consecrate something, we set it apart for God's use.  Therefore, when we consecrate our lives, we turn our backs on fleshly desires, worldly values, carnal thinking, undisciplined living, bad habits, and on everything else that does not agree with God's word."

If we mean it, we can be sure God will start to work on us and deal with our weaknesses.

She tells of her own struggles with false accusations by friends which led her to leave a treasured position at a church.   She came to see that she had come to depend on her friends and position for security and value.  She also lived with anxiety and worries for a long time before surrendering them to God.

The prayer of commitment is closely related to the prayer of consecration.  It involves giving over a situation you are wrestling with to God.

"It means committing things to him, releasing the pressures and the problems of life and letting him work everything out . . . God can do more in one moment than we can do through a lifetime of struggles."

When I say "surrender and win", does this mean everything will turn out exactly the way I want?  Clearly not.  Even Jesus pleaded with the Father to spare him from being nailed to the cross.

But Jesus knew that the plan of God was ultimately the right one - a plan that would change history.

In the end, I am called to trust that God knows best.  And when I trust him, he will win - and I will please him which is my eternal reward.

The Olympic runner who prayed with power

Eric Liddell, a great Scottish runner who won an epic race at the 1924 Olympics, left an even greater legacy for Christ in China.

Many people know about Liddell today because of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire which tells how he sacrificed his chance to win the 100 metre race at the Olympics because it would mean running on Sunday, contravening his beliefs.   He did run the 400 metre race and won against the favoured Americans, coming from behind with a final burst.

But Liddell's story is much more than that.

In his book Praying Backwards, Bryan Chapell talks about Liddell's  prayer life and its impact on his work as a missionary in China.  He prayed persistently for Chinese to come to faith in Christ - and wound up in a Japanese prison camp where he died in 1945.

On the surface, his hopes would seem to have been dashed.  Instead of multitudes coming to faith, he died in an internment camp.

But Liddell's selfless service to others in the camp had a profound impact on others and Christian efforts in China.

A camp survivor said that without his cheerful and faithful support, many would have given up and died.  One of them said he was about to take his life when Liddell gave him courage and he later wound up training "hundreds of ministers and missionaries who have taken Christ's hope throughout Asia".

Other young men later rose to leadership of great mission societies in Asia, reaching many throughout the continent.

Chapell says: "Eric Liddell repeatedly prayed that God would use him to bring many in Asia to a saving knowledge of Jesus.  God did."

Chapell's point is that persistent prayer pays off.  If we are praying as God wishes us to pray, we can be certain that God will bring forth fruit from our prayers - eventually.

It is the word "eventually" which bothers us - including me.  I want results I can see now.  But God is calling me to trust that he will use my prayers for good - in his own time and for his own purposes.

Chapell reminds me that the Israelites prayed for hundreds of years to God, pleading with him to free them from Egyptian slavery.  God answered that prayer spectacularly through Moses long after many of those pray-ers had died.

Jesus calls us to be persistent in prayer and to leave the results in his hands.

Despite my impatience, I find that encouraging.  I can count on God to do what he says he will do.

Trouble is good for you?

Trouble can be good for you - if it drives you to God through prayer.

E.M. Bounds, a prolific author of books on prayer in the 1800s, says that God allows trouble in our lives to shape us into the likeness of Christ.  We need trouble.

Without trouble, we might easily believe we can manage everything on our own.  Trouble makes us realize we need help.

In his book The Essentials of Prayer, Bounds writes:

"Trial is testing.  It is that which proves us, tests us, and makes us stronger and better when we submit to the trial and work together with God in it."

Bounds says prayer "sees God's hand in trouble, and prays about it".

He suggests we should bow before God in the troubles we face and ask him what he will have us do.

"Prayer in the time of trouble brings comfort, help, hope, and blessings, which, while not removing the trouble, enable the saint [believer] the better to bear it and to submit to the will of God."

Bounds acknowledges that some troubles are of our own making.  But, whatever the problems we face, we can find hope, direction, and comfort in prayer.

Sometimes, we will find - like Jacob's son Joseph in the Old Testament - that the troubles God allows have a completely unexpected result.  In Joseph's case, he was sold into slavery and wound up becoming the Egyptian Pharaoh's right-hand man so that he could save his family, the future nation of Israel.

Bounds says: "God can and will lay his hand upon all such events in answer to prayer, and cause them to work for us 'a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory'."

He adds: "Prayer places us where God can bring to us the greatest good, spiritual and eternal.  Prayer allows God to freely work with us and in us in the day of trouble."

Of course, much depends on our attitude to trouble.  Do we accuse God of abandoning us?  Or, do we seek him to find out how he is using trials to make us more like him?

The apostle Paul bore suffering with the confidence that it would never compare to the glory he would see when he met Jesus in heaven.

That's something for me to remember when I'm struggling with anxiety.

A deeper love

How can I love God?

Most Christians know that obeying God is one way of showing love to him.  But is there more?  Is there a way of nurturing a true heart-to-heart love of the Lord?

Emily Lawyer, author of a short e-book Enough Already, says she stumbled across a way to love God through meditation and prayer while going through a couple of personal crises a few years ago.

The result, she says, is that her life has been transformed.  She has changed and the people she has shared this method with have been changed, too.

A pastor by training, Lawyer says she has seen people who struggled with reading the Bible become excited as they started looking for Jesus in the scriptures and then reflecting on what they found.

What Lawyer found was that God's grace and love are boundless.  And looking at his character - and appreciating it - helped her enjoy his love and bring about change in her life.

Most Christians, she says, feel that God wants them to meet certain standards of behaviour. 

She noted an instructor asked an adult Sunday School class what they thought Jesus would say to them if he visited their class that day. Most said they thought he would tell them to do better.

"Not one person . . . said anything about Jesus affirming His fierce love for them."

Christians have largely missed the truth that "change is the byproduct, not the goal," she says.  "Relationship is the goal."

In other words, our love relationship with Jesus is what we should be seeking.  Out of our love for him, we will become more like him.

Lawyer changed the way she read scripture.  Instead of asking what it told her to do, she started asking: "What does this make me appreciate about God?"

"The more you know someone, and find good character within, the more
you’re inclined to trust him," she writes. "The same applies to our relationship with God."

"It is virtually impossible to get to know the true God without falling more in love with Him," Lawyer adds. "And the more you believe that He loves you, the more you’ll trust and obey."

So, she launched several small groups using a three-step method:

1. Pray for God to show you what he wants you to see;
2. Choose a passage of scripture; and
3. Silently read looking through the lens of “What does this make me
   appreciate about God?” and then journal that truth.

Participants chose a scripture verse that caught their attention and then wrote a line or two in their prayer journals expressing their appreciation of God.

An example she gave was Jesus, filled with compassion, telling a widow whose son had just died: "Don't cry!"  And then he raised the boy from the dead (Luke 7:11-15).

Her response was appreciation for his compassion, for sharing the widow's hurts, and for making people the highest importance in his mission.

I am now incorporating Lawyer's approach in my own scripture reading and prayer.

You can find Lawyer's e-book on the Exponential web-site at exponential.org.  Here is the link to the book: https://www.exponential.org/resource-ebooks/enough-already/

A book that had a deep impact on Lawyer was Alex Aronis' Developing Intimacy with God, a book I have just bought.  I will likely explore this theme further in later posts.