Surrender to Him

October 20, 2022

From Jackie Payne

As I’ve been reading through the book of Jeremiah, I came across this passage, and I literally stopped to think through the larger implications of this verse:

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; they will escape with their lives. Jeremiah 21:8-9 (emphasis mine)

By surrendering to the Babylonians, they were also surrendering to God their instinct to run or fight. If they surrendered their lives to the will of God, they would survive. Would it be easy? Of course not. Would they survive? Yes.

Surrender is often seen as a sign of weakness, but in this case, it was a sign of trusting in the One who made them, who was bigger than them, who knew what was best for them…and had let them fall time and again before He finally stepped in to help them stop making fools of themselves and Him.

So my question to myself that night (and since then) has been – what am I not surrendering to God? What part(s) of my life am I holding onto in the hopes that I can make things go well, and that I know what I’m doing? It’s a humbling thing to remember that we are just fleeting, foolish creatures. We can do nothing well without Him. And with that knowledge (and really knowing Him), may we all surrender each part of our lives to the true God, the living God, the eternal King. (Jeremiah 10:10).