Surrendering Our Will
by David Roadcup
“Surrender” is a hard word for many of us to hear, especially in the context of our faith and leadership! This word deals with the releasing or giving up of our wills to the absolute Lordship of Christ.
Jesus spoke to this idea very clearly in Luke 9:23 when He stated, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
This is a hard saying. When Jesus gave these words, He and His hearers knew exactly to what He was referring. Jesus is telling us that to authentically follow Him and make Him our Lord, we must be willing to do one thing – to die to ourselves on a daily basis. We surrender. We are basically to kill our will and allow the will of Jesus to be the dominant force in our nitty-gritty, in the trenches, daily grind, lives. Our desires, dreams, wishes and plans are surrendered to the leading and guidance of Jesus. And we need to practice this every day.
William Barclay states,
To deny oneself means in every moment of life to say no to self and yes to God. To deny oneself means once, finally, for all to dethrone self and to enthrone God. To deny oneself means to obliterate self as the dominant principle of life, to make God the ruling principle, more, the ruling passion of life. The life of constant self-denial is the life of constant assent to God.
The difficulty in Jesus’ request hits right at the heart of who we are. As humans, we are naturally self-centered. Embedded in the nature of every person is an overwhelmingly powerful sense of self-preservation. It is the way we all are before we come to know Christ. What we want is obviously the most important. This is the aspect of our lives that Jesus is talking about when He calls us to die. We die to ourselves. As we master our wills and surrender them, we become more like Christ than in any other way.
In his excellent book, The Joyful Christian, C. S. Lewis describes, with excellence, what Jesus is asking for:
The Christian way is different; harder, and easier. Christ says, “Give me All.” I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”
When we are leaders in the Body of Christ, there are certain things that we must have in place. The act of dying to ourselves daily, of surrendering our hearts, once for all, is one of those things. When we have died to ourselves, we ask Jesus to guide us every day in our words, attitudes, actions, habits, business dealings, relationships and driving.
Fellow believers, this topic is critical because it is possible to be a leader in the church (staff or elder) and not have given up my will. But to follow Jesus on His terms and to live an authentic life before the flock, we must make this move. We die. We kill our wills and the will of Jesus takes over. In every area of our lives, we say “yes” to Jesus and “no” to ourselves. It is an absolute necessity when following Jesus and when leading His church.
Let us begin each day by joyously surrendering ourselves, every part, to the peace and leading of Jesus!
