http://rcdailyjournal.blogspot.com/ - 100% of today's post is a copy from Jim Spivey's blog. When I asked God what He would have me write this morning He said, "nothing." I truly thought it would be nothing until I read the following. Then I knew what I was suppose to post. This is the nature of surrender, and I could not have said it better.
"So many times during every single day I get asked, “What does it really mean to surrender to God? I think I’ve surrendered, but I don’t know what it looks like, really.” So, here goes nothing:
“If we are truly surrendered to God, we will never be aware of our own efforts to become or remain surrendered. Our entire life will be consumed with the One to whom we surrender. Beware of talking about surrender if you know nothing about it. In fact, you will never know anything about it until you understand that John 3:16 means that God completely and absolutely surrendered Himself to us. In our surrender, we give ourselves to God in the same way He gave Himself for us — totally, unconditionally, and without reservation. The consequences and circumstances resulting from our surrender will never even enter our mind, because our life will be totally consumed with Him. While living in it, the thinking about it, questioning it, pondering the possibility of it would all seem nonsensical.”
-- Oswald Chambers
In other words, if you have to ask about it – how, why, or wherefore? - don’t bother. No human intellectual answer will ever suffice.
It’s a flowing, natural response to a supernatural “intrusion,” not a fabricated show to look good or avoid “exclusion.”
This is why this sentence flowed out of me last week:
“God's Love is self-revealing (you won't have to ‘look for’ Him, He will just ‘show up’) and self-animating (you won't have to ‘wonder what to do,’ it will be self-evident), after you complete your self-crucifying (having fully accepted the death of all of your fear-based illusions).”
-- Jim Spivey
Many wrestle with the concept of surrender to God, needing to “get that right” in some way, debating about it, philosophizing about it, agonizing over it, as if it’s some kind of cosmic Rubic’s Cube they haven’t “figured out” yet. But God is not a mind trick to be mastered. Just keep doing your life your way, and He will show up to pull you out of it when you’ve hit the end of yourself. Your work is not to alter, circumvent, deny, fix, or short-cut that design. Just be ready for the help when it inevitably arrives, and be ready to let go of your way when the time comes.
Remember this penetrating statement:
“The life of self is that which causes us pain; that which is dead does not suffer.”
Your new life is not “better,” but “deader,” a “no-header” vs. “go-getter”:
“So if you're serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that's where the action is. See things from his perspective. Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God; he is your life.”
-- Colossians 3:1-3 (The Message)
And that kind of “dead” (the dying life) lets you “have” relationships without “needing” them to go a certain way (a living death). When human relationships and “getting your way” in them are not what you’re focused on, but Jesus and what he’s up to is, you are free to “have” relationships, vs. “need” them, and joy becomes possible and natural."
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