GOD-SUSUBMISSION TO
Lord, I am
willing to receive what You give, to lack what You
withhold, to relinquish what You take, to suffer what You inflict, to be what
You require.
I can say
from experience that 95% of knowing the will of God consists in being prepared
to do it before you know what it is.
We
can never be too frequent or too solemn in the general surrender of our souls
to God and binding our souls by a vow to be the Lord’s forever: to love Him
above all things, to fear Him, to hope in Him, to walk in His ways in a course
of holy obedience, and to wait for His mercy and eternal life.
Isaac Watts
A Guide to Prayer.
Once we agree
with God that we exist for His pleasure and His glory, we can accept whatever
comes into our lives as part of His sovereign will and purpose. We will not
resent, resist, or reject the hard things, but embrace them as friends,
sovereignly designed by God to make us more like Jesus and to bring glory to
Himself.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
Let God have
your life; He can do more with it than you can.
D.L. Moody
Realize that
when you put your faith in Jesus Christ, there can be no holding back. Your
will must hand God its letter of resignation. For unless you submit
to God's will in everything, you are not submitting to Him in anything.
Think about it. If you only follow God's will when it happens to correspond to
your own will, then you never have to surrender at all. You are simply asking
God to endorse your own agenda as often as He can. But if you want new life in
Christ, you must adopt God's agenda and throw away your own.
Philip Graham Ryken
When You Pray, Crossway
Books, 2000, p. 98.
Lord, I give
up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept Thy will for
my life. I give myself, my life, my all utterly to Thee, to be Thine forever. Fill me and seal me with Thy Holy Spirit.
Use me as Thou wilt. Send me where Thou wilt, and work out Thy whole will in my
life at any cost, now and forever.
Betty Scott Stam
I am His by
purchase and I am His by conquest; I am His by donation and I am His by
election; I am His by covenant and I am His by marriage; I am wholly His; I am
peculiarly His; I am universally His; I am eternally His. Once I was a slave
but now I am a son; once I was dead but now I am alive; once I was darkness but
now I am light in the Lord; once I was a child of wrath, an heir of hell, but
now I am an heir of heaven; once I was Satan's bond-servant but now I am God's freeman;
once I was under the spirit of bondage but now I am under the Spirit of
adoption that seals up to me the remission of my sins, the justification of my
person and the salvation of my soul.
Thomas Brooks
This is a
paradox, of course, as Augustine, Luther, Edwards, Pascal and others have
pointed out. When individuals rebel against God, they don't achieve
freedom. They fall into bondage, because rebellion is sin, and sin is a
tyrant. On the other hand, when men and women submit to God, becoming his
slaves, they become truly free. They achieve the ability fully to become
the special, unique beings that God created them to be.
James Montgomery Boice
Taken from
"Foundations of the Christian Faith-Book I" by James Montgomery
Boice, page 121. (c)1986
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the USA, Revised edition. Used by
permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=991.
I have now
concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is this, that I may
die to self, and live wholly to Him.
I cannot
conceive it possible for anyone truly to receive Christ as Savior and yet not
to receive him as Lord. A man who is
really saved by grace does not need to be told that he is under solemn
obligations to serve Christ. The new
life within him tells him that. Instead
of regarding it as a burden, he gladly surrenders himself- body, soul, and
spirit- to the Lord who has redeemed him, reckoning this to be his reasonable
service.
C.H. Spurgeon
Oh what
can be done with an old heart like mine?
Soften it up with Your oil and wine. This
song by Keith Green goes on to explain that the oil represents God’s Holy
Spirit and the wine His blood…To prevent out hearts from hardening, we must
stay surrendered to Jesus Christ. Such
victory will require drawing near to Him, spending time with Him, abiding in
Him, receiving His “oil and wine.” Then,
and only then, can we experience the love of God melting the hardness of our
stubborn hearts. This is the only way to
make it in this heart-hardening, soul-destroying world.
Cheryl Ford
Treasures from the Heart, Crossway Books,
2000, p. 103.
For until men
recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by His
fatherly care, that He is the Author of their every good, that they should seek
nothing beyond Him - they will never yield Him willing service. Nay, unless
they establish their complete happiness in Him, they will never give themselves
truly and sincerely to Him.
John Calvin
When we can
truthfully say to our Father, “All that I am and have is Thine,”
then He can say to us, “All that is Mine is thine.”
Author
Unknown
The Kneeling Christian, circa 1930, ch. 11.
You become
stronger only when you become weaker. When you surrender your will to God, you
discover the resources to do what God requires.
Erwin Lutzer
Men of Integrity, v. 1, n. 1.
If you look
up into His face and say, "Yes, Lord, whatever it costs," at that
moment He'll flood your life with His presence and power.
Alan Redpath
We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be within
us.
C.S. Lewis
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Brace
and World, p. 22.
Few souls
understand what God would accomplish in them if they were to abandon themselves
unreservedly to Him and if they were to allow His grace to mold them
accordingly.
Ignatius
On January
12, 1723, I made a solemn dedication of myself to God, and wrote it down;
giving up myself, and all that I had to God; to be for the future, in no
respect, my own; to act as one that had no right to be himself, in any
respect. And solemnly vowed to take God
for my whole portion and felicity; looking on nothing else, as any part of my happiness, nor acting as if it were; and His law for the
constant rule of my obedience: engaging to fight against the world, the flesh
and the devil, to the end of my life.
Jonathan Edwards