All on the Altar

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

Corrie ten Boom’s recorded address Total Surrender, now in the Ochorus library, is one of the fullest statements of what she believed the Christian life required. It is funny, practical and searching, and it circles around a single conviction. We have been bought at a very high price, and so we have no choice but to give ourselves wholly to the One who bought us. She did not present surrender as a special experience for advanced believers. She presented it as the ordinary, reasonable response of anyone who has understood the cross.

The empty altar

She opens the address with a story she says she also told in her book Amazing Love. At a meeting she attended, the Canadian preacher Oswald Smith asked his hearers whether they had laid everything on the altar, and then answered for himself. He placed a book on a table for each thing he had surrendered: his time, his money, his family, his house. Then, one by one, he took the books back. His time was given to God — except the holiday he had booked for himself. His money was given — except what that holiday would cost. His family was given — except the daughter he needed at home. His house was dedicated — except that he could not have his sister’s unruly boys making it dirty. At the end the altar was empty.

Corrie says she could not bear it. She left the meeting, asked her heavenly Father whether her own altar was empty, and heard that it was. So she laid everything on it again.

For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:20

Not once for all

The word again matters. Corrie insisted that surrender is not a single transaction completed at a meeting. Borrowing from the Keswick speaker Charles Inwood, she describes it as a moment-by-moment matter: moment by moment confessing sin, being cleansed, yielding, and being filled with the Spirit. We take things back. We must give them again.

She had a picture for the inner reality. There is a cross and a throne in every heart. If Jesus is on the throne, self is on the cross. If self is on the throne, Jesus is on the cross. There is no third arrangement.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. GALATIANS 2:20

What to surrender

What makes this address so useful is that she did not leave surrender abstract. She named the things that most Christians forget to hand over.

Surrender your blunders. She confessed that after making a foolish mistake she would berate herself for being so stupid. She told of a weaving school where a student explained that when a pupil made a mistake, the master was such an artist that he wove the error into the pattern and made it more beautiful. She told of mistaking a non-Christian professor in Tokyo for a seminary director and asking him to pray — and of the conversation that followed, in which he came to Christ.

And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. JEREMIAH 18:4

Surrender your limitations. She called feelings of inferiority a form of pride — a refusal to accept being the person God made, with the gifts He chose to give.

Surrender your if-onlys. Here she became personal. She spoke of the young man she had loved and hoped to marry, who had married another. After he brought his fiancée to meet her, she went to her room and told the Lord that she belonged to Him entirely, and surrendered to Him the wounded part of her life — her longing for marriage and children. She says she never had the joy of bringing a child to birth, but often had the joy of bringing someone to new birth, and that God kept her from becoming bitter.

God setteth the solitary in families. PSALM 68:6

Surrender your business. She remembered her father saying that God’s name, not his, belonged over the watch shop. Surrender your past, your present and your future.

Money’s worth

She drove the point home with a picture from her trade. Suppose, she said, she had sold a customer a watch with a gold bracelet, taken the full price, and then quietly removed the bracelet before wrapping it. The customer would tell everyone not to buy from Corrie ten Boom. Then she asked her hearers whether they were giving the Lord His money’s worth, when He had paid for them with His own blood.

What? 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? 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19

The cup turned upward

She ended the address with a cup. Held upside down, she said, it receives nothing and gives nothing — like a heart turned toward the world. Held half and half, it still neither fills nor overflows. Only when it is turned wholly upward does the water come in and run over on every side. She applied a verse from Chronicles: the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth to show Himself strong for those whose heart is wholly His.

For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. 2 CHRONICLES 16:9

A caution

Two cautions are worth carrying. The first is that the language of one hundred per cent can crush a tender conscience. A believer who examines himself and finds, as every honest believer will, that his surrender is not total may conclude that God cannot use him at all. Corrie did not mean that. Her own story of laying everything on the altar again shows that she knew the altar is often found empty, and that the remedy is not despair but a fresh surrender. Our acceptance rests on Christ’s perfect offering, not on ours.

The second is that surrender is not a technique for obtaining blessing. Corrie told her hearers not to fear losing their holidays, because God might give them a better hotel than the one they had booked. She meant it lightly. But the reason to surrender is not that God will repay us in kind. It is that we are His already, bought with a price. Some who surrender everything are given very little in this world, as Betsie was. They are not less blessed.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. LUKE 9:24

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Take five sheets of paper and write on each one area of your life: time, money, family, home, work. Lay them before God and ask which you have taken back.

2. Name one blunder you keep berating yourself for. Surrender it to God, and ask Him to weave it into His pattern.

3. Name your chief if-only. Tell God honestly how it hurts, and hand it to Him.

4. Ask yourself who sits on the throne of your heart today. Pray Galatians 2:20 as your own.

5. Where you find the altar empty, do not despair. Lay everything on it again, and thank God that Christ’s offering was complete.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You bought me with Your own blood. I am not my own.

I lay on Your altar my time, my money, my family, my home and my work. I lay there my blunders, my limitations and my if-onlys.

You know how often I take them back. When I find the altar empty, do not let me despair; let me give them to You again.

Sit on the throne of my heart, and let self stay on the cross. Turn my heart wholly toward You, that Your life may run over. Amen.