Surrender. Come on, be honest. Did the word make you cringe? I’ve always equated surrender with a white flag, admitting defeat. Losing the battle, game, or ahem, argument. But the other day the Lord gave me a new meaning of why surrender is the pathway to more fullness, more…Life.
Me and the Lord have this game we play. He likes to show me the meaning under the meaning in words. One morning, I was praying with Chuck and a picture just popped into my mind.
Sur render.
Surrender? I asked.
No. Sur render.
He was trying to redefine the word for me. I had to go look up what the Lord was hinting at.
At the most recent Yes and Amen retreat we talked about how God leads us through a process of transformations. We made a whole list of worldly mindsets we take off and Kingdom mindsets we put on. One of those was Self-sufficiency transformed into Surrender.
When I got home, He kept unpacking this. A weak view of surrender feels like resignation or quitting, or worse, losing. So from that mindset, if we “surrender to God,” it doesn’t always zing in our spirit. But look, there’s more:
Sur means “to be over, above, beyond, in addition.”
Think sur-plus, sur-charge, sur-prise, sur-name .
Render means in artistic terms to “to cause to become.” With this upgrade, Jesus is inviting us to give Him our situation, fear, need, or dream on the understanding that He is above and beyond our skill and pay grade and He wants to create more for us than we can do all by ourselves.
I don’t know about you, but that zings my spirit.
I am not quitting on me or my plans. I am leveling up. With Jesus.
Self-sufficiency to Sur render means we give our plans to Someone who is over and beyond us and then He causes something even better to become. Sure, we can do it. But He can and wants to do it better with us.
Try it His way. You might like it. Besides, self-sufficiency is exhausting anyway.