Surrender, Conquer
by Jared Johnson
Losing is winning.
Defeat is victory.
Failure is success.
Weak is strong.
Stand last in line to get there first.
Servants are leaders.
Our Christian faith is shot through with paradoxes like these.
If we give up our lives for Jesus’s sake, we find them (Jesus speaking; Matt 16.25 / Mark 8.35).
God chose weak/foolish things in this world to shame what seems strong and smart (Paul, 1 Cor. 1.26-29).
What the world thinks fancy and amazing is really rubbish (Paul, 2 Cor. 11, Phil. 3.1-11).
Surrender is what we must do with and before God. But He isn’t attacking us; He invites us into life with Him. It’s His kindness that brings us to “surrender” (paraphrase Romans 2.4), not beating us into a bloody pulp then glowering over us until we say “uncle.”
Jesus commanded us to “crucify” ourselves every day and follow Him (Luke 9.23).
But also...
If we die with him,
we’ll also live with him.
If we endure hardship,
we’ll reign with him...
2 Timothy 2.11-12
Reigning is definitely not what a surrendered, conquered people get to do alongside their vanquishing conqueror. But it’s what the Text says about us.
I often hear a statement in churchdom that always makes me involuntarily cringe. It's typically shouted mid-sermon when a guy’s all worked up about eternity. Have you ever heard this shouted in a sermon? “In the end, WE WIN!!” Can you book-chapter-verse me that one? I don’t think you can. Our King wins. We do get to ride His coattails, yes, but good winning against evil doesn’t depend on me. As such, it just hits askew when someone says “we win” when that win is 0% my effort; “there’s no ‘we’ about it.”
We get to be on the winning team, but only by surrender.
Surrender to conquer. It’s another paradox in our Christian walk, one that Jesus didn’t overtly speak like “lose your life to find it,” but it’s still there.
You died to this life and your real life is hidden with [the Anointed One] in God.
Colossians 3.3
Maybe Soren Kirkegaard was pondering Col. 3.3 when he wrote that “now, with God’s help, I will become myself.”
It doesn’t make any sense. It makes all the sense in God’s good world. This is how He ordered it. It's easy to remember that He made physical stuff, but He made intangible stuff too (Col. 1.16). Wisdom, humility, service as leadership – all those are part of the intangible realities that God suffused throughout His creation.
Surrender to conquer.
"I’ll show them – I'll ‘surrender’ to get one over on them!”
That’s not how the Almighty set up His creation. Did you ever read Proverbs 25.22 and/or Romans 12.20 and immediately think, “Aha! Now I got ‘em!”?
If your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they’re thirsty, give ‘em a drink. In doing this, you’ll heap burning coals of shame on their heads, and God will reward you.
Here, I appreciate that NLT’s translators chose to add, whole cloth (in both Romans & Proverbs), the words “of shame” to this command. In our humanity, it’s easy to think “I’m’a dump some burning coals on your terrible, ugly head you enemy!” Obviously, that doesn’t square with Scripture’s testimony anywhere else. Peter told us that we might “suffer for doing what’s right” in several ways throughout chapters 2 and 3 of his first letter. In the New Testament, Peter told us we need to continue doing what’s right and good, even when non-believers relish inflicting harm on us. But that happened in the Old Testament too.
When the king of Israel saw them [attacking Arameans], he shouted to Elisha, “My father, should I kill them? Should I kill them!?” “Of course not!” Elisha replied. “Do we kill prisoners of war? Give them food and drink and send them home again to their master.” So the king made a great feast for them and then sent them home...
2 Kings 6.21-23
That’s quite a contrast to the way I hear immigrants talked about, how our military treated and continues to treat people at Guantanamo 20+ years on, how politicians talk about their peers across the aisle, and how friends and family talk about each other who are politically persuaded differently than themselves. I often hear pushback such as “that Scripture’s not appropriate to talk about 21st century immigration,” or “you can’t say that about War on Terror detainees!” Well, either the Word is timeless and cross-cultural, or it’s not. I’m not saying everything has to be 1:1 from the Levant in 800 BC to today, but I am saying we can’t just hand-wave dismiss the Word’s testimony about mercy in social/political topics either. Both “Republicrats” and “Demublicans” get it wrong; they’re just opposite sides of the same cruel coin.
Jesus’s Kingdom really is upside-down. Despite all the hand-wringing, weeping and teeth-gnashing over a recently released Bible of the same name, that upside-down Kingdom is breathtakingly beautiful.
The stone that builders rejected has now become the cornerstone. This is [Yahweh’s] doing, and it’s wonderful to see.
Psalm 118.22-23
Another translation says, “it’s extraordinary in our eyes.”
Paradoxes create mental and emotional tension; it’s often hard to hold such tensions in Jesus’s Name and live them out well.
But we embrace and try to do that with “lose your life to find it” and others.
We can also, in the strength of God’s Holy Spirit, hold the tension that we’ll conquer ... if we surrender.
