Throughout my two years in the Discipleship Program I have realized over and over things in my life that I need to surrender to Jesus in order to continue to grow. Trying to continue without letting go is like trying to climb a ladder without letting go of the rungs. You’ll tie yourself into a knot trying to stay back and move forward, plus you stand a chance of upsetting yourself.
There was a specific detail of my life that I spent a lot of time during the first-year wrestling through surrendering that. God eventually showed me Joel 3:16, which has kind of become my life verse.
The LORD also will roar from Zion, And utter His voice from Jerusalem; The heavens and earth will shake; But the LORD will be a shelter for His people, And the strength of the children of Israel.
Joel 3:16 NKJV
God asked me if He, as the King described in this verse, wasn’t worthy of absolute surrender. He was and is.
This year I’ve come back to this same aspect of my life, just with a broader brush. I was wrestling with it again. Surrendering the specific detail wasn’t too hard, I had done so before. My reaction was “Haven’t I already surrendered this? Why am I dealing with the same thing again?”
God again asked me to surrender in this detail, but in a larger scale. What had before been a fine point, a certain playing out of events, that I surrendered had become a drastically life-changing decision that will likely govern large parts of my future. Jesus was now asking me to give Him everything. While I had surrendered the micro aspects, I still had to surrender the macro aspects of my life.
After this I wouldn’t be surprised if this is revisited in the future. There is no endpoint to my surrender. This has taught me that surrender is a continual enlarging of what is given to Jesus.