Absolute Surrender

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. ROMANS 12:1

The phrase most people associate with Andrew Murray is the title of his most famous collection of addresses: Absolute Surrender. He gave these addresses on his travels in the 1890s, and they were gathered into a small book that has been reprinted ever since. The title address takes an unlikely text — the words of the wicked king Ahab to the Syrian king who besieged him — and turns them into a confession for every child of God: My lord, O king, according to thy saying, I am thine, and all that I have.

And the king of Israel answered and said, My lord, O king, according to thy saying, I am thine, and all that I have. 1 KINGS 20:4

It is a startling choice of text, and Murray knew it. But the words were exactly what he wanted: an unconditional yielding of everything, held back from nothing.

Where the words came from

Murray tells us in the address where he first heard the phrase in its full force. In Scotland he had been in a company discussing the needs of the church, and he asked a godly man who trained Christian workers what he considered the great need. The man answered simply that absolute surrender to God was the one thing. Those workers who were sound on that point, he said, went on and improved even when they were slow; those who were not, often fell away. Murray never forgot it. The condition for obtaining God’s full blessing, he concluded, is absolute surrender to Him.

God claims it

Murray’s first point is that surrender is not an extra that especially devoted Christians choose. It is rooted in who God is. God is the fountain of all life and goodness, and nothing good exists anywhere except what He works. The sun, the stars, the lilies — all are wholly yielded to Him, and He works in them as He pleases. How then could He work His work in His redeemed children if only part of them is given to Him?

He used a homely illustration. A pen, he said, must be wholly surrendered to the hand that writes with it. If someone else is holding it partly, it cannot write properly. So with the believer: God cannot do His full work in a life that is half given.

Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19–20

God works it

Then comes the turn that makes this address gospel rather than law. Murray anticipated the objection that many hearts would raise: surrender implies so much, and I am afraid of what it will cost. His answer was that God does not ask us to produce a perfect surrender by the power of our own will. God is willing to work it in us.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:13

And he offered a prayer that has helped more timid believers than perhaps anything else he wrote: “My God, I am willing that Thou shouldst make me willing.” If you cannot say that you are willing for everything, you can at least say that. You can bring your reluctance to God and ask Him to deal with it. The longings you feel toward a deeper surrender, Murray told his hearers, are themselves the drawings of Christ.

God accepts it

Murray’s third point is the one most often forgotten. When a believer brings his surrender to God, he may be painfully aware of how imperfect it is. He may ask, Is it really absolute? Murray pointed to the father of the demon-possessed boy, who cried out, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief — and whose trembling faith was enough. So, Murray said, come just as you are, even with a trembling heart, even without feeling the power or the assurance. God accepts the surrender that is brought to Him and makes it good.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. MARK 9:24

This is the part of the teaching that must be held on to most firmly, because the phrase absolute surrender can so easily turn into its opposite.

The danger of the phrase

For many people, Murray’s call has been the door into freedom. They had held back some area of life from God for years, and his words gave them the courage to let it go. But there is another kind of reader. Conscientious, sensitive, prone to self-examination, this reader hears the word absolute and begins to inspect every motive. Was my surrender complete? Is there something I have held back without knowing it? Did I mean it enough? The call to rest in God becomes a new and endless law, and the believer who was meant to be set free is more anxious than before.

Murray did not intend this, and his own address guards against it. God claims the surrender, God works it, God accepts it, and God maintains it. It is not the perfection of our yielding that saves or sanctifies us; it is the faithfulness of the God to whom we yield.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:24

It is also worth saying plainly that surrender in Scripture is both a decisive act and a daily one. There may well be a moment when a believer, like Murray’s hearers, gives up to God something long withheld, and that moment can be a turning point. But Jesus also said, take up the cross daily. No single act exhausts our yielding, and no failure afterwards proves that the act was false. We give ourselves again tomorrow, not because yesterday’s gift was fraudulent, but because every day brings new things to give.

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. LUKE 9:23

The blessing on the other side

What did Murray expect to follow surrender? Not an easy life, but a life in which God is free to work. If our hearts are willing, he said, there is no end to what God will do. Surrender is not the loss of a life but the handing over of an instrument to the hand that made it — and a pen in the writer’s hand is at last able to do what it was made for.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name, honestly and specifically, one thing you have held back from God. Write it down.

2. If you are not willing to surrender it, pray Murray’s prayer: My God, I am willing that You should make me willing.

3. If you tend to anxious self-inspection, stop asking whether your surrender was absolute enough. Rest instead on the faithfulness of God.

4. Each morning this week, begin the day by giving yourself to God afresh in a single sentence.

5. Read the title address of Absolute Surrender in the Ochorus library, noticing the three movements: God claims it, works it, accepts it.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You made me, bought me, and have every claim on me. I confess that I have held parts of my life back from You.

I am not always willing, but I am willing that You should make me willing. Do in me what I cannot do.

I bring You my surrender, trembling and imperfect as it is. Accept it, and make it good.

And when I am tempted to measure my yielding, turn my eyes from my own heart to Your faithfulness. Amen.