Complete surrender is the key to finding the life you’ve been looking for.

I can vividly remember the day when I experienced salvation. The day when I died to myself and was resurrected to life in Christ Jesus. The day when I lost my life in order to find it. It was the day when the old was made new, completely new! On that day, I realized how filthy I was and how much I needed His salvation. I needed to be forgiven, to feel the freedom that comes from it surging through my veins! Oh, how beautiful that day was! To have the weight of the sin I was carrying taken off my shoulders!!! To surrender all that I was to the One who carried the cross in my place and who was made sin so that I might become His righteousness! I could have never done on my own what Christ did for me on that cross! I will never be able to fully understand the beauty and mystery of it and I want to keep the memory close to my heart forever! This life is like an ocean, with waves hitting against the shore of our heart in magnificent force. Sometimes it’s really easy to get caught up in the midst of it all; to overlook what Christ has done on our behalf and the life that we found in Him. It was through complete surrender that we found life in the first place, yet we don’t live lives completely surrendered to Christ anymore. The world around us has a way of making us “numb” to the effect of the cross. It’s not that the cross is of no effect anymore, because the power of it is stronger than anything else in this world! It’s just that we often become part of the world instead of letting God change the world through us. I’ve noticed that we can become a little too “comfortable” in our salvation and instead of living in it every day of our lives, we can so easily let sin creep in. This can take the form of a worldly mindset that shouts to us and begs us to focus all our attention and time on us instead of on Christ and what He wants to do in our lives. Instead of conforming ourselves to the image of Christ, we tend to conform ourselves to the image of this world. I’ve seen this happen in my own life and it happens in a very subtle way. If we don’t immerse ourselves in the Word of God and spend time in His presence through prayer, how can we constantly renew our hearts and minds in order to allow the Spirit of God to lead us on the path that we should follow? We wonder why we don’t feel as close to God as we used to feel in the beginning. Our focus has shifted. It used to be God, but now it’s become so many other things. We try to fit God in our lives, instead of giving Him full control and building our lives around Him. He is not our first love anymore. He just isn’t! Look at the way we spend our time and what consumes us. Are we devoted to God or ourselves? Are we starving our flesh or are we feeding it? If we feed our sinful nature, we starve the spirit; it’s just the way it works. When we sin, do we confess our sins and repent of them while turning away or do we let sin over sin accumulate in our lives until our sensitivity to the truth fades more and more? Do we allow Christ to be Lord over our hearts or are we serving our own desires and ambitions? We need to let Him renew our hearts and minds. Like a book that’s been long-forgotten on an old library shelf, so have we forgotten about our hearts and what the finger of God wrote on the pages of our life. We have forgotten that the hands of the One who wrote the story of the universe picked up the old and dusty book of our lives and with a gentle blow He dusted us off of our sinfulness and filled us with life. He erased everything and rewrote the story of our life. The pages of our heart became white and new. God wants to keep it that way. Let’s allow God to make our hearts new and pure again! There is nothing in this life that is as strong and powerful as the power of Christ to forgive sin and make everything new! God longs to be close to you and He’s been waiting for you to surrender your heart completely to Him in the same way that you surrendered when you first accepted Christ as Lord over your life. You found your life by losing it and the true Christian life is lived in a constant and complete abandon to God. We are focused on so many different things, when our sole focus should be our God! We try to make life work on our own and become so frustrated when we find out that we can’t make it work, yet we still don’t realize that everything we need will be given to us if we seek Him FIRST- with our whole heart. Give God everything! Your time, energy, dreams, all that you are! Life, freedom, fullness, blessing, joy, peace, stability, balance, wholeness, and true fulfillment will be yours.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Matthew 6:33 (NLT)