SURRENDERING ALL

"I surrender all..... to thee my blessed saviour". So, this hymn has been on my mind/lips for some days now and I can't help but write out the lyrics so I can actually realise what I've been singing.

Staring at the words of that song, I realise that surrendering my life to God really freaks me out. Probably for the same reason it freaks you out. It freaks me out because like you, I don’t know what God’s going to do with my life if I surrender it to him. 

You know what scared me the most about God while growing up? Being sent to live in some remote place for the rest of my life. Now that I think of it, I grew up in Africa – Nigeria for that matter, where else could be more remote than the white man’s grave? 

All my years I lived in Africa and for most of those years I had the same fear some of you had. I was afraid that if I surrendered my life to God, He would send me to some remote place where they don’t have light or cable TV and I just couldn’t take that chance.

I couldn’t take the chance that God would choose to do something with my life that didn’t fit with my hopes and dreams and so I did what so many of us do with our lives - I held on as tightly as I could to my life and everything that mattered to me because life felt safer and easier that way.  

                                          
You know what I think every single christian has in common? We're all holding something from God because we're afraid of what He might do if we let go. I honestly can't tell you how scary it is to "surrender" to God, so I just hold on.

Some of us are holding on to relationships. There’s no way we're surrendering our dating lives to God because we're pretty sure the moment we do, He'll ask us to be single for the rest of our lives. For some of us, it’s our finances, our career, a certain behavior, a secret sin, an addiction… the list goes on

I don’t know what you're specifically holding on to, but we all are holding something and tempted/deceived to believe life is safer and smarter that way. What if we got it all backwards? What if I told you that surrendering the most important things in your life to God is actually the smartest decision and safest thing you can do with those things?

How do I know this? I know because no one has ever surrendered his life to God and lived to regret it. No one! Not one person in the history of the world has ever given what mattered most to God and lived to regret it. Just ask Abraham, David, Moses, Esther, every and any person in the bible who surrendered to God,  Me. 

It's true, so true. If you obey Jesus and surrender your life to him, you will overly bloom.