Total Surrender To God Quotes

God surpasses our dreams when we reach past our personal plans and agenda to grab the hand of Christ and walk the path he chose for us.  He is obligated to keep us dissatisfied until we come to him and his plan for complete satisfaction.

That we ought, once for all, heartily to put our whole trust in GOD, and make a total surrender of ourselves to Him, secure that He would not deceive us.

...Go somewhere else. Somewhere safer.” Anywhere else. God, please. Or he was likely to do something horribly awful, like surrender his sanity and kiss her.

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.

D.L. Moody heard somebody say that the world has not yet seen what God could do with one man who would be totally surrendered to Him. And D.L. Moody said, “I want to be that man.

A Christian is held captive by anything that hinders the abundant and effective Spirit-filled life God planned for him or her.

Jesus didn’t die to keep us safe. He died to make us dangerous. Faithfulness is not holding the fort. It’s storming the gates of hell. The will of God is not an insurance plan. It’s a daring plan. The complete surrender of your life to the cause of Christ isn’t radical. It’s normal. It’s time to quit living as if the purpose of life is to arrive safely at death. It’s time to go all in and all out for the All in All. Pack your coffin!

When you are trying to discern whether God or Satan is the author of a hardship, one of your best clues is whether sin is involved. God never entices us to sin, nor does he employ sin or perversion as a means of molding us into the image of Christ. Impossible!

There are three barriers that block our total surrender to God: fear, pride, and confusion. We don’t realize how much God loves us, we want to control our own lives, and we misunderstand the meaning of surrender.

We have a crippling tendency to forget what God has done for us. For a while, we’re humbled. Then, if we do not guard our hearts and minds, we begin to think we must have done something right for God to have been so good to us. Therein lies another road to captivity. It is the road of legalism.

When we’re most exhausted, we’re expending more energy fighting the enemy than we are seeking God's presence. More than you seek to win, seek Christ! More than you seek to defeat the enemy, seek his foe! More than you seek victory, seek the Victor!

I believe that God totally, absolutely, intentionally gives us more than we can handle. Because this is when we surrender to Him and He takes over, proving Himself by doing the impossible in our lives.

God’s faithfulness is proved not by the elimination of hardships but by carrying us through them. Change is not the absence of struggles; change is the freedom to choose holiness in the midst of our struggles. I realized that the ultimate issue has to be that I yearn after God in total surrender and complete obedience.

This surrender seems a very strange and difficult thing for us to understand. And yet, just as the life of man here in this world can suddenly be greatly altered by a strong affection, so his total life can be greatly and permanently altered by a supreme affection, which is the love of God as the embodiment or personification of man’s love of truth. He discovers, for example, that as this mystery unfolds within his own nature, what we call the end of knowledge is strangely and wonderfully attained in itself. Man becomes internally appreciative of true value.

We glorify God to the degree that we externalize the internal existence of the living Christ. A life that glorifies God is not something we suddenly attain. As we spend time in the presence of God, His glory both transforms us and radiates from us.

The Power that knows the way will take care of you. The One who makes the sun shine, the grass grow, the apples grow perfectly on apple trees. The food that sustains us, nourishes us, everything has been lovingly provided for us. Have faith. Trust the Power that knows the way. This is a first step. To have total faith and total trust in the Infinite, the One. You may call this God if you want to. Makes no difference what you call it. It is within you. It is without you. It is everywhere. (p. 195)

if there is any part of our lives that we haven’t turned over to Christ, the devil reminds him, ‘No, that one isn’t totally yours. I still have this patch of ground here.’ “Jesus is totally committed to us. And until we learn to be totally surrendered to him, we’ll never find the joy of what it means to fully belong to him. That is the key to every believer’s life — full ownership by Christ. Everything we are and want to be belong to him. “The Lord wants to have ownership of your life. If there is anything hindering this from happening, I invite you to come forward now and lay it before Christ.

Nate chuckled. “Tough. Our women are tough, thank God.” She warmed from the compliment and flushed at being included in the Dean brothers’ women. Old-fashioned

 Why doesn’t God reveal Himself to you? He cannot. It is not that He will not, but He cannot, because you are in the way as long as you won’t abandon yourself to Him in total surrender.

No amount of determination will bring freedom. We’re going to learn to be victorious by surrendering our lives completely to the Spirit of God, not by gritting our teeth and trying harder.

Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render him what is God's — that is a sacrifice we dare not make!

I don’t believe God allows surrendered hearts to continue to long for things He will not ultimately grant in one way or another. Our disappointment with God is often the result of our small thinking.

Let's consider a series of lessons that lay the groundwork for our discussion of breaking free. I will list them as nine lessons about captivity and freedom. LESSON 1 The people of God can be oppressed by the enemy.

So often when we say 'I love you' we say it with a huge 'I' and a small 'you'. We use love as a conjunction instead of it being a verb implying action. It's no good just gazing out into open space hoping to see the Lord; instead we have to look closely at our neighbour, someone whom God has willed into existence, someone whom God has died for. Everyone we meet has a aright to exist, because he has value in himself, and we are not used to this. The acceptance of otherness is a danger to us, it threatens us. To recognise the other's right to be himself might mean recognising his right to kill me. But if we set a limit to this right to exist, it's no right at all. Love is difficult. Christ was crucified because he taught a kind of love which is a terror for men, a love which demands total surrender: it spells death.

We live sacrificially when we’re outside the will of God, giving up all sorts of things that were meant to be ours in Christ. We want to claim those things back, but in the process we’re going to be putting a few other things on the altar.

Do you trust Arman, Highness?' 'Yes, but--' 'No buts. Either you trust Him or you don't.' Achan shifted in his chair. 'Maybe I don't, then.' 'I agree. you don't trust Him fully or you'd know you did. Arman wants your trust, Highness. When he asks something of you, he's seeking your heart. Your attitude, your disposition, your fears, your strengths, your obedience, your allegiance. All of you. When you trust Arman with your life, you run the risk of exposing your real fears. You run the risk of Arman having total authority and say in your life. Most men don't like that. They like to be in control.

But surrender is only possible if we have total assurance that we are safe. We must be convinced that if we let go we will be caught. This assurance only comes when we trust that our heavenly Father desires to be with us and will not let us fall.

Faithfulness is not holding the fort. It’s storming the gates of hell. The will of God is not an insurance plan. It’s a daring plan. The complete surrender of your life to the cause of Christ isn’t radical. It’s normal. It’s time to quit living as if the purpose of life is to arrive safely at death. It’s time to go all in and all out for the All in All. Pack your coffin!

Paul says that in order to prove the will of God in our lives, we must become like Isaac. We must totally surrender ourselves to God, yielding to His purpose regardless of what it may be. Absolute abandon to God is the foundation in knowing His will.

We have the idea that we can dedicate our gifts to God. However, you cannot dedicate what is not yours. There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself (see Romans 12:1). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you—and His experiments always succeed. The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ.

Anoint me with "Fresh Oil" O God! Mold me and make me...totally for Your use! You are the potter, I am the clay. Amen

We’ll probably never learn to enjoy our storms, but we can learn to enjoy God's presence in the storm!

A soul cannot seek close fellowship with God, or attain the abiding consciousness of waiting on Him all the day, without a very honest and entire surrender to all His will.

We have a crippling tendency to forget what God has done for us. For a while, we’re humbled. Then, if we do not guard our hearts and minds, we begin to think we must have done something right for God to have been so good to us. Therein lies another road to captivity. It is the road of legalism. Hezekiah believed he was right with God because of what he had done.

Instead he mulled over his dissatisfaction with the fight. Because, honestly. He'd had the tracker. Totally contained, though the tracker fought and squirmed and thrashed to avoid Emmett's crushing arms. There was no chance any of this struggle could have helped him, and Emmett was already breaking him when Jasper lunged into the blood-drenched room. Jasper, mangled and ferocious, eyes sharp and empty at the same time, looking like some forgotten god or incarnation of war, projecting an aura of pure violence. And the tracker had stopped trying. In that fraction of a second when he saw Jasper (for the first time, but Emmett didn't know that), he'd surrendered to his fate. No matter that his fate was sealed once Emmett had gotten his hands on him, this was what demoralized him. I was driving Emmett crazy. Someday soon I would have to describe to Emmett what he'd looked like in the clearing and why. I doubted anything else would soothe the sting.

Put your Isaac on the altar! Then, and only then, will you see what God can do. He cannot give back what you do not give up. But if you surrender yourself to Him, He will provide the ram in the thicket.

Jesus proclaimed the favor of God in His very first sermon. Then He sealed the deal with His death and resurrection. Favor is a function of surrender. If we don't hold out on God, God will not hold out on us.

Derived from the root s-l-m, which means primarily “peace” but in a secondary sense “surrender,” its full connotation is “the peace that comes when one’s life is surrendered to God.” This makes Islam—together with Buddhism, from budh, awakening—one of the two religions that is named after the attribute it seeks to cultivate; in Islam’s case, life’s total surrender to God. Those who adhere to Islam are known as Muslims. Background

God does not want obedience as the fruit of our willful determination. God wants surrender as the choice of the heart. For what we long for in our heart we will pursue with the totality of our being not simply with the resolve of our will.

Please don’t be dismayed if you feel you are not already living a life that glorifies God! He never sheds light on our weaknesses or shortcomings for the sake of condemnation (Rom. 8:1). God makes us aware of hindrances so He can set us free!

If I told you that God speaks to us through our urges so long as these are safe and proper and totally civilized and don't hurt anyone, what would I be saying? If I told you longing is okay as long as it is within the bounds of what our world considers normal, I would be going counter to my whole tradition. My people discovered divine urges, for goodness' sake. Not namby-pamby urges either. It was loincloth-tearing, harlot-marrying, sacrificing, succumbing, and surrendering kinds of urges. Not without bickering and haggling, I'll grant you, but ultimately urges of the worst kind, the kind that demanded everything.

What is true is that in all these despairing and strained efforts to believe, what we really wanted was not to believe. That is, we didn’t want that which is the first requirement of faith, namely, to surrender ourselves totally, not to think of ourselves anymore, to extinguish completely our need for recognition and recognize God alone, to put our trust and dare to believe in God alone. We would surrender what was uncomfortable to us, but not that which we cared about! To have faith means to trust and to dare unconditionally, and that we didn’t want; we wanted to set conditions, and thereby we missed the whole point, and our whole effort was not genuine. We did not want to believe. If

When our hearts are surrendered totally to the will of God, then we delight in seeing Him use us in any way He pleases. Our plans and desires begin to agree with His, and we accept His direction in our lives. Our sense of joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment in life increases, no matter what the circumstances, if we are in the center of God’s will.

When you receive Jesus as your Savior,” Dr. Graham continued, “you are regenerated by the spirit of God. Your life is transformed. You are a new person in Jesus Christ. Remember, Jesus doesn’t want part of your life, He wants all of your life. He wants you to repent of your sins and then completely and totally surrender your life to Him and follow Him.

Once you have placed your body on God’s altar in total surrender, your body no longer belongs to you. It belongs to God. You no longer decide what happens to your body. God does. You do not determine what kind of job you are going to do with your body. God does. You do not choose where you are going to live. God does. But it is wonderful when He takes the responsibility.

Surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ must not be partial—but total. Only when we repent and turn away from our sins (using His power, of course) does He fill us with His Holy Spirit. The fruit of the Holy Spirit makes us right with God, and God’s love in us makes us right with men. Through that we can forgive—even love—our enemies. Jesus Himself makes us ready for His coming.

There are times when it seems as if God watches to see if we will give Him even small gifts of surrender, just to show how genuine our love is for Him. To be surrendered to God is of more value than our personal holiness. Concern over our personal holiness causes us to focus our eyes on ourselves, and we become overly concerned about the way we walk and talk and look, out of fear of offending God. “. . . but perfect love casts out fear . . .” once we are surrendered to God (1 John 4:18). We should quit asking ourselves, “Am I of any use?” and accept the truth that we really are not of much use to Him. The issue is never of being of use, but of being of value to God Himself. Once we are totally surrendered to God, He will work through us all the time.

In every culture the total word of God has to be declared to us by another. In every culture the message of the gospel is in constant danger of being compromised by the value system that supports that culture and its goals. The stranger to that culture can instinctively identify those points of surrender and call the community back to a purer and more authentic faith. But such infusions of new life are usually resented and resisted.

A second barrier to total surrender is our pride. We don’t want to admit that we’re just creatures and not in charge of everything. It is the oldest temptation: “You’ll be like God!”11 That desire — to have complete control — is the cause of so much stress in our lives. Life is a struggle, but what most people don’t realize is that our struggle, like Jacob’s, is really a struggle with God! We want to be God, and there’s no way we are going to win that struggle.

The Power that knows the way will take care of you. The One who makes the sun shine, the grass grow, the apples grow perfectly on apple trees. The food that sustains us, nourishes us, everything has been lovingly provided for us. Have faith. Trust the Power that knows the way. This is a first step. To have total faith and total trust in the Infinite, the One. You may call this God if you want to. Makes no difference what you call it. It is within you. It is without you. It is everywhere. (p. 195)

Faith is the opposite of seeking control. It is surrendering control. It embraces the truth that control is an illusion—we never had it and we never will. Rather than trying to overcome our fears by seeking more control, the solution offered by LIFE WITH GOD is precisely the opposite—we overcome fear by surrendering control. But surrender is only possible if we have total assurance that we are safe. We must be convinced that if we let go we will be caught. This assurance only comes when we trust that our heavenly Father desires to be with us and will not let us fall.

Life is an adventure orchestrated by God, and our attempts to be in the driver’s seat will always result in mere frustration. Why? Because this is not the way of authentic love, which involves the total surrender of self. Authentic love calls for sacrifice. That is true of all of us. Whether it’s being up with a baby all night, caring for an aging parent, giving a hurting friend a landing place in your home for a while, or becoming a foster parent, we will be called on to sacrifice. That is the way of the Cross, and we are not offered anything else. It’s easy to think of parenthood as a season of sacrifice that ends so we can move on with our lives. But neither Christ nor the saints ever model living for ourselves. God never tells us, “Wow, thanks for your service. You’ve done your time and please enjoy the next four decades of your life living just for yourself. You’ve been serving others for awhile so grab your sunscreen and enjoy your remaining years drinking cocktails in Aruba.” Can you imagine that being the final chapter of a saint’s life? We are called to live out generous love in whatever opportunities present themselves to us.

Andrew Murray wrote, “Christ’s life and work, His suffering and death, were founded on prayer—total dependence upon God the Father, trust in God, receiving from God, and surrendering to God. Your redemption is brought into being by prayer and intercession. The life He lived for you and the life He lives in you is a life that delights to wait on God and receive from Him. To pray in His name is to pray as He prayed. Christ is our example because He is our Head, our Savior, and our Life. In virtue of His deity and of His Spirit, He can live in us. We can pray in His name because we abide in Him and He abides in us.”1

The word consecrate means to set yourself apart. By definition, consecration demands full devotion. It’s dethroning yourself and enthroning Jesus Christ. It’s the complete divestiture of all self-interest. It’s giving God veto power. It’s surrendering all of you to all of Him. It’s a simple recognition that every second of time, every ounce of energy, and every penny of money is a gift from God and for God. Consecration is an ever-deepening love for Jesus, a childlike trust in the heavenly Father, and a blind obedience to the Holy Spirit. Consecration is all that and a thousand things more. But for the sake of simplicity, let me give you my personal definition of consecration.

In Mark 2:4, I’m fascinated by the lame man whose friends pressed their way toward Jesus with the total expectation that Jesus would heal him. The lame man’s friends cut a hole through the roof of where Jesus was hanging out. That is faith. You have to allow God to see you coming through the roof! That gesture would demonstrate that you, too, have fully surrendered; that despite obstacles in your path, you have found a bold way to press forward to be in His presence. The lame man was healed because of his faith and boldness. There is no doubt in mind that when you chase God down like that, He will chase you down and bless your obedience. This is where the winning begins: by chasing Him down.

People thought of Adam as dim, flawed, “Lights are on, but nobody home,” they said about him. Because he had been told so often, Adam had come to agree with them. None of this made Adam think less of himself. In fact, Adam rarely thought of himself at all. He was different that way. Adam looked out at the world and whatever he saw required his total attention. He engaged his visible universe with an absolute, unreserved surrender. The intensity of his observation would have put an angel to shame. Mamaw’s preacher, a man more enlightened than he was educated, and who had some sense of the Spirit that was in Adam, might have said God looked down on Marshall County through Adam’s eyes, loved their little slice of the Appalachians through Adam’s heart, so that people and places there became real through being truly and completely seen and cherished by a selfless soul.

Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man and, perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to lifesaving in the sense of giving it his total attention—so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim—he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the ambassador to Britain. The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote to appease. During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts. In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Qur’an that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.” For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. Most Americans do not know that the payments in ransom and Jizyah tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800. Not long after Jefferson’s inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress. Declaring that America was going to spend “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute,” Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America’s best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast. The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all fought. In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves. During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbled as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines. They finally agreed officially to abandon slavery and piracy. Jefferson’s victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn with the line “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea.” It wasn’t until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.

In love, in other words, those phases are present, in its content, which we cited as the fundamental essence of the absolute Spirit: the reconciled return out of another into self. By being the other in which the spirit remains communing with itself, this other can only be spiritual over again, a spiritual personality. The true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self, yet in this surrender and oblivion having and possessing oneself alone. This reconciliation of the spirit with itself and the completion of itself to a totality is the Absolute, yet not, as may be supposed, in the sense that the Absolute as a purely singular and therefore finite subject coincides with itself in another finite subject; on the contrary, the content of the subjectivity which reconciles itself with itself in another is here the Absolute itself: the Spirit which only in another spirit is the knowing and willing of itself as the Absolute and has the satisfaction of this knowledge. In love, on the contrary, the spirit’s opposite is not nature but itself a spiritual consciousness, another person, and the spirit is therefore realized for itself in what it itself owns, in its very own element. So in this affirmative satisfaction and blissful reality at rest in itself, love is the ideal but purely spiritual beauty which on account of its inwardness can also be expressed only in and as the deep feeling of the heart. For the spirit which is present to itself and immediately sure of itself in [another] spirit, and therefore has the spiritual itself as the material and ground of its existence, is in itself, is depth of feeling, and, more precisely, is the spiritual depth of love. (α) God is love and therefore his deepest essence too is to be apprehended and represented in this form adequate to art in Christ. But Christ is divine love; as its object, what is manifest is on the one hand God himself in his invisible essence, and, on the other, mankind which is to be redeemed; and thus what then comes into appearance in Christ is less the absorption of one person in another limited person than the Idea of love in its universality, the Absolute, the spirit of truth in the element and form of feeling. With this universality of love’s object, love’s expression is also universalized, with the result that the subjective concentration of heart and soul does not become the chief thing in that expression – just as, even in the case of the Greeks, what is emphasized, although in a totally different context, in Venus Urania[8] and the old Titanic deity, Eros, is the universal Idea and not the subjective element, i.e. individual shape and feeling. Only when Christ is conceived in the portrayals of romantic art as more than an individual subject, immersed in himself, does the expression of love become conspicuous in the form of subjective deep feeling, always elevated and borne, however, by the universality of its content.

I find it fascinating that God healed Hezekiah through medical treatment. Obviously God did not build a wall between faith and using medicine.

In Ephesians 1, Paul named specific blessings that can come through prayer. He prayed that his spiritual offspring would receive “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better” (v. 17). He asked God to open the eyes of their hearts so they could “know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe” (vv. 18–19). The better we know God (v. 17), the more we trust Him. The more we trust Him, the more we sense His peace when the wintry winds blow against us.

things, while Gideon trembled in fear, God called him a mighty warrior—long before he was one. God is calling you a mighty warrior. This study

Oh God, as we begin this journey, our hearts are so full of anticipation. God, we want to be different. We invite You to do a work in us that we cannot even

says— / your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: / ‘I am the LORD your God, / who teaches

We can believe in Christ, accepting the truth that He is the Son of God, and we can believe on Christ, receiving eternal salvation, yet fail to stand firm in belief and choose to find Him trustworthy day to day.

entering the spiritual contract required a “total surrender to the will of God,” including giving “myself and all I possess” to God’s “control and use.”42 It involved “utterly renouncing every thought, every purpose, every desire, every affection of our own” and instead thinking Christ’s “thoughts,” forming “His purposes in us,” and even feeling “His emotions and affections.”43 The final activity entailed a commitment to acting on God’s direction, “prompt, exact obedience, without asking any questions” to every command in scripture regardless of how hard

Pamela, I'm sure you didn't mean any harm, but I intend to keep my husband. If I catch you sniffing around him again, I'll break both your legs. I swear it!" "Oh, God..." Pamela blushed furiously. "Even if he begs, don't meet with him ever again. Don't make this any worse than it already is." "No, I won't, Sarah. I promise you!" "And do me a favor?" "Anything." "Spread the word to his other paramours: I won't have him philandering. He's mine. And I'm not sharing!

Given the burdens of informed citizenship in an era of information glut—the paralyzing prospect of total knowledge, the unending task of weighing opinions, fact-checking sources, Googling credentials—how freeing it is to surrender to the purity of unqualified belief. —

Are you prepared to let God take you into total oneness with Himself, paying no more attention to what you call the great things of life? Are you prepared to surrender totally and let go? The true test of abandonment or surrender is in refusing to say, “Well, what about this?” Beware of your own ideas and speculations. The moment you allow yourself to think, “What about this?” you show that you have not surrendered and that you do not really trust God. But once you do surrender, you will no longer think about what God is going to do. Abandonment means to refuse yourself the luxury of asking any questions. If you totally abandon yourself to God, He immediately says to you, “I will give your life to you as a prize.

A great mind without God is like a muscle car without a steering wheel. The only thing about it that’s fast is how quickly it totals itself.

The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing Well, which is a continual Source of original life. The Spirit of God is a Well of water springing up perpetually fresh. A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus. Never try to make your experience a principle for others, but allow God to be as creative and original with others as He is with you. If you abandon everything to Jesus, and come when He says, “Come,” then He will continue to say, “Come,” through you. You will go out into the world reproducing the echo of Christ’s “Come.” That is the result in every soul who has abandoned all and come to Jesus. Have I come to Him? Will I come now?

you debate for even one second when God has spoken, it is all over for you. Never start to say, “Well, I wonder if He really did speak to me?” Be reckless immediately—totally unrestrained and willing to risk everything—by casting your all upon Him. You do not know when His voice will come to you, but whenever the realization of God comes, even in the faintest way imaginable, be determined to recklessly abandon yourself, surrendering everything to Him. It is only through abandonment of yourself and your circumstances that you will recognize Him. You will only recognize His voice more clearly through recklessness—being willing to risk your all.

We have the idea that we can dedicate our gifts to God. However, you cannot dedicate what is not yours. There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself (see Romans 12:1). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you—and His experiments always succeed. The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing Well, which is a continual Source of original life. The Spirit of God is a Well of water springing up perpetually fresh.

Most of us live only within the level of consciousness—consciously serving and consciously devoted to God. This shows immaturity and the fact that we’re not yet living the real Christian life. Maturity is produced in the life of a child of God on the unconscious level, until we become so totally surrendered to God that we are not even aware of being used by Him. When we are consciously aware of being used as broken bread and poured-out wine, we have yet another level to reach—a level where all awareness of ourselves and of what God is doing through us is completely eliminated. A saint is never consciously a saint—a saint is consciously dependent on God.

The master as a friend can help immensely, but the master should not become an owner. He should not possess the disciple as a slave, he should not ask for any surrender. The surrender has to be for the whole of existence, not for any individual. You have to surrender the ego, not to someone, you have to simply drop it. If somebody demands you to surrender yourself to him, demands that you should obey him and says that disobedience is sin, then he is creating a spiritual slave out of you. [...] Just believe in Jesus Christ and on the ultimate judgment day he will choose you out of the crowd: "This is my follower." Those he chooses will enter into the kingdom of God, and those he does not choose will fall into eternal darkness and hell. Now this is all exploitation of the simplicity, of the innocence of human beings. Nobody can be your savior. Neither can Christ nor Krishna; [...] And if you had not accepted these people as your saviors but just as your guides, you would have been in a totally different state. You would not have been in such misery and suffering and anguish. You would have been blissful. Your life would have been a light unto itself.

God is calling you a mighty warrior. This study is about God's teaching us to live like the mighty warriors we can be in Him. Are you sick of deceit and ready to learn how to live like a mighty warrior?

LOVE IS THE MASTER Love is the One who masters all things; I am mastered totally by Love. By my passion of love for Love I have ground sweet as sugar. O furious Wind, I am only a straw before you; How could I know where I will be blown next? Whoever claims to have made a pact with Destiny Reveals himself a liar and a fool; What is any of us but a straw in a storm? How could anyone make a pact with a hurricane? God is working everywhere his massive Resurrection; How can we pretend to act on our own? In the hand of Love I am like a cat in a sack; Sometimes Love hoists me into the air, Sometimes Love flings me into the air, Love swings me round and round His head; I have no peace, in this world or any other. The lovers of God have fallen in a furious river; They have surrendered themselves to Love's commands. Like mill wheels they turn, day and night, day and night, Constantly turning and turning, and crying out.

The essence of my belief is that there is a difference, a vast difference between fact and truth. Truth in the Scriptures is more than a fact. A fact may be detached, impersonal, cold and totally disassociated from life. Truth, on the other hand is warm, living and spiritual. A theological fact may be held in the mind for a lifetime without its having any positive effect upon the moral character; but truth is creative, saving, transforming and it always changes the one who received it into a humbler and holier man. “Theological facts are like the altar of Elijah on Mount Carmel before the fire came; correct, properly laid out but altogether cold. When the heart makes the ultimate surrender, the fire falls and true facts are transmuted into spiritual truth that transforms, enlightens and sanctifies. The church or the individual that is Bible taught without being Spirit taught has simply failed to see that truth lies deeper than the theological statement of it. We only possess what we experience!

Oh, God, awake our souls to see—You are what we want, not just what we need. Yes, our life's protection, but also our heart's affection. Yes, our soul's salvation, but also our heart's exhilaration. Unfailing love—a love that will not let us go!

Now, believe it or not, we are threatened by such a free God because it takes away all of our ability to control or engineer the process. It leaves us powerless, and changes the language from any language of performance or achievement to that of surrender, trust and vulnerability. . . . That is the so-called “wildness” of God. We cannot control God by any means whatsoever, not even by our good behavior, which tends to be our first and natural instinct. . . . That utter and absolute freedom of God is fortunately used totally in our favor, even though we are still afraid of it. It is called providence, forgiveness, free election or mercy. . . . But to us, it feels like wildness — precisely because we cannot control it, manipulate it, direct it, earn it or lose it. Anyone into controlling God by his or her actions will feel very useless, impotent and ineffective. — Richard Rohr

I hope reading this book will convince you of something: that by surrendering yourself totally to God’s purposes, He will bring you the most pleasure in this life and the next.

Massive faith is on full display through total surrender to God’s will. So take the plunge into a Spirit-directed life, laying your future completely in God’s hands—the future of both your life that now is and that which is to come. Let Him decide what is best and what direction you should take. Let Him have full authority over you.

The level of trust we have for God is a monumental issue in the life of every believer. Many variables in our lives affect our willingness to trust God. A loss or betrayal can deeply mark our level of trust. A broken heart never mended handicaps us terribly when we’re challenged to trust. Trusting an invisible God doesn’t come naturally to any believer. A trust relationship grows only by stepping out in faith and making the choice to trust.

If your repentance and God's forgiveness of your sin does not lead to total surrender to God, you should wonder if you truly repented.

God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own character. Paul was not conscious of himself. He was recklessly abandoned, totally surrendered, and separated by God for one purpose--to proclaim the gospel of God.

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less!

She did not pray for God’s choice of husband for her and after her second marriage failed from her choosing, she reached a point of total surrender to God.

This total surrender to 'the love of Christ' is the only thing that will bear fruit in your life. And it will always leave the mark of God's holiness and His power, never drawing attention to your personal holiness.

Philippians 4:6–7: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

FAILURE TO BELIEVE GOD'S UNFAILING LOVE

A Choice I’m singing joyful praise to GOD. I’m turning cartwheels of joy to my Savior God. Counting on GOD’S Rule to prevail, I take heart and gain strength. I run like a deer. I feel like I’m king of the mountain! HABAKKUK 3:18–19 MSG Many days, life seems like an uphill battle, where we are fighting against the current, working hard to maintain our equilibrium. Exhausted from the battle, we often throw up our hands in disgust and want to quit. That’s when we should realize we have a choice. We can choose to surrender our burdens to the Lord! What would happen if we followed the advice of the psalmist and turned a cartwheel of joy in our hearts—regardless of the circumstances—then leaned and trusted in His rule to prevail? Think of the happiness and peace that could be ours with a total surrender to God’s care. It’s a decision to count on God’s rule to triumph. And we must realize His Word, His rule, never fails. Never. Then we must want to stand on that Word. Taking a giant step, armed with scriptures and praise and joy, we can surmount any obstacle put before us, running like a deer, climbing the tall mountains. With God at our side, it’s possible to be king of the mountain. Dear Lord, I need Your help. Gently guide me so I might learn to lean on You and become confident in Your care. Amen.

My friend, I am “jealous” for you to enjoy God. I want God to be the greatest reality in your life. I want you to be more assured of His presence than any other you can see or touch. This can be your reality. This is your right as a child of God. We were destined for this kind of relationship with God, but the enemy tries to convince us that the Christian life is sacrificial at best and artificial at worst.

places and wide valleys to a heavenly destination. Until then, abiding in Christ (John 15:4, kjv) is the key to staying deliberately connected with our upland Source. Take pleasure in knowing that God inspired His Word with great care and immaculate precision. He chose every word purposely. When He said we could have peace like a river in Isaiah 48:18, He wasn’t drawing a loose analogy. He meant it. What does it take to have this peace? Attention to God's commands (by obedience) through the power of the Holy Spirit.

1. God hears the cry of the oppressed. He even hears the cries of those whose oppression is a result of sin and rebellion.

relationship distant, or close and personal, or somewhere in the middle? If you enjoy a close relationship with God, this study will be an opportunity to deepen that relationship. I deeply desire for you to say when you turn the last page, “And I thought I knew Him and loved Him when I first began.” If you don’t have a close and familiar relationship with God, don’t despair!

life what your mind has never conceived. But just as the children of Israel were held captive by the Babylonians, areas of captivity can keep us from living out the reality of Isaiah 64:4 and 1 Corinthians 2:9. Take a moment to reread the definition of captivity I gave you previously: A Christian is held captive by anything that hinders the abundant and effective Spirit-filled life God planned for him or her. One of the most effective ways we can detect an area of captivity is to measure whether or not we are enjoying the benefits God intends

Any sacrifice we make in our quest for freedom will be wholly consumed and blessed by God. Notice something extremely important: Gideon prepared a sacrifice. Then we read in verse 21: “With the tip of the staff that was in his hand, the angel of the LORD touched the meat and the unleavened bread. Fire flared

He came to bind up the brokenhearted—no matter what broke the heart. He came to open the eyes of the blind—no matter what veiled their vision. part ii BENEFITS AND OBSTACLES You have examined the rule of the four kings of Isaiah's day and compared the reign of the King of kings. You may already be recognizing the symptoms of captivity in your life. Now we are ready to begin the core of our journey. In the following chapters you will get to know your birthright. God intends five benefits to be the daily experience of every child of God. They are not prizes for an elite few believers. He wants you to live and breathe each of these blessings. Since many Christians today obviously are not living in the five benefits, we will also consider five primary obstacles. These are hindrances that keep us from the birthright God intends. I hope you have been working on hiding God's Word in your heart. And because the five benefits are so important to our journey, I want to ask you to begin to memorize them also: To know God and believe Him To glorify God To find satisfaction in God To experience God's peace To enjoy God's presence Five obstacles block our access to the benefits God wants for us: Unbelief, which hinders knowing God Pride, which prevents us from glorifying

The spies, sent to search out the Promised Land, could be likened to a Baptist committee. Instead of looking to God’s promises, they fed on one another’s perception of the impossibility before them—conquering the land God had promised. God’s great works have not come through committees but through leaders who were totally surrendered to Him. While ten of the twelve committee members were fearful of the giants and battle, Joshua fixed his focus on God. He had the pure vision to focus on God’s clearly revealed will rather than on the obstacles to fulfilling it. “And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which were of them that searched the land, rent their clothes: And they spake unto all the company of the children of Israel, saying, The land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land. If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not. But all the congregation bade stone them with stones. And the glory of the LORD appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel.”—NUMBERS 14:6–10 A pattern oft repeated in the lives of leaders who make a difference is the opposition that comes as they edge closer to being used of God. It’s as if the devil senses the potential for God’s power to flow through their surrendered lives and plants doubts in their minds and accusations in the minds of others. “You’re not good enough,” “You can’t do it,” “You’ll never see people saved,” “It can’t be done,” “No one wants to hear what you have to say”—these thoughts are common darts of discouragement the devil hurls at leaders. The person who places confidence in personal ability, education, friendships, allegiances, or alliances, will fail indeed. But while there will always be the naysayers who insist that God’s will cannot be done, a Spirit-filled leader will place his confidence solely in God Almighty and press forward. Joshua knew the victory would not come through his sword, his ingenuity, or his military skill. But he also knew that if God was in it, God would do it. This knowledge gave him the confidence to insist, against the voice of his peers, “If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us” (Numbers 14:8). In a world of ideals, such leadership would be appreciated and readily followed. But the results in Joshua’s life were not quite so rosy. For believing God and trying to lead others to do the same, Joshua became a target. The people wanted to take the life of this faith-filled man of God! If you will be a spiritual leader where you work—a man of God who doesn’t laugh at improper jokes or join in ungodly conversation—if you will be distinct and stand for what is right, not everyone will applaud. You may be mocked, criticized, and ostracized. Standing for Christ may be difficult at times, but it does make a difference. Like Joshua, we must understand the importance of vision and be willing to make sacrifices to lead others. For “where there is no vision, the people perish…” (Proverbs 29:18).

without compromise. Our salvation settles in our answer towards the sacrifice of Jesus, surrendering our life with a sincere heart in order to be forged by His power. We will not be saved until we determine to live in Christ. Maybe we are walking towards salvation, but we will not be sealed until we truly put our life on the cross. Some people decide to follow him and give him their life in a radical way. They make a simple prayer that comes from the deepest part of their heart and they are sealed in that very moment. Others get closer to the Lord little by little, until they surrender their hearts totally. Others just pray for repentance before they die and this is enough for God to save them. The times and the heart of each man are different; there is not a formula, so we cannot put them all in the same bag. And they that are christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. Galatians 5:24 It does not say: “They crucify the flesh little by little”, as God deals with their life, as it is taught nowadays. Salvation not only refers to what it is said in Romans 10-9-10, but it also involves the deep comprehension of the whole New Testament. It is part of a series of truths that compliment each other and give salvation substance. God is restoring both the way we understand and appreciate salvation, as well as the preaching of His gospel. It is not time anymore to live vituperating against His name with injustices of all kinds. God is restoring the right way to live as His body, so that we may raise up His name by living a holy life and giving Him the honor that He deserves.