surrender on Lent

Sorrow and anxiety cannot eat: joy celebrates its feasts with eating and drinking… We are creatures of the senses: our mind is helped by what comes to us embodied in concrete form; fasting helps to ex...

Prayer is the reaching out after God and the unseen; fasting, the letting go of all that is of the seen and temporal.

Maturation is a lifelong journey with different phases, human and spiritual. And it has many setbacks. What can be helpful is to have a grasp of the natural seasons of our lives and how these interfac...

Leader: Christ is risen! All: Christ is risen indeed! Leader: Light out of darkness! All: Life out of death! Leader: Hope out of despair! All: Power out of surrender! Leader: God, this is your g...

A World in Chaos At the risk of sounding dramatic, both the U.S. and the world seem to be reaching a level of chaos unmatched since 9/11. The confusion and shifting loyalties, not to mention the 26,0...

Sabbath requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop—because our work is never completely done. . . . If we refuse rest until we are finished, we will...

Gracious and loving God, you know the deep inner patterns of my life that keep me from being totally yours. You know the misformed structures of my being that hold me in bondage to something less than...

Taking up my "cross" means a life voluntarily surrendered to God.

Surrender—or “abandonment to divine providence,” as it is called in some of the older writings—is the central dynamic of the spiritual life, and retreat offers us many concrete opportunities for pract...

There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Inste...

How do you define what it means to “make a sacrifice?” We say we sacrifice for our family, or sacrifice for our careers. We speak of Jesus sacrificing himself so that we can experience eternal life. A...

May not a single moment of my life be spent outside the light, love and joy of God's presence and not a moment without the entire surrender of myself as a vessel for Him to fill full of His Spirit...

Lord, you have in fact searched us and known us. You know when we rest and when we rise, when we go out and come home. You know our inmost thoughts. And yet even so Lord, even so we turn our backs to ...

The greatest burden we have to carry in life is self. The most difficult thing we have to manage is self. Our own daily living, our frames and feelings, our especial weaknesses and temptations, and ou...

[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.

From what is common in all these expressions, we can extract the dictionary definition of sacrifice: “the surrender of something of value for the sake of something else.” That is a good definition, bu...

Surrender your poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers y...

In the days of the early church, believers affirmed their faith by saying, “Jesus is Lord.” We give lip-service to that same affirmation, but find it difficult to surrender control of our lives. Inste...

You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross”—in other words, it is like going to be beaten ...

One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime. Nor is surrender to the will of God (per se) adequate to fullness of power in Christ. Maturit...

How, then, shall we lay hold of that Life and Power, and live the life of prayer without ceasing? By quiet, persistent practice in turning all of our being, day and night, in prayer and inward worship...

You keep us waiting You keep us waiting. You, the God of all time, want us to wait for the right time in which to discover who we are, where we are to go, who will be with us, and what we must do...

There are many who say to the Lord, "I give myself wholly to Thee, without any reserve," but there are few who embrace the practice of this abandonment, which consists in receiving with a ce...

Heavenly Father, Your love for us is so very evident. Everywhere we look, we see tangible proof of Your great care for us. Yet, when it comes to following You, we confess that we often don’t surrender...

George Fox as a youth was religious enough to meet all earthly standards and was even proposed as a student for the ministry. But the insatiable God-hunger in him drove him from such mediocrity into a...

St. Anthony, the “father of monks,” is the best guide in our attempt to understand the role of solitude in ministry. Born around 251, Anthony was the son of Egyptian peasants. When he was about eighte...

God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.

There are two wonderful Greek words that the early church theologians used to describe the Trinity: kenōsis and perichōrēsis. Kenosis is the act of self-giving for the good of another. It is found in ...

Eric Liddell, the “Flying Scotsman” was made famous by the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire . He was born to missionary parents in China in 1902 and educated in the United Kingdom. Though he made the Bri...

I am a bow on your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot. Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break?