In Part 2 of our short series "Absolute Surrender:" God will never accept a half-hearted surrender, but if we come to Him with a genuine desire to give Him everything, He will accept it and will accomplish it in us.

Host: Kathy, when we ended our discussion in our last program, we were talking about the reality that there are many of us who want to surrender our hearts to God and yet we see our failures. But there is an encouragement in this next section. God accepts your surrender.

Kathy: And that is just so amazing to me that He does because our surrender is so puny. There's not a lot of substance to it, but God's heart is so huge, and He wants nothing but the best for us and He gives us nothing but the best. I think a lot of our problem is that we want to give something to God. We want to present something to Him. At least that was my experience. I don't know how many others have struggled with this, but I wanted to be absolutely surrendered and offer something I had to God. But the way I should have been seeing it was “Lord, I don't have it, but I know that you'll give it to me and I accept the grace.”

Host: Andrew Murray talks about a sweetness in an interaction that we read in Scripture. He says, “Oh remember, there was once a man to whom Christ had said, 'If thou canst believe all things are possible to him that believeth.' And his heart was afraid and he cried out, ‘Lord I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.’” (From Absolute Surrender By Andrew Murray, 1895) And then of course you have the interaction between Jesus and Peter. And in that interaction you see the Love Jesus had for Peter. He knew Peter's weaknesses and He knew Peter was struggling, but also He saw his yielded heart. And Peter learned that he didn't have anything to bring to Jesus.

Kathy: Right. But also, Peter didn't know he had a yielded heart. Peter was learning the hard way like the rest of us. Jesus told Peter you're going to deny me three times. The Lord knew that and He wasn't offended or put off by that. And I think that's where a lot of Christians get so discouraged because they expect so much from themselves in some ways.

Host: Well, that's the problem isn’t it? We are expecting of ourselves while the Lord is saying, “No, expect from me for what you need.”

Kathy: Actually, it takes a lot more humility and faith to take from God and to even know how to do that. It's just so messed up in the church world, in a sense that Christians don't really know how to humble themselves with that kind of humility. Where instead of coming to God with something to hand to Him, we are receiving from Him.

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Host: Especially in America, because we've been raised to be so self-sufficient and proud about it. And that really leads us into this next section here, which is “God maintains our surrender.” And he talks about here that we have those moments where maybe we've gone to a powerful service or someone has said something to us and God has reached us in that moment. And as a result then we have humbled ourselves and we have surrendered, but then two weeks later we're back out of that surrender and living selfishly again. But this section in particular I thought was so encouraging for me. He talks about the fact that God knows if our surrender is genuine. And if it is, then He's going to maintain it. He's going to work it out in our hearts.

Kathy: Yeah, I think that anybody who's concerned about this is genuine. If you weren't, you wouldn't even care. And the truth of the matter is, you don't get it all at once. You get it in the journey and you get it as time goes. And I refer back to when I got saved. In the first 10 years of my salvation, I wanted so much to be everything that that I knew God wanted me to be. And I was striving for that. I was going to be absolutely surrendered and I was going to be an intercessor. I was going to be this and I was going to be that and what a trophy God was going to get, right? Well, I started to see some walls run up in front of me and I was banging into these walls spiritually and just getting very discouraged.

       And I'll never forget a number of years ago when I got so frustrated and I threw up my hands and I said, “God, I cannot do this in the flesh.” And I don't want to be cliche, but it was almost like He said, “That's what I’ve been waiting for.” And that has become, and is becoming, more and more real to me, that I don't have anything to offer to God, but I am so happy and free inside that He is the workman and I am His craftsmanship. I am the thing that He is creating and He's making me and He's molding me and I'm going along saying, “yes” inside. I want Him. I want to go where He's leading me. I want to be right with God, whatever that means to Him. And He's taking me there.

Host: Yeah, Andrew Murray ends on the section titled, “God Blesses When We Surrender.” And you've just described the blessing. The very things that He wants to be in your heart, He's put in your heart. That's the blessing and as you grow in your faith, you learn to discern the difference between that which God has planted and that which you're trying to manufacture within yourself. There's a sweetness and a purity to the things that God puts in our hearts. You just know that it’s from the Lord. What gratitude wells up from that! The only response I can have to those things as I see them from time to time is, “Thank you Lord. You did that.”

Kathy: The closer I get to seeing the reality of what the Lord has done, I understand a little bit better why everybody in Heaven falls down and worships. And it's not just going to be that we're in Heaven forever and ever, just worshiping, bowing down, doing this homage thing. It’s coming out of a heart of, “Thank you Lord!” It's just gratitude. And you can live out that life of God completely free in that happy place.

Host: And I know that our reaction to that can be, “We're going to worship forever and ever and ever.” And we just automatically can think about some of those worship sessions we've been in that fell flat. And inside the response can be, “I don't want to do that forever and ever.” But no, you're talking about that gratitude that just wells up from what God has done. There just won't be any effort to it at all, it'll just happen.

Kathy: Yeah. It’ll just flow out of you. And the other thing about worship is that it isn't just singing and raising of the hands and clapping and being joyful. Worship is also a lifestyle. It really is true that you worship God by the way you live your life. You can only worship that way when you have really surrendered and He's really conquering and overcoming everything inside of you.

Host: Yeah, it really does. As we started off by saying, it begins with absolute surrender. If we're not willing to surrender, then God can't do these things in us.

Kathy: You're never going to be blessed. You just won’t.

Host: Yes. And it is in His heart to bless us. He wants to.