We celebrated my mother’s birthday today, and she picked a theme for the year for her to focus on, which is “surrender”. I remember someone saying that a certain group were resistant to someone’s preaching (vague memory, haha), because he used the term “surrender to Christ”, and they had been taught never to surrender.
It seems to me the same people would accept the same or similar message more readily than others if it had been put as “obey Christ”, as they would have been taught to strictly and fervently obey their leader, or “sacrifice your own desires for those of Christ your leader”. He is their one rightful leader, all others are traitors and impostors.
They are at fault in being resistant to surrender: it is false as the pagan idea that all struggle, strife, and fighting is evil and fleshly, the idea that one should always surrender. Pagan false morality tends to look at positive vs. negative rather than at fitting vs. unfitting: the truth as it is written is, “There is a time for every purpose under heaven”.
When you are on the wrong side, following the wrong leader, surrender and changing sides is noble, courageous, self-sacrificing; when you are on the right side, following a faithful leader, surrendering the cause and changing sides is traitorous, cowardly, and selfish. (And of course the principles of the concepts of surrender wouldn’t necessarily apply to individual cases of surrender in individual fights).
2023/01/14 #SabbathPosts