Choose Your Word! A New Year’s Practice for a Life of SurrenderSample

What does it mean for your life, your work, and your day to be God’s? Here’s how I’ve thought about it as I’ve meditated on God’s Word.

Your Life. All of me and everything I am is God’s. The apostle Paul notes that I am not my own, that I have been bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). The apostle Peter talks about my being redeemed with the precious blood (1 Peter 1:18–19) and that while suffering, Jesus “kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously” (1 Peter 2:23 NASB). I remember visiting the Garden of Gethsemane—at the cusp of a major decision with daunting demands—struggling with and then submitting to the prayer prayed by the Lord: “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42 NIV). God, Yours is my life—my life belongs to You, all of me and my loves, including my family and friends.

Your Work. My work is, first of all, God’s work first. Lord, my work is about You; Yours is Your work through me. And I am willing for Your work to be done through me. I will not hold any part of it tightly or lightly. I will hold it rightly as Your work.

Your Day. God, Yours is this day—this 24-hour day. I have made some plans, and I don’t know how the day will develop. I don’t know the interruptions and changes it will bring, the people I will meet, the opportunities that will arise, the challenges I will face. And so, Lord, this day’s schedule, meetings, decisions, and talks are all Yours.

Sometimes, I list the foreseeable features, advantages, benefits, and consequences of my word choice—what the concept reveals and generates. For example, Yours reveals love, comfort, confidence, grace, security, trust, peace, belonging, totality, devotion, surrender, preciousness, value, intimacy, access, availability, obedience, oneness, and so on.

If “everything in heaven and earth is yours,” as the verse notes (1 Chronicles 29:11 NIV), I shall abandon any identity-markers and sources, private ownership of anything, and all my objects of trust to the Lord alone. Such is the way to exalt the supreme sovereign as head above all. Indeed, a dear colleague includes a wonderfully assuring thought underneath his email signature, a thought I leave with you: “Those who joyfully leave EVERYTHING in GOD’s HAND will eventually see GOD’s HAND in EVERYTHING” (emphasis his).

Everything is Yours, God, so I leave it all in Your hands. And You are working in and working out everything.