August 22

Sweet Surrender

We are jumping back to Jeremiah and his sermons in Jerusalem. And while there is plenty of doom and gloom there is also hope found here. Jeremiah is instructed to buy some property as a sign that Jerusalem will one day be re-inhabited. Jeremiah is also able to praise God on the eve of destruction because he knows that God has promised a restoration of the land. Jeremiah’s faith is tested again with an imprisonment in chapter 33. Yet in the midst of terrible times, Jeremiah focuses on the nature of God.

Jeremiah 33:2-3 "This is what the Lord says, he who made the earth, the Lord who formed it and established it--the Lord is his name: 'Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.'

The old adage is true ... we might not know what the future holds but we know who holds the future. It is faith in the nature and character of God that stabilizes Jeremiah during the storms of life.

One further point, many times God asks us to do things that we feel are counterintuitive.

Jeremiah 21:8-9 Furthermore, tell the people, 'This is what the Lord says: See, I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death. Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague. But whoever goes out and surrenders to the Babylonians who are besieging you will live; he will escape with his life.

Surrender is the way of life. Now, that is a revolutionary message. The last thing we would think would bring life and hope to an army is surrender. Yet when God is in it, it is true.

Larry Harris tells a story about the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, the Communists solders were told to avoid surrender at all cost. They were told that the Americans would torture them, beat them, and starve them to death. Some of them surrendered anyway and were taken to camps where many were treated better by their enemies than by their own comrades. After the war, many of them elected to come to the United States. They have become US citizens and are living in a land of freedom and abundance. For them surrender was the best thing they could have done.

So it is with our surrender to God, when we say to the Lord, “I am turning my life over to you, you come control me, you show me the paths to walk,” it is then that we find life in all its greatness and abundance.