This is liberty: to know that God alone matters.
— Donald Haukey (1874–1917)
— Luci Shaw (1928– )
Absolute surrender to Christ brings about a completely unexpected result: Absolute freedom to do absolutely anything we want.
Yeah, there are no more rules. No laws to bind your body and brain to codes that will only be broken and lead to brokenness. You are free to proceed however you choose. The chains are gone. You are a free moral agent in the universe.
At first, this dynamic seems odd. Aren’t we supposed to be holy? Aren’t we supposed to start doing good works?
No.
G_d does not want us to do anything. At least not anything on our own. Not any more. Not ever again.
We can go ahead and pull away from the near presence of our Creator/Redeemer and choose to return to the fetid pools of our past. We can return to the sin that drives a wedge between us and Him. Surely, though, G_d did not create sin. Nothing can separate us from anything that He has created. But sin is where God is not.
It seems He has allowed sin so that we’d see the absolute folly of trying to do anything for ourselves. Anything we do (the yucky stuff, the human stuff, even the properly motivated virtues of our lives) fall completely short of His Perfection, Power and Glory. ALL aspects of our lives were simply an affront to a Holy G_d. Said simply, we ourselves, making anything for ourselves… only ended in separation from Him.
But then there is the deeper reality of the situation… Him. And He is Wonderful beyond any words!
We begin even to see even the utter worthlessnes of our ‘gift’ to Him of absolute surrender. It’s all about Him, we don’t even bring anything to the table.
We used to speak about “utter dependance” on Him in the past. But really this was just counting on Him to inform our ‘my’ old man’s next heartbeat… that’s the difference in our lives now. We don’t have our own heartbeat anymore. We’ve died and been risen anew; utterly one with Him. And He is Wonderful!
For those that have laid it all down, Jesus has invaded our lives. Everything is new. Nothing else matters. To move one iota away from Him is a journey back towards the death from which He had so radically saved us. Why in heaven’s name would we want to do that?
No, the only reasonable response, after the full-disclosure of freedom that G_d gives us, is to present ourselves anew as a holy sacrifice to the only One that matters. To be used by Him as He pleases. There is simply no greater Joy than to know and be known by Him.
Yeah, absolute surrender brings us to a place of absolute freedom in Christ. We suddenly realize we are now free to make any choice we want.
But, now in fact, we don’t want any of them. We just want Him. We don’t want our lives any more, we want His life lived in us.
