"Lord, I Give This To You"

Surrender is such an interesting thing. It is one of the most important things that a Christian can do - laying down our lives before Christ. When we do this, we can truly experience the freedom that comes from a relationship with the Lord. We can be open to receiving His blessings and to seeing His promises for us, that we find in the Word, fulfilled. It's great! I am all for it!



But, I think sometimes we miss the mark in our so-called "surrender." As I sat in church, God was dealing with my heart about an issue that I did not realize that I even had! And I prayed, "Lord, I give you my sin." That's not a bad prayer, asking the Lord to take our messy stuff. He tells us to when He asks us to cast our cares on Him, because He cares for us. It is something that He wants to do! And that is great! I sure know that I would LOVE it if Jesus could make something beautiful out of my crap, my sin.



Sometimes, I think that the "Lord, I give you my _____" prayer is not enough. We can ask God to take something from us...to take it away, to take it out of our lives, and other prayers of this kind, and He will help us however we can. God is a redeemer. But, God is not a magician and God will not force us to stay away from our own sin. Giving it to God, while great, is not enough.



A lot of the time, we are so afraid of God knowing the details of our sin. When we mess up, we run and hide from Him like He doesn't already know. Like He wasn't there with us when we did it. But, we run...we feel like God won't love us or forgive us. We feel like we need to get as far away from Him as possible because He's holy and we have just done something bad. But, the Truth is that we cannot escape from His presence. Trying to would only prove futile.



Instead, we can ask God to meet us in our sin. Once we realize that we are fallen, we can ask God to come and rest with us. In those moments when we find ourselves lower and deeper than we hoped we could get because of bad decisions, we can either start digging more or we can ask God to come and give us perspective on this point in our lives. God came to provide the broken world salvation and beauty that had been lost with the fall of man. It is important to remember that God sent Christ for us.

When we unashamedly ask God to come to where we are first, then He can give us His perspective on whatever we're struggling with. He can also show us, without shame, what He believes of us. This way, when we give Christ our issues like He asks us to, we have His perspective on our sin. But, we also are a little more certain that we can overcome it because we know that He is there no matter what. We have the Lover of our souls there to empower us. We have the Holy Spirit to guide us. When we lay our burdens and our sin on the Lord, we will be much more prepared to actually deal with it. Our sin is not like a trash can that's full - you cannot just take it out when it gets stinky and that takes care of the issue. It takes constant work. And we don't have to do it alone. We can do it with God instead of apart from Him.