Sunday, March 8, 2009

Surrender or Death: God Takes No Prisoners

By David Ryser

I’ve known Joe for more than 25 years.  Since he moved away to California, we don’t see one another very often, so we visit frequently by phone.  We exchange personal pleasantries and talk about what God is doing in our lives.  Because Joe is an avid reader, he often tells me about the most recent Christian book he has been reading.

During one such conversation, I received clarity concerning something I’d been thinking about for a while.

The book Joe had been reading heavily emphasized the importance of a Christian surrendering to God.  As a result, the word “surrender” came up a lot in this particular conversation.  Every time the word “surrender” was spoken, a thought grew stronger in me until I asked, “Why does a soldier surrender?”

As I voiced this question, Joe responded with the first answer that had come to my mind, “He surrenders because he is beaten.”  My thoughts were becoming more clearly defined, and I expressed them by saying, “No, a soldier surrenders when he is beaten, but why does he surrender?”

Even a defeated soldier has options.  Surrender is one option, but he could also continue to fight.  He can continue to fight, with his bare fists if necessary, until he is killed.  So why does he choose to surrender?  He chooses to surrender in order to preserve his life.

When we surrender to God, we likely do it for the same reason.

Nowhere in the Bible are we commanded to surrender to God.  (The word surrender isn’t even in the Bible).  We are told to submit to God (James 4:7a), but submission is not the same as surrender.  There is a difference between the two.  Submission is always voluntary.  Surrender is always coerced.  Big difference.

We are not coerced to submit to God.  Coerced submission is false submission.  Coerced submission is no submission at all.

We are told to lose our lives (Luke 17:33) and die to ourselves and our old life (Romans 6:2), but never to surrender.  When a soldier surrenders and is taken captive, what does he spend every waking moment of every day doing?  Plotting how to escape.  Our Adamic nature does the same thing if we are allowed to surrender.

This is why God does not take prisoners.

I once heard someone say, “God and the devil have one thing in common:  they are both trying to kill you.”  This is a true statement and totally biblical.  Both God and the devil are trying to kill me, but for different purposes.  The devil wants to kill me in order to dishonor God (because I am made in the image of God) and to do damage to the cause of the Kingdom of God.  God wants me dead so He can resurrect me into a new life as a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17)…a new spiritual species of humanity.

For as long as I have been a Christian, I’ve heard fellow believers talking about how we live the resurrected life.  We’ve joyfully proclaimed our resurrected life even as we continue to live lives (at least on the inside of us) that are pretty much the same as our old lives.  Yes, we’ve cleaned up our language and modified our behavior (whitewashed the tomb as it were--Matthew 23:27), but on the inside we are still motivated by the same things as always.  We still want to be noticed, appreciated, admired, and promoted.  Our lives are still all about us, and we continue to pursue the things we have always pursued; only now we do it in Jesus’ name. 

And we pay pastors big money to tell us how wonderful we are and to comfort us when we know instinctively that something is still wrong with us.

We continue to talk about the resurrected life without ever having experienced death.  We want resurrection without death.  The problem with this is that resurrection always involves death.  Resurrection, by definition, requires that we be dead first.  No one can be resurrected without having been dead.  Resurrection is only for dead people.

If you are not dead, you cannot be resurrected.

Paul says he dies daily (1 Corinthians 15:31). He tells Christians to consider themselves dead to sin on a constant basis (Romans 6:2-11), but raised to newness of life in Christ.  Paul makes a direct connection between death and resurrection here in Romans 6 and elsewhere.

Only by losing our life can we find life (Matthew 16:25).

The process of dying to ourselves can be a painful process, it takes more time than we’d like; in fact, it never really ends.  Embracing pain and difficulty is not natural for us.  Putting aside our own interests and ambitions for the sake of Jesus and the Kingdom of God is hard for us, but we cannot manifest the life of Christ flowing through us until we have cast our “old man” aside so we can put on the resurrected “new man” (Ephesians 4:22-24).

Anyone can walk on the wide path; it is easy for us, but it leads to destruction.  Few choose to walk the narrow path that goes through the valley of death on its way to resurrection and newness of life.

This battle most of us are fighting is not with the devil.  To paraphrase Steve Gray, too many Christians want to talk of fighting the devil when we are not yet finished fighting with God.  This fight with God has only one possible end.

Our battle with God does not end in surrender.  It ends in death.  God doesn’t take prisoners.



Responses to this article are welcomed.  You may contact the author at drdave1545@yahoo.com

No comments:

Post a Comment