Surrender to Love - Benner

I continue to be blessed by David Benner’s writings. He really challenges the “I can do it myself” mentality which is prevalent even within the church. The need to surrender is foundational to being His and following Him. I am learning and growing and definitely need all sorts of help in this foundational aspect of following Jesus Christ. So you’ll have to come along as I share where Benner is challenging and encouraging me. The following are excerpts from David G. Benner’s book, Surrender to Love (IVP Press, 2003).

. . . surrender plays a crucial role in the spiritual journey as understood by most major religions and spiritual traditions. Far from being a sign of weakness, only surrender to something or someone bigger than us is sufficiently strong to free us from the prison of our egocentricity. Only surrender is powerful enough to overcome our isolation and alienation. (10)

Like loving parents who can look at their children with disappointment that in no way dilutes their love, the God in whose image such parents are made loves us with a love that is not dependent on our behavior. (17)

Created from love and for love, humans – according to the Christian account of things – spurned God’s love in favor of what was perceived to be freedom. The result, of course, was disastrous. Liberty was instantly replaced by bondage, intimacy by alienation. Genuine love was reduced to self-love, and the result was egocentricity and estrangement from our deepest self, God and others. (23)

The story of Jesus is the story of love personified. We miss the point when we simply try to do what he tells us to do. And we miss the point when we merely try to follow the pattern of his life. His life points us back to his own Source. His life is intelligible only when it is understood as the personification of divine love.

But genuinely encountering Love is not the same as inviting Jesus into your heart, joining or attending a church, or doing what Jesus commands. It is the experience of love that is transformational. You simply cannot bask in divine love and not be affected. (25-26)

A.W. Tozer notes that most of us who call ourselves Christians do so on the basis of belief more than experience. We have, he argues, “substituted theological ideas for an arresting encounter; we are full of religious notions but our great weakness is that for our hearts there is no one there.”

Any authentic spiritual journey must grow from direct, personal experience of God. (27)

If God is love, he cannot truly be known apart from love. He cannot, therefore, be known objectively. One cannot observe him from a distance and know him. To do so is to fail to genuinely encounter his love. One can encounter divine love only up close and personally. (28)

The Christian God wants the intimacy of our friendship, not our fear. The Christian God comes to us with gestures of breathtaking love, hoping to eliminate our fear, not manipulate us through it. And he offers his love as the one thing in the universe capable of making an otherwise hostile cosmos into a friendly home. He offers his love as the one thing in the universe capable of freeing us from our fears. (37)

The God Christians worship loves sinners, redeems failures, delights in second chances and fresh starts, and never tires of pursuing lost sheep, waiting for prodigal children, or rescuing those damaged by life and left on the sides of its paths.

The Christian God of grace stands in stark contrast to the vindictive, whimsical, threatening and often capricious (unpredictable) gods of other religions. Only the Lord God unconditionally cherishes human beings. Only the Lord God forgives all our offenses and teaches us how to forgive ourselves. Only the Lord God provides everything he demands. Only the Lord God offers the life of his own Son for the salvation of his people. The Lord God’s persistent habit of relating to humans with grace is the best news the human race has ever received.

What makes grace amazing is that it and it alone can free us from our fears and make us truly whole and free. Surrender to God’s love offers us the possibility of freedom from guilt, freedom from effort to earn God’s approval, and freedom to genuinely love God and others as the Father loves us. (45-46)

Grace is totally alien to human psychology. We want to get our house in order and then let God love and accept us. The psychology of works-righteousness and self-certification is foundational to the human psyche and totally at odds with grace. (46)

A familiar Christian hymn states that as I come to God, “nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling.” How deeply I resent this fact. How desperately I want to be able to contribute something to the deal – my faith, my effort, my love, my belief. But the bottom line is that Perfect Love meets me where I am and asks only that I open my heart and receive the love for which I long. (46)

Surrender and Obedience

Those who surrender obey. But not all who obey surrender. It is quite easy to obey God for the wrong reasons. What God desires is submission of our heart and will, not simply compliance in our behavior.

“Trust and obey” sums up the understanding of the Christian life of people who focus on obedience as an act of the will rather than a surrender of heart. It suggests that all we have to do is believe certain things about God and then get on with doing what God asks. While obedience may be demanding, we are tempted to think that it is achievable if we put our mind to it and are prepared for lots of hard work.

There are two problems with this. The first is that doing what God asks is, of course, not something we can ever achieve in ourselves. Not only did God never mean us to do so, he intended that our failures in obedience lead us to surrender. Rather than drive us to ever-increasing efforts to get it right ourselves, God wants our sin to make us aware of our need for him. . .

The second problem in simply trying to do what God asks is that it leaves the kingdom of self intact. I remain in control, and my willful ways of running my life remain unchallenged. The whole point of the kingdom of God is to overturn the kingdom of self. These are two rival spiritual kingdoms. We need to be very suspicious when self-control and egocentricity are left unchallenged in our Christ-following. (55-56)

Relying on the will to make things happen keeps us focused on the self. Life lived with resolve and determination is life lived apart from surrender. It is living with clenched-fisted doggedness. It is living the illusion that I can be in control. It is the rule of life lived in the kingdom of self. (58)

If the core of Christian obedience is listening to God’s will, the core of surrender is voluntarily giving up our will. Only love can induce us to do this. (59)