True worship—bringing God pleasure—happens when you give yourself completely to God. Notice the first and last words of that verse are the same: offer.
Offering yourself to God is what worship is all about.
Offering yourself to God is what worship is all about.
This act of personal surrender is called many things: consecration, making Jesus your Lord, taking up your cross, dying to self, yielding to the Spirit. What matters is that you do it, not what you call it. God wants your life—all of it. Ninety-five percent is not enough.
There are three barriers that block our total surrender to God: fear, pride, and confusion. We don’t realize how much God loves us, we want to control our own lives, and we misunderstand the meaning of surrender.
Can I trust God? Trust is an essential ingredient to surrender. You won’t surrender to God unless you trust him, but you can’t trust him until you know him better. Fear keeps us from surrendering, but love casts out all fear. The more you realize how much God loves you, the easier surrender becomes.
How do you know God loves you? He gives you many evidences: God says he loves you;3 you’re never out of his sight;4 he cares about every detail of your life;5 he gave you the capacity to enjoy all kinds of pleasure;6 he has good plans for your life;7 he forgives you;8 and he is lovingly patient with you.9 God loves you infinitely more than you can imagine.
The greatest expression of this is the sacrifice of God’s Son for you. “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”10 If you want to know how much you matter to God, look at Christ with his arms outstretched on the cross, saying, “I love you this much! I’d rather die than live without you.”
God is not a cruel slave driver or a bully who uses brute force to coerce us into submission. He doesn’t try to break our will, but woos us to himself so that we might offer ourselves freely to him. God is a lover and a liberator, and surrendering to him brings freedom, not bondage. When we completely surrender ourselves to Jesus, we discover that he is not a tyrant, but a savior; not a boss, but a brother; not a dictator, but a friend.
Admitting our limitations. A second barrier to total surrender is our pride. We don’t want to admit that we’re just creatures and not in charge of everything. It is the oldest temptation: “You’ll be like God!”11 That desire—to have complete control—is the cause of so much stress in our lives. Life is a struggle, but what most people don’t realize is that our struggle, like Jacob’s, is really a struggle with God! We want to be God, and there’s no way we are going to win that struggle.
DAY TEN: THE HEART OF WORSHIP
A. W. Tozer said, “The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven’t yet come to the end of themselves. We’re still trying to give orders, and interfering with God’s work within us.”
We aren’t God and never will be. We are humans. It is when we try to be God that we end up most like Satan, who desired the same thing.
We accept our humanity intellectually, but not emotionally. When faced with our own limitations, we react with irritation, anger, and resentment. We want to be taller (or shorter), smarter, stronger, more talented, more beautiful, and wealthier. We want to have it all and do it all, and we become upset when it doesn’t happen. Then when we notice that God gave others characteristics we don’t have, we respond with envy, jealousy, and self-pity.
What it means to surrender. Surrendering to God is not passive resignation, fatalism, or an excuse for laziness. It is not accepting the status quo. It may mean the exact opposite: sacrificing your life or suffering in order to change what needs to be changed. God often calls surrendered people to do battle on his behalf. Surrendering is not for cowards or doormats.
Likewise, it does not mean giving up rational thinking. God would not waste the mind he gave you! God does not want robots to serve him.
Surrendering is not repressing your personality. God wants to use your unique personality. Rather than its being diminished, surrendering enhances it. C. S. Lewis observed, “The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become—because he made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”
Surrendering is best demonstrated in obedience. You say “yes, Lord” to whatever he asks of you. To say “no, Lord” is to speak a contradiction. You can’t call Jesus your Lord when you refuse to obey him. After a night of failed fishing, Simon modeled surrender when Jesus told him to try again: “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”12 Surrendered people obey God’s word, even if it doesn’t make sense.