"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me" (Lk. 9:23).

 Most people that I know don't really want to deny themselves.  Fulfill themselves, maybe - but never deny themselves.  After all, we hear all the time about how important we are and how what we want is what really matters.  Even when it comes to church, it's what I like, and what's convenient for me, and what matches my beliefs and my agenda.  How easily we forget that we are not God!

 Rather, we worship the one who has created the heavens and the earth - the one who has the power to save us or to condemn us.  We also worship the God who invites us into self-surrender in order to set us free.

 I was recently reminded of what self-surrender actually means in an article written by Ole Anthony in The Wittenburg Door (May/June 2005).  In the article, he points out how both self-exaltation and self-abasement are not to be part of the Christian faith.  The thing is that, in either case, our attention is self-centered rather than Christ-centered.

 At the same time, we are not called to self-commitment, for we can be committed to God and to Christ but not surrendered.  We even might have committed ourselves under inner protest!  Instead, we are called to surrender our very selves to God - to hand back to our Creator the self that has first been given to us.

 Anthony writes: "Surrender is not a kind of spiritual lobotomy where you become a vegetable, but that is our fear.  By our act of self-surrender, consent and cooperation, God wipes clean our selfishness.  We are then empowered to obey the deepest law of the universe."

 Strangely enough, it is the Spirit of God who enables us to surrender ourselves in this way in the first place, and it is the Spirit of God who fills the space within us left after the emptying of ourselves.  Surrender puts us in a position to receive "the power that created the universe - the power that raised Christ from the dead."  God raises us from a dead "self-for-self life" to a "creative fruitful life" instead: His life.

 "I am important because I am His.  Now I can express myself without apology.  For me to live is Christ.  Surrender saves you from self-deification and egotistic self-assertion, always wanting to occupy the center of attention.  It also saves you from self-mortification, shyness, victimhood and thinking, 'What do they think of me?'  Surrender saves you from self-consciousness and from herd-consciousness, because you have the mind of Christ.  You can be yourself because you are His self.  You are free."

 I have used Anthony's words here because he says it so well.  We tend to think of self-surrender as some sort of slavery, yet, paradoxically, it sets us free.  Remember, "those who lose their life for my sake will save it" (Lk. 9:24).

 This whole article caught my attention because I can see the difference that self-surrender makes.  When I am arguing with God because of what I want, I am not a happy camper.  When I am surrendered, I can accept wherever God wants me to be. 

In Christ,
 Pastor Lynne Hutchison Moore