Full Surrender

In my first blog, I intimated that I would not be prepared to surrender. I would nail my colours to the mast and choose to go down with the ship. Perhaps I need to make clear that I have come to that decision because I have already surrendered, but to the one whose colours I am now flying.

I have been a Christian for over fifty years and I guess many of the folk who know me would have said I was a pretty serious one for a large part of that time. However, a few years ago I yielded to the conviction that, in spite of many years of full time ministry in various sorts of situations, I still held back from Jesus in a number of areas of my life. I came to a place where I decided that I really needed God to sort me out. At a conference I attended, I went forward for prayer, and a couple of folk prayed simply and quietly that I would let God deal with every area of my life. A week or so later I had a life-threatening heart attack and, as you can imagine, I really found that helped me to focus my mind and sort out my priorities. Suffice it to say, I fully surrendered to Jesus on every front.

Interestingly enough, it was the ‘good’ areas of my life that God began to deal with first. Some of the organisations and committees I had been involved with moved down my list of priorities, some falling off altogether. Then God focussed in on some of the ‘bad’ areas, including a hidden lifelong addiction to pornography that I had constantly been wrestling with. Lastly, He moved on to the everyday sort of things such as making sure the loo was clean after I had used it and unrolling the sleeves of my shirts before I put them into the washing basket. Most of the things He has done have been unspectacular on the outside, but very radical indeed on the inside.

Perhaps the most noticeable thing – in terms of tangible results – is that I have finally got down to actually writing stuff after years of talking about it and half-heartedly producing bits and pieces here and there. So in one very real sense, this website and the blogs, books and articles on it, are the results of some radical changes in my recent life as a Christian. I hope you will find them helpful.