“All to Jesus I surrender,
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.
I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to Thee, my blessed Saviour,
I surrender all.”
– Judson W. Van De Venter
I have sung this hymn thousands of times throughout my life. It is a song that I have known since I was a little child. It is usually played or sung during the invitation time, after the preaching from God’s Word is finished and while those in the audience have the opportunity to kneel at an altar and to make decisions in their lives.
If someone were to ask me if I were surrendered to the Lord, I would answer with an emphatic “Yes!” After all, I am a pastor’s wife. I surrendered my life to the Lord’s will when I was a teenager. I consider myself a faithful Christian. I have raised my daughters to do right and to love the Lord. I have placed standards in my life that help me to have a better Christian testimony. I am definitely surrendered to the Lord; however, I have learned a few things about staying surrendered.
It was during a personal trial in my life that I had to look at what the word “surrender” truly means. Surrender means “to cease resistance to an enemy or opponent and submit to their authority.” I thought, “Does that mean I am opposing what God has allowed when I do not surrender?”
Another definition is “to give up or hand over.” To be fully surrendered meant that I had to give up my will, my wants, my desires, and even my dreams. While everything I wanted at the time was good and would be pleasing to the Lord, these were things I wanted and not necessarily what God had planned for me. To be fully surrendered in this trial, I would have to “let go and let God.” I realized then, in the midst of my trial, that I wanted God’s will to be my will, too.
Surrender is something that we often have to do over and over as we allow God to lead and guide us through the life He has planned for us. God blessed my husband and I with three beautiful daughters who we have done our best to rear as God would want them reared. They have grown up in church and around the things of God. Teaching them the Bible since they were old enough to understand, we also pray for them and encourage them to serve the Lord with their lives. We also have a beautiful daughter who is in Heaven, Amanda. She would have been raised exactly the same way as her sisters. Why did the Lord decide that He should take her home at just eight months of age? The truth is that I do not know why. However, I do know that this was always His plan. Even so, I had to come to a point of surrendering to His will for Amanda.
Surrender is not easy. Perhaps like most ladies, I like to feel in control of situations. It is difficult not knowing what the outcome will be or what the next step will look like. Often, God chooses for us to trust in Him and to give up control. This takes an enormous amount of surrender, but we must remember to focus on the fact that we want the Lord’s will in our lives more than that control. To continue pleasing and serving God even when life seems out of control, we have to surrender to Him.
From the moment Amanda was born, I found myself in a situation over which I had no control. I could not fix her health problem or heal her infirmities, but I knew Who could. My daily prayers begged the Lord to touch and to heal her little body. I cried many tears during that time. I mourned for the life she would not experience. I grieved over the things she would not be able to do or see. As Amanda’s mom, I wanted the best life possible for her, but this seemed impossible with her declining health.
Over time, my prayers began to change. The Lord comforted me, calmed my fears, and pointed me to His promises as I read my Bible and prayed. I realized that my tears had been about “me.” They were for the life I thought Amanda should have. However, Amanda was perfect in God’s eyes, exactly how the Lord had made her. She was not missing out on anything because she was fulfilling the Lord’s will for her life. My prayers became my asking God to help me to accept whatever outcome He had planned and to surrender to His will.
There are no earthly words to explain the overwhelming peace I was given when I finally acknowledged that, no matter what happened, God would take care of me and preserve me. The Lord had already prepared the way, and He had prepared me, too.
While we often think of surrender as a one-time thing, God asks us to surrender to Him over and over again. We have an opportunity to show our love and faithfulness to Him each time. Best of all, over and over again, He is faithful to grant us His heavenly, perfect peace every time.
Isaiah 26:3, Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.
by Heather Neal
