One of the things I LOVE about the accounts of Jesus life, is that they leave absolutely no room for people to consider Jesus a good teacher. They are packed with miracles and claims to be God’s Son. To reinterpret or dismiss any of the accounts of Jesus life that we currently have would be to claim that you can see the mind of a writer from 2,000 years ago who lived in a completely different time and culture–who even spoke a different language than you do! Making a claim like that is akin to claiming that YOU are God’s Son–you’d be one intelligent person to be able to rebuild the past!

Most people, when they really encounter Jesus, encounter Him as their Savior. They trust that His death on the cross paved the way for them to have a relationship with God–and they ask for that relationship to be restored in their life. That’s not a bad place to start…but it’s certainly only scratching the surface of where God ultimately wants to be. They are surrendering their lives…but only the part of their lives that they are most familiar with at that time. And for a time, everything is awesome in their new relationship.

Later, those new Christians come back to the gospels and they begin to re-encounter the bold, miracle-working, no nonsense Son of God and they realize that Jesus wants MORE. They gave Him a voice in their lives, but He wants to be THE VOICE. He wants to change the way they manage their finances. He wants to reshape their marriage. He is dedicated to sending them out to serve their community’s needs. A piece at a time, Jesus chips away at enemy held territory in our lives–bad habits and selfish ideals. And it hurts. Surrender is never easy…even if we have done it before. In fact, the second time of surrender is often the hardest one we ever face!

The greatest mistake Christians make is at the point of second surrender. They either refuse to surrender, or worse: they walk away thinking that they have failed Jesus and aren’t worthy of being Christians. Nothing is farther from the truth! No one can surrender it all the first time. Surrender comes in stages in the Christian life. Like an enemy held island, Jesus has established a foothold in our lives, and He takes the rest of the territory back in stages. By taking it a piece at a time, He preserves and shapes us. We need to go slowly. Change is hard. Trust is being built. Like Peter and the disciples during their early travels, they are growing in how much they trust God, and with each miracle, each storm-calming experience, every act of love, they grow more and more willing to place more of their lives in His control.

We are all moving toward a day when we wake up every day and are simply ready to surrender whatever new thing Jesus asks us to surrender each day. There’s always something. We are moving toward an attitude of surrender. In church world, we often talk about moving from the place where Jesus is your Savior, to the place where He is LORD. A place where you see Him more and more as He really is–not an advisor, a rescuer or a friend, but as the majestic, wise, powerful King to whom you owe complete allegiance. We are naturally skeptical of people with great authority in this world. We should be–they are human! But one day we realize that God is never going to let us down, that He deserves to have all the authority in the world. And when we arrive there one day, we surrender.

So the question to ask as you connect with God is: where are You asking me to surrender my life more, right now? And what keeps me from being more surrendered to You?