Not long ago, I was listening to a preacher give an invitation at the end of a gospel concert. I don’t remember everything he said, but one question caught my attention: “Have you truly surrendered your life to Christ?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question. I’ve probably asked some version of it myself more times than I can count. But this time it confused me. What exactly does that mean?

Most of the people at a gospel concert are probably already Christians. Certainly, there could have been someone there who enjoyed the music but had never made a profession of faith. Perhaps someone needed to hear the gospel that night and respond to Christ for the first time. But I wondered whether there might be another possibility.

What if the person hearing that invitation had already surrendered his life to Christ? What if he had believed? What if she had been following Jesus for twenty years? What if the work Christ wanted to do in someone’s life that evening wasn’t the beginning of faith, but the continuation of it?

The question stayed with me because I realized I’m not always sure what we mean when we ask someone to “surrender your life to Christ.” There certainly is an initial surrender. There comes a moment when we recognize our need for Christ, repent of our sin, place our faith in him, and confess Jesus as Lord. As Wesleyans, we describe that as the moment of justifying grace. God forgives. God reconciles. God makes us his own.

But grace didn’t suddenly appear at that moment. God’s grace had already been at work. Wesleyans have traditionally called that prevenient grace—the grace that goes before. Long before we understood what God was doing, God was drawing us. Before we knew we needed grace, grace was already awakening us to our need.

In my old age, I have come to believe that we are never absent from God’s grace. We may not always be aware of God’s grace, but we are never absent from it. That doesn’t mean everyone is automatically saved. Grace can be resisted. We can turn away. We can refuse what God desires to do in us. But even our ability to recognize our need for God begins with God’s gracious activity toward us.

Then comes that moment when we say yes. We believe. We surrender. We trust Jesus. But what happens the next morning?

I Surrender All—Again

Since I was listening to a gospel concert, one of the old hymns of the church came to mind: I Surrender All.

I’ve sung it hundreds of times. And I mean it. I surrender all. Today. But tomorrow morning I’ve got to surrender it all again. That’s the part of surrender I don’t think we talk about enough.

Surrender isn’t simply something I did once. Surrender is a daily activity. I can sincerely surrender my life to Christ today and wake up tomorrow determined to have my own way about something. I can place my future in God’s hands and then spend the next three days worrying about it. I can surrender my anger and discover tomorrow that I’ve picked it back up. I can tell Christ that everything I have belongs to him and then become remarkably possessive when he puts his finger on something I don’t want to release.

Perhaps that’s part of sanctification. Yesterday I surrendered “all.” Today the Holy Spirit shows me something else that “all” includes. My ambition. My resentment. My money. My need to be right. My fear. My plans. My relationships. My pain. My reputation. My future. My sin. Apparently “all” is bigger than I realized.

That doesn’t necessarily mean yesterday’s surrender wasn’t genuine. It means God isn’t finished with me. That’s the difference between justification and sanctification. The grace that forgives me is also the grace that transforms me.

“Have You Truly Surrendered?”

That’s why I’ve become uncomfortable with that question—not because it is wrong, but because it can mean several different things.

“Have you truly surrendered your life to Christ?” Are you asking whether I’ve ever trusted Christ? Yes. Are you asking whether I’ve confessed Jesus Christ as Lord? Yes. Are you asking whether there was a moment when I believed and entrusted myself to him? Yes. But are you asking whether every part of my life is completely surrendered to Christ at this particular moment? Well…

Maybe I surrendered once. Maybe I didn’t this morning. I don’t think today’s failure necessarily invalidates yesterday’s faith.

Sometimes we Christian preachers collapse justification and sanctification into one event. We see someone struggling with sin, obedience, doubt, addiction, anger, pride, or surrender, and conclude that perhaps that person was never really saved. “You need to truly surrender your life to Christ.”

Maybe. Or, perhaps the person has trusted Christ and now needs to surrender to what the Holy Spirit is trying to do next. Perhaps this isn’t a question of whether justifying grace was real. Perhaps it is a question of whether I am presently yielding myself to sanctifying grace. That’s a very different question.

Can We Fall From Grace?

And this raises another difficult question. Can I fall from grace?

As a Wesleyan, I don’t believe in “once saved, always saved” in the way that phrase is commonly understood. I believe human beings remain capable of resisting God’s grace. Scripture takes seriously the possibility of turning away from faith.

But I wonder whether “falling from grace” is always the best way to picture what happens. A fall sounds accidental. I wasn’t paying attention. I stumbled. Suddenly I’m outside the grace of God.

I’m not convinced that’s a good description of our relationship with God.

Perhaps it is better to speak of turning from grace. I can resist the Spirit. I can ignore conviction. I can refuse obedience. I can repeatedly say no to what God is asking of me. And I suppose it is possible for repeated resistance eventually to become rejection. A person can turn away from faith. I don’t know that it requires someone to stand up one morning and formally announce, “I hereby renounce Jesus Christ.” Scripture’s warnings about drifting and hardened hearts suggest that turning away may sometimes happen gradually.

But neither do I believe that every act of disobedience means I’ve fallen out of salvation.

If it did, none of us could have assurance for very long. There is a difference between struggling within a relationship with Christ and abandoning the relationship altogether.

I can be disobedient and still be a disciple, though not necessarily a good one. I can resist the Spirit and still be someone the Spirit is pursuing. I can refuse to surrender something today without concluding that everything God has done in my life until today was imaginary. In fact, the conviction I feel over my resistance may itself be evidence that grace is still at work.

Grace Doesn’t Eliminate the Will

There is another distinction I think matters. Sometimes we talk about surrender as though everything depends upon human determination. Try harder. Do better. Make yourself surrender. Sanctification isn’t self-improvement with religious vocabulary.

At the same time, surrender isn’t passive. God doesn’t surrender my life for me. The Holy Spirit convicts. The Holy Spirit draws. The Holy Spirit enables. Grace makes obedience possible. But I still have to say yes.

Maybe surrender is best understood as the grace-enabled yielding of the human will to God. That’s different from willpower. Willpower says, “I am going to make myself a better person.” Grace says, “God is at work in me, and I am yielding myself to what God desires to do.”

Paul captures that tension beautifully in Philippians: “Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear. For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.”

We work because God is working. We respond because grace has already acted. We surrender because the Spirit has enabled us to surrender. And tomorrow, we do it again.

Maybe That’s the Invitation

So, I’ve been thinking about that preacher’s question. “Have you truly surrendered your life to Christ?” Maybe the problem isn’t the question. Maybe we just need to understand how large the question really is. 

There is an invitation for the person who has never trusted Christ: Will you surrender your life to Jesus? Believe. Repent. Trust him. Receive the grace God has already been extending toward you.

But there is also an invitation for the person who has followed Jesus for fifty years: Will you surrender your life to Jesus? Not because your previous surrender was necessarily false. Not because every failure means you need to get saved again. But because Jesus is still Lord.

And there are still places within us where we would rather be lord.

Maybe the Christian life is learning, by grace, to surrender those places as the Spirit reveals them. Today it may be my pride. Tomorrow it may be my fear. Next year it may be something I cannot even see in myself today. That doesn’t mean grace has failed. It means grace is still working. Sanctifying grace keeps reaching into the places I haven’t surrendered yet and saying, “This too.” And I get to answer again, “Yes, Lord.”

The Goal Isn’t Becoming Better

Perhaps this is where I’ve finally landed. Christianity is often presented as though Jesus came to make us better people. I don’t think that’s quite right. Certainly, following Jesus ought to change the way we live. We should become more loving, more patient, more generous, more forgiving, more truthful, more compassionate. If decades of following Jesus leave us just as angry, selfish and cruel as we were when we began, something is wrong.

Becoming a better person isn’t the goal. We don’t follow Jesus to become better people. We follow Jesus to become like Jesus. Becoming better is the fruit, not the goal.

That’s why surrender matters. I can’t transform myself into the likeness of Christ by determination. I cannot grit my teeth and manufacture holiness. Sanctification isn’t a self-improvement project. It is the continuing work of God’s grace forming Christ in me.

My part is surrender. Not once. Again. And again. And again.

There was a day when I surrendered my life to Christ. I meant it. By God’s grace, I still mean it. But this morning there are things I need to surrender again. And tomorrow morning, if God gives me another day, I suspect there will be more. That’s not evidence that my surrender failed. Maybe that’s simply what a life of surrender looks like.

So, what about you? Have you surrendered your life to Jesus Christ?

Until next time, keep looking up…

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