The themes of confession, repentance and surrender have been prominently swirling through my mind and out into my conversations over the past few months. I've been finding myself wanting to exhort both those who are walking with Christ, and those who are not, to just surrender your life to the only One worth surrendering to, and the focus of that exhortation (in my mind) has been to showcase the benefits of surrendering, to talk about how hard it is, to encourage people to persevere.
But as I was walking and contemplating what I wanted to write, I realized we need to start with something far more important.
A lot of people, Christians or otherwise, have this view of God being up in heaven creating arbitrary rules for his own amusement and looking down at us and being like "dance monkey, dance!" We see God as being much like us when we play the Sims: directing our Sim into a swimming pool, going into build mode, and removing the ladder in order to see the animations that come as the Sim helplessly drowns. It's understandable why, with this view, we would be unwilling to climb into the metaphorical pool.
Is this an accurate view of God?
Let's start with the word "Lord." The clearest verse in Scripture that describes what it takes to "become a Christian" might be Romans 10:9, which says "because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Strong's defines the word translated as Lord as "he to whom a person or thing belongs... the owner; one who has control of a person." And so there are two key takeaways: 1) being saved requires a transfer of control over my life from ME to someone else and 2) the one who is Lord is Jesus. It's important that we know that all throughout the New Testament, it is consistently Jesus who is referred to as Lord, and not God the Father.
This is important because...
Back around Christmas I started reading my 4-year-old nephew stories from the Jesus Storybook Bible. As we read, he started to grow really fond of Jesus, and would get excited when we'd get to the end of a story and I would ask "and who is the warrior God was going to send?" (etc. etc. depending on whether we were talking about David and Goliath or Daniel in the Lions' Den) Shortly after Easter, it seemed like it was time to read about what happened to Jesus on Easter, and I had a slight worry about whether I was going to traumatize this poor 4-year-old boy when I had to tell him that his beloved Jesus was going to die, but I trusted the author of the book and the 20 parents who had recommended it, so I read him the stories.
Throughout the entire story, there are references to the fact that Jesus' death by crucifixion was:
- planned long before it happened
- the only way that God could restore His relationship with humanity
- going to be very difficult for Jesus
- the very reason that Jesus came into the world
- an act of surrender: He could have chosen not to go through with it, or to come down from the cross at any moment
