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Surrendered to Love
by Jeannie Pallett
Both the practise and the pursuit require obedience
The Greek word for obedience is "audire" which means to "hear in order to obey".
"Godliness with contentment is great gain" 1 Timothy 6:6
I believe that this contentment comes because in our practise of godliness, of walking through life motivated by the desire to hear God with the intent to obey Him, we come to a place of understanding that everything that comes our way is allowed by God. Jesus is the Good Shepherd; He guards the gate of the sheepfold and only what He allows enters.
In Jeremiah 29:11, the Lord tells us that the plans He has for us are good. In Genesis, He looks at all that He has made and declares it good, very good. We cannot even begin to comprehend the vastness and intricacies of all that God has made. It is wonderful and gloriously incomprehensible to us and yet our God can see it all, the beginning from the end all at the same time and He calls it "good".
In the same manner, He tells us that the plans He has for us are "good". God's "goodness" is far greater than what our mind can know or perceive. His intent is our welfare and to place hope in our hearts.
We sometimes get concerned (more often than not, most of us do!) about the unknowns in our future, the unknowns about tomorrow, about a few hours from now, about what are we going to do right now.
God says He holds all of our times in His hands in Psalm 31:15 and that we have been made free by the knowing of the truth. To be free, is to abandon one's self to the realization of freedom. Free to walk with God as His son and daughter abandoning ourselves to realizing and experiencing His love.
To be free from care and concern about tomorrow's troubles is to abandon ourselves to the care and keeping of our Lord. We abandon ourselves to the power of God's Word. In Matthew 6:32 Jesus is telling us to "take no thought for tomorrow for your Heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things".
In choosing to obey this Scripture, we can then move farther and take another step of active obedience by "acknowledging God in all of our ways and seeing Him direct our paths." Proverbs 3:6
We acknowledge God in all of our inward and outward ways and once these are coordinated with His Word something marvellous happens. There is a collision of our two worlds - the natural and spiritual - and instead of a clashing, in the collision there is a merging as the natural yields to the power and strength of the spiritual. The fruit of the merging is that our "ways" are committed to the Lord, we trust Him with those things and He is faithful to bring a change to us. What He is bringing to pass is the merging from the collision of our two worlds. There is a meeting of our wills as our renewed minds acquiesce and agree with the will of the Spirit of God. It is here at this place of collision where we experience freedom in the fullest form. It is here where the Image of Son is formed to a place of maturity in us.
Jesus walked the earth completely and wholeheartedly abandoned to the will of His Father. All of His spiritual and temporal needs were taken care of and He not once carried the cares of tomorrow upon Himself. Even in His darkest hours before the ordeal of the cross, He chose to bring about a collision in His will and that yielding brought freedom to us.
There must be a merging of the spiritual and natural so that the emerging of Jesus is seen in us. Our hearts must be apprehended by this necessity if we are to experience the freedom of abandonment.
To 'give ourselves' to prayer and fasting, to the study of God's Word is to truly hear the Word and experience freedom by abandoning other things in life and wholeheartedly abandon ourselves to the things of God. We will want to adopt the practises of God and above all, to abandon ourselves to the knowing of God.
If we developed our inner hearing to accurately perceive what the Lord is speaking to us; if we harnessed our flesh to move in obedience with the Master, our lives would model confident contentment. Peace would rule our hearts because of walking in obedience to His Word. Godliness in our outward lives is a result of practising obedience and it all comes from Him. It is a result of our personal discipline to read, know, love and apply God's Word but the change comes from the power of God at work in us. Godliness is the character of Jesus seen in us because we have chosen to subdue our flesh nature.
Contentment will come because we have experienced the pangs of discontentment as we have pondered our level of spirituality and hungered and thirsted for more of God.
Our hunger and thirst for more of God is appeased by abandoning our hearts, our lives to Him. The more of Him we taste ("Taste and see that the Lord is good") the greater hunger for Him grows in us.
Only He can satisfy us. We hunger and thirst in our souls for Him alone.
We are His Bride, loved to the fullest extent; how can we not abandon ourselves fully to Him? How can we be anything but wholehearted in our giving of ourselves to Him?
As we give ourselves, fully and freely to the Lord there comes a collision, a joining of the two worlds we live in.
Do we need to remind ourselves that God is a consuming fire, that He is passionate in His jealousy for us, and that His jealousy is balanced by and surrenders to the love that blazes in His heart for us?
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