Quotes About Surrender

When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose.

Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? … But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

The command is Do no work. Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.

Much of our effort to do things for the Lord is really the resurgence of our desire to dominate and make things happen in our own strength.

The familiar words of Jesus are "Without me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). But these must be balanced by the insight that, in general, if we do nothing it will certainly be without him.

To "grow in grace" means to utilize more and more grace to live by, until everything we do is assisted by grace. Then, whatever we do in word or deed will all be done in the name of the Lord Jesus (Colossians 3:17). The greatest saints are not those who need less grace, but those who consume the most grace, who indeed are most in need of grace—those who are saturated by grace in every dimension of their being. Grace to them is like breath.

Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.

When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him. That

If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all…. One reason why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.

Love is a gift from God, who is love. We can seek a gift and we can receive a gift, but we do not perform for a gift. So, when we read passages of Scripture like those above, we must remember that the call to us is not to do as much as it is to receive.

Humility leads to perfect death. Humility means the giving up of self and the taking of the place of perfect nothingness before

You must make the decision to have Jesus with you. A decision is an inward resolve to do whatever is necessary to bring something to pass.

if we think we are facing an irresistible cosmic force of evil, it will invariably lead to giving in and giving up—usually with very little resistance. If you can convince yourself that you are helpless, you can then stop struggling and just "let it happen." That will seem a great relief—for a while. You can once more be a normal human being. But then you will have to deal with the consequences. And for normal human beings those are very severe.

Dallas Willard

God, I want to give You every minute of this year. I shall try to keep You in mind every moment of my waking hours. . . . I shall try to let You be the speaker and direct every word. I shall try to let You direct my acts. I shall try to learn Your language.

An older Franciscan brother said to Brennan Manning on the day he joined the order, "Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.

kneel for five or ten minutes and welcome the presence of Jesus. You may not think it will make any difference to kneel when you pray, but try it anyway. Then consider the difference it may have made. As you pray, give the day up to God, renewing your invitation to him to be with you each moment.

It is setting aside our own ideas as supreme and our own will as ultimate, freeing us from the burden of having our own way and of being all-wise in our own eyes.

Petition: Casting Your Cares on Him

Search me, O God." "Let the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you." "Renew in me a right spirit." At a certain point my own "beyond that is within" (my heart) has been formed and I am then at its mercy. Only God can save me.

Self-denial means knowing only Christ, no longer knowing oneself. It means no longer seeing oneself, only him who is going ahead, no longer seeing the way which is too difficult for us. Self-denial says only: he is going ahead; hold fast to him. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

only humility leads to perfect death; only death perfects humility. Humility and death are in their very nature one: humility is the bud; in death the fruit is ripened to perfection.

Jesus' basic idea about this world—with all its evil, pushed to the limit in what he went through going toward and nailed upon the cross—is that this world is a perfectly good and safe place for anyone to be, no matter the circumstances, if they have placed their lives in the hands of Jesus and his Father.

We must put all our desires on the cross.