Believing and Surrendering

"For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain." (Philippians 1:21)

There is a flaw that can hide inside the way we speak about faith. You ask someone about theirs, and they tell you they believe in a higher power, and you say what you have said a hundred times, you have to believe in Jesus, and they answer, I do believe in him. And there we stop, satisfied, certain something has happened. But there is a difference between believing and surrendering, and the whole of the Christian life is lived in the gap between them.

Believing is the first step. It acknowledges that Jesus is real, that he existed, that he is who he said he was. That is something. It is not nothing. But it is not yet enough, because belief has a second step to take, and the second step is surrender. To place your faith in Christ is not merely to be persuaded of him. It is to hand yourself over.

For most of us it begins in the mind. Who is the way, the truth, the life. Jesus. And then, slowly, what the mind holds about Christ works its way down out of the head and into the depths of the heart, where affection actually lives, and faith moves from believing in Christ to living for him. That is Paul's whole sentence. For me to live is Christ. Not, for me to be convinced of Christ. To live is Christ.

Even the demons believe, and tremble. Belief that costs nothing and changes nothing is not yet the thing that saves. So ask yourself the question plainly, the one that goes underneath mere agreement. Do you believe in Jesus, or have you given him your life? A great many people can answer the first. He is asking the second.