Surrender

All or Nothing

All or Nothing

To many of us, I Surrender All  (lyrics below) is a familiar song. Perhaps, like me, it is a song you have sung on many occasions. But how many times have we sung it without really thinking about what we are singing? How many times have i sung this and yet lived in a way that looked completely different? What does it really mean to surrender all?

In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews there is a listing of Old Testament saints frequently called the roll call of faith. We read about the great patriarchs and matriarchs of the faith – Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, David and many more. God commends them for their trust and faith in Him by including them in this listing. But if we study what Scripture tells us about many of the folks in this great roll call, we find that most of them did not “surrender all”. There was a part of their life they insisted on holding onto. Abraham was a liar. Noah was a drunkard. Jacob was a deceiver. David was an adulterer and murderer. We’d be somewhat hard-pressed to say that they surrendered “all”. Gratefully that is where God’s grace and mercy come in. Their faith wasn’t borne out of their works; it was borne out of His grace. i, for one, am grateful – because i know that left to my own devices i too am a sinner – saved only by His grace….

Come to the "Alter"

Come to the "Alter"

Last weekend, i received an email inviting people to come to the “alter” to pray on Sunday. My first reaction was – don’t you just love the way that “spell check” often changes a word to something we did not intend? Sometimes that change can be somewhat embarrassing, and sometimes it can change the whole meaning of what we intended to say. In this case, it was a “malapropism” – a word that sounds the same, but has a very different meaning. But as i thought about this one for a moment, i began to become convicted that maybe the words “altar” and “alter” actually have a great similarity in their meaning….