I Surrender All

For the past month the Lord has taught me many lessons about surrender, and they've all been very painful and/or uncomfortable. Corrie Ten Boom once said, "I hold all things lightly, so it won't hurt for my Father to pry them loose from my hands." I had to learn not to hold on too tightly.

Before I left for Canada at the beginning of this month, Mom bought a signed copy of Elisabeth Elliot's "A Chance to Die" for me to read on the plane. It forever changed my life. As I read, the Lord convicted me of my need to surrender everything in my life -- something I hadn't done. I experienced small moments of surrender -- where I gave up little things or parts of big things -- but I wasn't living surrender. Right there in the plane I surrendered all to God, not knowing the consequences, but looking forward to the ultimate prize -- Jesus Christ Himself.

Reader, when you surrender all of your life to God the consequences are often costly and usually painful, but "he is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose" (Jim Elliot).

During my week in Canada, the Lord took me at my word and required not only the dearest thing to my heart, but my life as I knew it or had thought it would be. Everything was turned over. When I said I wasn't coming back the same Carey as when I left, I wasn't kidding. I left the old Carey behind me.

The moment I returned to the US, God had already taken care of so many things for me that I thought I had to deal with when I returned. There were some things that I had to give up, and I gave them up gladly. But there was still one thing I struggled to surrender. I had held it so closely to my heart, that I did not even realize at first how much it would hurt to let go... but I had to.

I have written before about laying your Isaac on the altar -- a great topic to write about and exhort others to do, but when it came to applying it to myself it was an entirely different matter. Reader, I guarantee you that when you are a child of God being sanctified, the Lord will at some point ask you to surrender something (or someone) very precious to you. Only until you surrender it completely will you even have the chance of getting it back. Maybe your sacrifice will be required and never returned, but I do know one thing: if you do not surrender your heart's desire, you most surely will not get it back.

Does this sound cruel? I sometimes felt that God had dealt cruelly with me. Why did He answer so many prayers and make the situation seem like His will -- only to take it away from me? But when I step back and look over this summer (in particular), I would not change a thing that happened. The spiritual growth brought forth and the deepening that only pain can bring is priceless. Even if I never get back my "Isaac," I take comfort because God worked beauty into me through the furnace -- and I have only a glimpse of the end result. I would go through that over and over again. God's will is perfect.

The entire week I was in Canada, one hymn continually played through my mind -- "I Surrender All." It has become my theme song:

All to Jesus I surrender
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In his presence daily live.

I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.

All to Jesus I surrender,
Humbly at His feet I bow,
Worldly pleasures all forsaken,
Take me Jesus, take me now.

I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.

This past Sunday, I heard a sermon that drove the point home for me: "The Cost of Being a Disciple." When you are a disciple of Christ, you have to follow His example and deny yourself the passions and desires that rule your life, crucify your flesh, take up your cross as Christ did... you must lose your life in order to gain it (Mark 8:35-36). My life is not my own, and if you are a follower of Christ -- neither is yours.

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith -- that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

~ Philippians 3:7-16 (ESV)