Christmas is a wonderful time to put our busy lives back into Scriptural perspective. We celebrate the coming of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ…the One who gives us everything we need to live a godly life. (II Peter 1: 3) This year 2022 is closing down…how did you do in your surrender to Him this year?
Genuine Christianity is an unconditional surrender to His Lordship.
While attending the University of Arizona, I was invited to join Kappa Alpha Theta, a national sorority. I had a sense of acceptance and grew to love the girls and the accountability. After a semester of pledging, we had a night of mild hazing that culminated in stepping, individually, behind a veil for the final step of becoming a Theta. As the “pledge of loyalty” was read and the words were spoken to me…I was asked to repeat them…
A few months earlier, over Thanksgiving holiday, I had attended a church service and heard for the first time in my life that I could know God in a personal way through His Son, Jesus Christ. Now, standing behind that veiled curtain in the Theta House, listening to the call to Theta loyalty, I was profoundly struck and realized I had already given my total allegiance to the Savior that we celebrate next week! When He walked into my life, everything changed…I had no more allegiance to give.
Time has tested on life’s stage that unconditional surrender
I made to my loving Savior and Sovereign Lord, in those college days.
What is your present commitment?
Commitment was the turning point in my life when I seized the moment and converted it into an opportunity to alter my destiny. When we talk about total surrendering of our lives to the Lordship of Christ, we are talking about yielding all our rights and expectations!
What…?
Wait a Minute!
Don’t we run from the people and circumstances that call us into total commitment? It is much easier to go with the flow as the secular, ungodly world dictates to us woke, relativity, independence and “I have MY rights!” The world’s motto: “Strength only, show no weakness!” The human struggle wants HIS POWER TO DO OUR WILL…no humility here.
Is humility a position of strength or weakness, in your opinion?
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses,
so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake,
I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.
For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (II Cor. 12: 9-10)
Humility is me…seeing the contrast between my spiritual condition (a sinner) and HIS holiness and then receiving His grace to live Christ-like, not Jackie-like! Grace flows in our weakness. Grace is doing HIS WILL WITH HIS POWER! (Phil. 2: 13) It is acknowledging His presence and His power to live the Christian life. Victory is living in that truth!
Have you surrendered your life to His Lordship?
~Jackie Johnson - I am a former tribal missionary to the Kuna Indians on the Colombian border in Central America. Fluent in several languages, my husband and I currently pastor a Spanish-speaking church in Southern California. My passion is mentoring and equipping dedicated young women for life, marriage, motherhood, and beyond. I am the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of three Princesses and four young Knights.
