Peter began to say to him, See, we have left everything and followed you. (Mark 10:28 ESV)
True surrender will always go beyond natural devotion. For example, devotion to a football team is not the same as giving your heart to a spouse or child. Similarly, if we would only give up our hearts to Him, God would surrender Himself to embrace all those around us and meet their needs. Jesus was telling the disciples what it would take to get into the kingdom of heaven when Peter made this famous remark, “we have left everything…” In deed, they did leave everything behind, families, businesses, their homes, and in return they received persecutions and hardships of following God. In Peter’s mind and in his heart, this is the most any human could have done. Peter’s remark tells us that he was dumbfounded by the radical condition Jesus places on salvation. Yet for Jesus, it was just the beginning of everything. Our salvation requires nothing but total surrender to the new life God is giving us. There is nothing for us to go back to because that life is gone when we accept Jesus as our atonement for being wrong with God. God is perfect and our imperfection keeps us from God, not because God doesn’t love us, but because our imperfection hates being around the perfection that is God. If you’re looking at the trade off between salvation and your former life and it is that former life that you hold dear and near, salvation will slip through your fingers. It is in our best interest that we lose ourselves together to God and follow the path of salvation in total surrender. Surrender everything, totally to God in your life, and you’ll see something unexpected.
Comments are closed