Absolute Surrender

by Andrew Murray

the condition of God’s blessing is absolute surrender of all into His hands.

Who is God? He is the Fountain of life, the only Source of existence and power and goodness. Throughout the universe there is nothing good but what God works.

God is life, love, blessing, power, and infinite beauty, and God delights in communicating Himself to every child who is prepared to receive Him.

God does not ask you to give the perfect surrender in your strength, or by the power of your will; God is willing to work it in you. Do we not read: “it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13)? And that is what we should seek—to go on our faces before God, until our hearts learn to believe that the everlasting God Himself will come in to turn out what is wrong. He will conquer what is evil, and work what is well pleasing in His blessed sight. God Himself will work it in you.

When God has begun the work of absolute surrender in you, and when God has accepted your surrender, then God holds Himself bound to care for it and to keep it.

“By Your grace I desire to do Your will in everything, every moment of every day.” Say: “Lord God, not a word upon my tongue but for Your glory. Not a movement of my temper but for Your glory. Not an affection of love or hate in my heart but for Your glory, and according to Your blessed will.”

You must deny self once and for all. Denying self must every moment be the power of your life, and then Christ will come in and take possession of you.

Do you love Christ? Do you long to be in Christ, and yet not like Him? Let death be to you the most desirable thing on earth—death to self, and fellowship with Christ.

“Anything to bring me to separation, to death, for a life of full fellowship with God and Christ.”

It is the very nature and being of God to delight in communicating Himself. God has no selfishness; God keeps nothing to Himself. God’s nature is to be always giving. You see it, in the sun and the moon and the stars, in every flower, in every bird in the air, in every fish in the sea. God communicates life to His creatures. And the angels around His throne, the seraphim and cherumbim who are flames of fire where does their glory come from? It comes from God because He is love, and He imparts to them part of His brightness and His blessedness.

One of the worst things sin did for man was to make him selfish, for selfishness cannot love.

“The fruit of the Spirit is love.” Why? Because nothing but love can expel and conquer our selfishness.

And how can I learn to love? I cannot learn to love until the Spirit of God fills my heart with God’s love, and I begin to long for God’s love in a very different sense from which I have sought it so selfishly—as a comfort, a joy, a happiness, and a pleasure to myself. I will not learn it until I realize that “God is love,” and to claim and receive it as an indwelling power for self-sacrifice. I will not love until I begin to see that my glory, my blessedness, is to be like God and like Christ, in giving up everything in myself for my fellow-men. May God teach us this! Oh, the divine blessedness of the love with which the Holy Spirit can fill our hearts! “The fruit of the Spirit is love.”

It is in hearts entirely surrendered to the Lord Jesus, separating themselves from the world, and even from ordinary religious exercises, and giving themselves up in intense prayer to look to their Lord, that the heavenly will of God will be made manifest.

God wants us to seek for the Holy Spirit as a Spirit of power in our own heart and life, to conquer self and cast out sin, and to work the blessed and beautiful image of Jesus into us.

“Father, let the Holy Spirit have full dominion over me, in my home, in my temper, in every word of my tongue, in every thought of my heart, in every feeling toward my fellow-men. Let the Holy Spirit have entire possession.”

“God forgive me that I have not honored the Holy Spirit as I should have done, that I have grieved Him, that I have allowed self, the flesh, and my own will to work where the Holy Spirit should have been honored! May God forgive me that I have allowed self, the flesh, and the will to actually have the place that God wanted the Holy Spirit to have.”

Notice how Christ uses that word deny twice. He said to Peter the first time, “Deny himself” (Matthew 16:24); He said to Peter the second time, “Thou shalt deny me” (Matthew 26:34). It is either of the two. There is no other choice for us; we must either deny self or deny Christ. There are two great powers fighting each other the self-nature in the power of sin, and Christ in the power of God. Either of these must rule within us.

No one else but Christ Jesus can give deliverance from the power of self. And what does He ask you to do? He asks that you should humble yourself before Him.

Your Christian life is to be a continuous proof that God works impossibilities. Your Christian life is to be a series of impossibilities made possible and actual by God’s almighty power.

The whole of Christianity is a work of God’s omnipotence.

God is able to reveal Christ in your heart, to let the Holy Spirit rule in you so that the self-life will not have power or dominion over you? Have you coupled the two together—and, with tears of penitence and with deep humiliation and feebleness, cried out: “O God, it is impossible to me; man cannot do it, but glory to Your name, it is possible with God”? Have you claimed deliverance? Do it now. Put yourself afresh in absolute surrender into the hands of a God of infinite love. As infinite as His love is His power to do it.

Do believe that, when He takes charge of you in Christ, it is possible for God to make you a man of absolute surrender. And God is able to maintain that. He is able to let you rise from bed every morning of the week with that blessed thought directly or indirectly: “I am in God’s charge. My God is working out my life for me.”

This is my message to every individual believer: “Nothing will help you unless you come to understand that you must live every day under the power of the Holy Spirit.” God wants you to be a living vessel in whom the power of the Spirit is to be manifested every hour and every moment of your life. God will enable you to be that.

All the feebleness in the Church is owing to the refusal of the Church to obey its God. And why is that so? I know your answer. You say: “We are too feeble and too helpless, and we vow to obey, but somehow we fail.” Ah yes, you fail because you do not accept the strength of God. God alone can work out His will in you. You cannot work out God’s will, but His Holy Spirit can. Until the Church and the believers grasp this, and cease trying by human effort to do God’s will, and wait upon the Holy Spirit to come with all His omnipotent and enabling power, the Church will never be what God wants her to be. It will never be what God is willing to make of her.

He will enable us to perfect, not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, what was begun in the Spirit.

How little we have learned to study God, and to understand that a godly life is a life full of God. It is a life that loves God and waits on Him, trusts Him, and allows Him to bless it! We cannot do the will of God except by the power of God. God gives us the first experience of His power to prepare us to long for more, and to come and claim all that He can do. God helps us to trust Him every day.

Oh! let us make God’s omnipotence as revealed in His Word the measure of our expectations.

Ah, yes, God will have to bring us down very low. A sense of emptiness and despair and nothingness will have to come upon us. It is when we sink down in utter helplessness that the everlasting God will reveal Himself in His power. Then our hearts will learn to trust God alone.

Many say: “I believe what you say, but there is one difficulty. If my trust were perfect and always abiding, all would come right, for I know God will honor trust. But how am I to get that trust?” My answer is: “By the death of self. The great hindrance to trust is self-effort. So long as you have got your own wisdom and thoughts and strength, You cannot fully trust God. But when God breaks you down, when everything begins to grow dim before your eyes and you see that you understand nothing, then God is coming near. If you will bow down in nothingness and wait on God, He will become all.”

As long as we are something, God cannot be all. His omnipotence cannot do its full work. That is the beginning of faith—utter despair of self, a ceasing from man and everything on earth and finding our hope in God alone.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne says, somewhere: “Oh, God, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be made.”

Moment by moment, I’m kept in His love; Moment by moment, I’ve life from above; Looking to Jesus, the glory doth shine; Moment by moment, Oh, Lord, I am thine!

the life of the branch is not only a life of entire dependence, but also of deep restfulness.

In Thy strong hand I lay me down. So shall the work be done; For who can work so wondrously As the Almighty One? Workers, take your place every day at the feet of Jesus, in the blessed peace and rest that come from the knowledge—I have no care, my cares are His! I have no fear, He cares for all my fears.

you cannot bear heavenly fruit unless you are in close connection with Jesus Christ.

Remember, that in order for you to bear more fruit, you just require more of Jesus in your life and heart.

What is meant by absolute surrender? It means that, as literally as Christ was given up entirely to God, I am given up entirely to Christ.

we find the Christian life so difficult because we seek God’s blessing while we live in our own will. We desire to live the Christian life according to our own liking. We make our own plans and choose our own work. Then, we ask the Lord Jesus to come in and make sure that sin will not conquer us too much, and that we will not go too far wrong. We ask Him to come in and give us so much of His blessing. But our relationship to Jesus ought to be such that we are entirely at His disposal. Every day we are to come to Him humbly and straightforwardly and say: “Lord, is there anything in me that is not according to Your will, that has not been ordered by You, or that is not entirely given up to You?”

Christians, bring everything into relationship with Jesus, and say: “Lord, everything in my life has to be in most complete harmony with my position as a branch of You, the blessed Vine.”