surrender on Self-Centeredness

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...

Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves, we must become ourselves. For no...

The one misery of man is self-will, the one secret of blessedness is the conquest over our own wills. To yield them up to God is rest and peace. What disturbs us in this world is not “trouble,” but ou...

Gracious God, We build walls to protect ourselves, but it leads to isolation. We make independence the highest value, instead of complete dependence on You. Forgive us for our inability to surrender e...

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...

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...

Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man...

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...

Kate Bowler is a gifted scholar and writer who, as a young wife and mom, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer—kept going six months at a time thanks to immunotherapy. She writes honestly about how ...

King of kings and Lord of lords, today I am reminded of your preeminent sovereignty over all things, including me. Psalm 2 calls me to “kiss” you, to acknowledge your authority by submitting myself to...

[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.

In her memoir, Confessions of a Good Christian Girl, Tammy describes the internal turmoil she experienced trying to be a good, rule-following Christian who had unexpectedly built an entire life arou...

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...

One of the greatest struggles we face in this life is the temptation to compare ourselves to others. As Teddy Roosevelt famously said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” But in the final part of ...

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...

Intimacy happens as we bring more and more of ourselves into God’s presence. To pray with soul and body means, says Jane Vennard, “praying with all of who we are: our physicality, our emotions, our in...

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

The condition of an enlightened mind is a surrendered heart.

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 ...

It is only when you reach the very bottom, when everything falls apart, when all your schemes and resources are broken and exhausted, that you are finally open to learning how to completely depend on ...

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 ...

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...

Let me share one more lesson I am learning about daily surrender. It concerns the way we relate to others. Daily we encounter people who express views opposite to our own, hold values with which we ca...

When we surrender our mistaken goal of self-perfection, the life of faith gradually becomes a joyful adventure again. And a funny thing happens: In forgiving ourselves for being imperfect, we find it ...

I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should ask what kind of me God wants for his mission.

God gives where he finds empty hands.

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

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...

Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; ...

“A young man came to visit me with a question on his mind. He asked, “I prayed to receive Jesus as my Savior, but why has nothing really changed in my life?” I asked him, “Who is running your life?” H...