Why is total surrender necessary? Why does it matter? Why can’t we love holy lives, attend church, read the scriptures, pray…why does it matter whether we yield our wills completely, that we say over and over again and mean it over and over again, “TAKE MY WILL.” Is not simply living the Christian life good enough?
What is the will? The will is intrinsic to not only our mortal nature, but to our human dignity which is a characteristic of our souls. God in His goodness, being so good, respects the very thing that He implanted in each human being, human dignity, the very thing that is totally necessary to true inner peace, joy and charity, Christian authenticity, and is directly linked to who a person is as a child of God.
It is our free will that provides human dignity. We have human dignity as we are made in His image, that’s why it’s there. Unless man reviles it, everyone possesses it. Tis is also why people who feel they have lost their dignity feel despair and even leads them to suicide. The will is free and it is the will that either therefore protects or destroys human dignity.
This is why sexual sins and sexual abuse are actually a death to human dignity because human sexuality is absolutely one with our mortal nature and therefore our souls and any violation that is in opposition to God’s plan for human sexuality is a death jab to one’s human dignity. Once one’s human dignity is eroded or gone entirely, only God can restore it because God alone has given it to the human person.
And so the will is in charge of who we are as children of God: we can either be children of the Light or children of darkness. Only God knows the totality of what our souls need, what is lacking, only He can see what is to come in our lives, only He knows how we got to where we are, and where it is we are going. God cannot do anything without our consent. Otherwise this would violate our human dignity and corrupt us as children of God, and so He cannot do this because it would violate Himself since God is Light and we are from the Light and this is who we are.
So total consent=total surrender. And this allows God to work grace into our lives where we may not understand, where we may not even know we need it because of our pride which is tied to our wills. That is why it is difficult to surrender, it is a fight to relent, but total surrender=total freedom, which sounds contradictory. “How can handing myself over be anything but slavery? I am in control. “ No. Control is tension. Control is rigidity. Movement, flexibility-THAT IS FREEDOM-God Who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, it is handing ourselves completely over to Him that we find peace and contentment in who we are, what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, where we’re going. This is freedom.
Total surrender, this is hard. It may take many trials, it may take much much pain. This is a fight between our will and God’s will. Pray. Do not merely say, “I trust in You.” But “I am Yours, tutus tutus.”
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